This is fair enough; but, indeed, after laying down our rule, we must confess that it is very difficult to keep always true to it, in a language which does not, like the Latin and German, allow us to put our adjectives very much where we choose. Nevertheless, whether we can avoid it or not, every time we place before the noun an epithet which, like "departed joys," relates to our consciousness concerning the object, and not merely to the object itself; or an epithet which, like "flowery thorn," gives us, before we get to the object itself, those accidents of the object which we only discern by a second look, by analysis and reflection--(for the thorn, if in the flower, would look to us, at the first glance, not "flowery," but "white," "snowy," or what you will which expresses colour, and not scientific fact)-- every time, we repeat, this is done, the poet descends from the objective and dramatic domain of song, into the subjective and reflective one of elegy. But the field in which Burns's influence has been, as was to be expected, most important and most widely felt, is in the poems of working men. He first proved that it was possible to become a poet and a cultivated man, without deserting his class, either in station or in sympathies; nay, that the healthiest and noblest elements of a lowly-born poet's mind might be, perhaps must be, the very feelings and thoughts which he brought up with him from below, not those which he received from above, in the course of his artificial culture. From the example of Burns, therefore, many a working man, who would otherwise have "died and given no sign," has taken courage, and spoken out the thought within him, in verse or prose, not always wisely and well, but in all cases, as it seems to us, in the belief that he had a sort of divine right to speak and be heard, since Burns had broken down the artificial ice-wall of centuries, and asserted, by act as well as song, that "a man's a man for a' that." Almost every volume of working men's poetry which we have read, seems to re- echo poor Nicoll's spirited, though somewhat over-strained address to the Scottish genius: This is the natal day of him Who, born in want and poverty, Burst from his fetters and arose, The freest of the free. Arose to tell the watching earth What lowly men could feel and do, To show that mighty heaven-like souls In cottage hamlets grew. Burns! thou hast given us a name To shield us from the taunts of scorn: The plant that creeps amid the soil A glorious flower has borne. Before the proudest of the earth We stand with an uplifted brow; Like us, thou wast a toil-worn man, And we are noble now!