Commentators from Henry Mackenzie onward have regretted that Burns never carried out his plans for writing a drama. Yet his triumph in the dramatic monologue is the best reason for believing that the attempt would have failed. His numerous references to the drama and dramatic writing never so much as hint that Burns had grasped the elements of theatrical technique. For him a play was merely a vehicle for declamatory speeches and the expression of ‘sentiments’ which would make neat quotations; a cobbling together of purple patches and of scattered episodes supposed to depict ‘originality of character’. If it ever occurred to him that a good play is a unified structure in which a single impression is built up through a series of artfully contrived climaxes, he never put the idea on paper. But even had he understood the technique he had not the right psychological approach for dramatic writing, any more than Browning had. The true dramatist stands apart from his characters and develops them from without; the writer of dramatic monologues identifies himself for the moment with another individual and develops the character from within. The two temperaments are seldom united in one man, and Burns in turning away even from the pastoral drama which Mackenzie had urged him to undertake was once again instinctively following the bent of his own genius. In the light of what he accomplished in his chosen forms, Mackenzie’s suggestion was almost as inept as John Moore’s proposal that he try something like Virgil’s Eclogues.