spirit of manly independence and superiority to considerations of mere worldly rank,--it remains true that De Quincey's own estimate of Burns all in all fell woefully beneath the proper mark. There are evidences of this in the present paper, and there are other evidences at different points of De Quincey's life. Wordsworth in this respect differed immensely from his friend De Quincey, and might have taught him better. In that letter of Wordsworth's which is referred to by De Quincey (_ante_, p. 131) precisely because it had deprecated the republication in 1816 of Dr. Currie's _Life of Burns_ in 1800, how enthusiastic was the feeling for Burns and his memory compared with anything that De Quincey seems ever to have permitted himself! And, as long before as 1803, had not Wordsworth, in his lines _At the Grave of Burns_, given expression to the same feeling in more personal shape? Who can forget that deathless stanza in which, remembering that Burns had died so recently, and that, though they had never met, they had been near neighbours by their places of habitation, the new poet of England had confessed his own indebtedness to the example of the Scottish ploughman bard?-- "I mourned with thousands, but as one More deeply grieved; for He was gone Whose light I hailed, when first it shone And showed my youth How verse may build a princely throne On humble truth." In connexion with the fact of De Quincey's defective appreciation of Burns even so late as 1837, it is additionally significant that, though he refers in the present paper, with modified approbation, to Jeffrey's somewhat captious article on Burns in the _Edinburgh Review_ for January 1809, he does not mention the compensation which had appeared, with Jeffrey's own editorial sanction, in the shape of Carlyle's essay on Burns in the same _Review_ for December 1828.--M. CHAPTER II SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE[32] [32] This chapter is composed of four articles contributed to _Tait's Magazine_ under the title of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge: By the English Opium-Eater." They appeared, respectively, in the numbers of the Magazine for September, October, and November 1834, and January 1835. Three of these articles were revised by De Quincey, and thrown into one paper for Vol. II of the Collective Edition of his writings, published in 1854. The fourth article was not included in that paper; but it is added to the reprint of the paper in the American Collective Edition of De Quincey, and is necessary to complete his sketch of Coleridge. It is therefore reproduced here. The reader will understand, accordingly, that as far as to p. 208 we follow De Quincey's revised text of three of his Coleridge articles; after which we have to print the fourth article as it originally stood in _Tait_.--M.