No; Burns, like Chaucer, comes short of the high seriousness of the great classics, and the virtue of matter and manner which goes with that high seriousness is wanting to his work. At moments he touches it in a profound and passionate melancholy, as in those four immortal lines taken by Byron as a motto for _The Bride of Abydos_, but which have in them a depth of poetic quality such as resides in no verse of Byron's own-- 'Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met, or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted.' But a whole poem of that quality Burns cannot make; the rest, in the _Farewell to Nancy_, is verbiage. We arrive best at the real estimate of Burns, I think, by conceiving his work as having truth of matter and truth of manner, but not the accent or the poetic virtue of the highest masters. His genuine criticism of life, when the sheer poet in him speaks, is ironic; it is not-- 'Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme These woes of mine fulfil, Here firm I rest, they must be best Because they are Thy will!' It is far rather: _Whistle owre the lave o't_! Yet we may say of him as of Chaucer, that of life and the world, as they come before him, his view is large, free, shrewd, benignant,--truly poetic therefore; and his manner of rendering what he sees is to match. But we must note, at the same time, his great difference from Chaucer. The freedom of Chaucer is heightened, in Burns, by a fiery, reckless energy; the benignity of Chaucer deepens, in Burns, into an overwhelming sense of the pathos of things;--of the pathos of human nature, the pathos, also, of non-human nature. Instead of the fluidity of Chaucer's manner, the manner of Burns has spring, boundless swiftness. Burns is by far the greater force, though he has perhaps less charm. The world of Chaucer is fairer, richer, more significant than that of Burns; but when the largeness and freedom of Burns get full sweep, as in _Tam o' Shanter_, or still more in that puissant and splendid production, _The Jolly Beggars_, his world may be what it will, his poetic genius triumphs over it. In the world of _The Jolly Beggars_ there is more than hideousness and squalor, there is bestiality; yet the piece is a superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach's Cellar, of Goethe's _Faust_, seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by Shakespeare and Aristophanes.