Scotland _Scotia_, France _Gallia_; so inveterately had the mind, in this school of feeling, been trained, alike in the highest things and in the lowest, to a horror of throwing itself boldly upon the great _realities_ of life: even names must be fictions for _their_ taste. Yet what comparison between "_France_, an Ode," and "_Gallia_, an Ode"? Dr. Currie was so much occupied with his professional duties that of him I saw but little. His edition of Burns was just then published (I think in that very month), and in everybody's hands. At that time, he was considered not unjust to the memory of the man, and (however constitutionally phlegmatic, or with little enthusiasm, at least in external show) not much below the mark in his appreciation of the poet.[28] [28] Dr. James Currie, born 1756, a native of Dumfriesshire, settled in Liverpool, in medical practice, in 1781. His edition of Burns, with memoir and criticism, published in 1800, was for the benefit of the widow and children of the poet, and realised £1400. Currie died in 1805.--M. So stood matters some twelve or fourteen years; after which period a "craze" arose on the subject of Burns, which allowed no voice to be heard but that of zealotry and violent partisanship. The first impulse to this arose out of an oblique collision between Lord Jeffrey and Mr. Wordsworth; the former having written a disparaging critique upon Burns's pretensions--a little, perhaps, too much coloured by the fastidiousness of long practice in the world, but, in the main, speaking some plain truths on the quality of Burns's understanding, as expressed in his epistolary compositions. Upon which, in his celebrated letter to Mr. James Gray, the friend of Burns, himself a poet, and then a master in the High School of Edinburgh, Mr. Wordsworth commented with severity, proportioned rather to his personal resentments towards Lord Jeffrey than to the quantity of wrong inflicted upon Burns. Mr. Wordsworth's letter, in so far as it was a record of embittered feeling, might have perished; but, as it happened to embody some profound criticisms, applied to the art of biography, and especially to the delicate task of following a man of original genius through his personal infirmities or his constitutional aberrations--this fact, and its relation to Burns and the author's name, have all combined to embalm it.[29] Its momentary effect, in conjunction with Lord Jeffrey's article, was to revive the interest (which for some time had languished under the oppression of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron) in all that related to Burns. Fresh Lives appeared in a continued succession, until, upon the death of Lord Byron in 1824, Mr. Allan Cunningham, who had personally known Burns, so far as a boy _could_ know a mature man, gave a new impulse to the interest, by an impressive paper in which he contrasted the circumstances of Burns's death with those of Lord Byron's, and also the two funerals--both of which, one altogether,