Genius, says Mr. Morgan, “did not guide Burns’s untaught pen to write of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus.” No! that was not Burns’s lay; nor would he have found a public had he emulated the contemporary St. Andrews professor, Mr. Wilkie, who wrote _The Epigoniad_, and sang of Cadmeian Thebes, to the delight of David Hume, his friend. The public of 1780–90 did not want new epics of heroic Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature accessible to Burns full of the mediæval legends of Troy and Athens. But the popular literature accessible to Will was full of the _mediæval_ legends of Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, _not_ of Homer, Will made his market. Egypt he knew only in the new English version of Plutarch’s _Lives_; of Homer, he (or the author of _Troilus and Cressida_) used only Iliad VII., in Chapman’s new translation (1598). For the rest he had Lydgate (perhaps), and, certainly, Caxton’s _Destruction of Troy_, still reprinted as a _popular_ book as late as 1713. Will did not, as Mr. Morgan says, “reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten. . . ” He bestowed the manners of mediæval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks. He accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke. He gave Scotland cannon three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards. Look at his notion of “the very manners” of early post-Roman Britain in _Cymbeline_ and _King Lear_! Concerning “the anomalous status of a King of Scotland under one of its primitive Kings” the author of _Macbeth_ knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual truth concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man slain in a blacksmith’s bothy), and of the whole affair, the author knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated legends. The author of the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan inexplicably declares that he had) of “matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treaties or statutes rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach!” _Mon Dieu_! do historians _not_ treat of “matters of curious research” and of statutes and of treaties? As for “old romances,” they were current and popular. The “occult” sources of _King Lear_ are a popular tale attached to legendary “history” and a story in Sidney’s _Arcadia_. Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as “a letterless peasant lad,” or the Author, whoever he was, is not “invested with all the love” (_sic_, _v.1._ “lore”), “which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten.”