as we should have expected, because he possessed genius, which would have made success a matter of course in any rank, but because he was so well educated--"having acquired a competent knowledge of French, together with the elements of Latin and Geometry," and before he had composed a single stanza, was "far more intimately acquainted with Pope, Shakespeare, and Thomson, than nine-tenths of the youths who leave school for the university," etc. etc.--in short, because he was so well educated, that his becoming Robert Burns, the immortal poet, was a matter of course and necessity. And yet, a page or two on, the great reason why it was more easy for Robert Burns the cottar to become an original and vigorous poet, rather than for any one of "the herd of scholars and academical literati," who are depressed and discouraged by "perusing the most celebrated writers, and conversing with the most intelligent judges," is found to be, that "the literature and refinement of the age do not exist for a rustic and illiterate individual; and consequently the present time is to him what the rude times of old were to the vigorous writer who adorned them." In short the great reason of Robert Burns's success was that he did not possess that education the possession of which proves him to be no prodigy, though the review begins by calling him one, and coupling him with Stephen Duck and Thomas Dermody. Now if the best critic of the age, writing fifteen years after Burns's death, found himself between the horns of such a dilemma'-- which indeed, like those of an old Arnee bull, meet at the points, and form a complete circle of contradictions--what must have been the bewilderment of lesser folk during the prodigy's very lifetime? what must, indeed, have been his own bewilderment at himself, however manfully he may have kept it down? No wonder that he was unguided, either by himself or by others. We do not blame them; him we must deeply blame; yet not as we ought to blame ourselves, did we yield in the least to those temptations under which Burns fell.