some original in the Scottish vernacular school. The elegy, the verse epistle, the satirical form of _Holy Willie's Prayer_, the song and recitative of _The Jolly Beggars_, are all to be found in his predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local poets of the south-west of Scotland. In the songs often whole verses, nearly always the refrains, are from older folk poetry. What he did was to pour into these forms the incomparable richness of a personality whose fire and brilliance and humour transcended all locality and all tradition, a personality which strode like a colossus over the formalism and correctness of his time. His use of familiar forms explains, more than anything else, his immediate fame. His countrymen were ready for him; they could hail him on the instant (just as an Elizabethan audience could hail Shakespeare) as something familiar and at the same time more splendid than anything they knew. He spoke in a tongue they could understand. It is impossible to judge Burns from his purely English verse; though he did it as well as any of the minor followers of the school of Pope he did it no better. Only the weakest side of his character--his sentimentalism--finds expression in it; he had not the sense of tradition nor the intimate knowledge necessary to use English to the highest poetic effect; it was indeed a foreign tongue to him. In the vernacular he wrote the language he spoke, a language whose natural force and colour had become enriched by three centuries of literary use, which was capable, too, of effects of humour and realism impossible in any tongue spoken out of reach of the soil. It held within it an unmatched faculty for pathos, a capacity for expressing a lambent and kindly humour, a power of pungency in satire and a descriptive vividness that English could not give. How express in the language of Pope or even of Wordsworth an effect like this:-- "They reeled, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit, Till ilka carlin swat and reekit, And coost her duddies to the wark, And linket at it in her sark." or this-- "Yestreen when to the trembling string, The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha' To thee my fancy took its wing-- I sat but neither heard nor saw: Tho' this was fair, and that was braw, And yon the toast of a' the toun, I sigh'd and said amang them a', You are na Mary Morison." It may be objected that in all this there is only one word, and but two or three forms of words that are not English. But the accent, the rhythm, the air of it are all Scots, and it was a Burns thinking in his native tongue who wrote it, not the Burns of "Anticipation forward points the view "; or "Pleasures are like poppies spread, You grasp the flower, the bloom is shed." or any other of the exercises in the school of Thomson and Pope.