of synthetic Scots of his own, not sticking to any one dialect and recovering words that had ceased to be used, did not know the works of his great fifteenth-century predecessors well enough to make anything like full use of the linguistic material available. This is what makes Carlyle say that if Burns had been “a first-class intellectual workman he might have changed the whole course of literature.” That opportunity still remains open, however, for anyone who can revive the potentialities of the Scots language manifested in Dunbar and since then almost wholly forgone in favour of the very different potentialities of English. The effect of Burns’ work on Scots poetry is well-known. It has reduced it to a level that is beneath contempt. Little or no poetry that has been produced in Scots since Burns’ day has been of a quality to support comparison for a moment with the average of contemporary poetry in any other European country. It is all of the kailyard kind; sentimental, moralizing, flatfooted, and with little or no relation to reality. I have suggested in the preface to my selection of Burns’ work in Benn’s _Augustan Poets_ that critical revaluation of Burns is overdue—or has, perhaps, been tacitly accomplished—except by Burnsians and anthologists. Perhaps poetry-lovers have carried the winnowing process too far. Reacting from hackneyed favourites, and immune from the Burns cult, they have not troubled to go over his work again—still less considered it from the standpoint of what is best by Scottish, if not by English, standards. Much of the best, and least known, of Burns depends for appreciation on a thorough knowledge of Scots. This is its “growing end.” His poetry in English is wholly negligible, and of his work as a whole it may be said that it rises in poetic value the further away from English it is, and the stronger the infusion of Scots he employs.