That the poetry of Burns, thus liberated, must have its career of evolving value—that it is even now entering upon its clearer stages—hardly admits of intelligent doubt. It would be strange indeed if a genius so autochthonous, if a personality so powerful and so perilously charged, so real and yet symbolic, were to abide always where the first bewildered essays of opinion placed them. In truth, they have abided there too long. The most interesting life in Scotland has hitherto found no sufficient biographer. Lockhart’s early sketch is still virtually unsuperseded, though it was historically impossible that Lockhart in 1828 could be more than provisionally excellent and honourably imperfect. In the way of interpretation nothing of any moment was done—nothing, that is, which did not leave the subject where it was before—till the appearance in 1896 of Henley’s highly disturbing _Essay on Burns_; a masterpiece loudly execrated by fools, but a homage none the less noble, and a service hardly the less great, for being a little warped in the rendering. And if it seem strange that the Peasant Poet (somewhat misleadingly so called) and the social rebel should be indebted to an Edinburgh lawyer and son of the manse for the most sympathetic and dignified telling of his life-story, it might seem stranger still that the patriotic and revolutionary spirit who wrote _Scots Wha Hae_ and _A Man’s a Man for a’ That_ should be indebted to an intransigeant Englishman (and no lover of democrats and levellers, perdy!) not only for the first illuminating study of his literary origins and personal achievement, but for the first full sympathetic perception of the tragedy presented by his over-worked, under-nourished, playless, joyless, prospectless adolescence, with all its inspiration mute and waiting. But in Henley the man was even more abounding than the Englishman, and the man-of-letters was equal to both; and he found in Burns such true matter, of humanity and literature, as all his head and heart delighted to take hold of. So his work has done more to de-provincialise Burns—to dissipate, I mean, the subtly limiting and obscuring presupposition of provincialism with which many even of the worthy were wont to approach him—than all the annual panegyrics of the Poet’s own countrymen, most of which, to be sure, have wrought to quite contrary effect. It off-sets with abundance the sad dereliction of Matthew Arnold, whose poor, pained, academic, and sniffy sensations in the presence of Burns and his world “of Scotch morals, Scotch religion and Scotch drink” is equalled, among the illustrious stupidities of great critics, only by Sainte-Beuve’s inability to see in Balzac anything more than a vulgar and voluminous writer of romances for the ruck of contemporary readers.