136 CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



Cunningham proceeds — ** He had prepared himself, however, for those 

 more prolonged efforts ; nature had endowed him with fine sensibility 

 of heart and grandeur of soul ; he had made himself familiar with nature, 

 animate and inanimate ; with the gentleness of spring, the beauty of 

 summer, the magnificence of autumn, and the stormy sublimity of 

 winter ; nor was he less so with rural man, and his passions and pursuits. 

 Though indulging in no sustained flights, he had now and then sudden 

 bursts in which his feelings over-mastered all restraint." (P. 31.) To 

 talk of "preparation'' is, in this case, however, little less than absolutely 

 ridiculous ; Burns's poetry is anything but the offspring of study ; it 

 has, indeed, for one of its principal merits, this distinguishing feature, 

 that it appears to have issued spontaneously from his fancy, as a spring 

 flows from the limestone : — the precision and polish of the scholar ; the 

 raspings and filings of the statuary ; the classical richness, the grandeur, 

 the exuberant eloquence of the cultivated bard are not to be sought or 

 expected in the musings of the unstudied poet. His flowers are not 

 those of the garden, they belong to the fields, to the banks, to the burn- 

 sides, and the wild woods, but they are not less beautiful, they are but 

 more natural; what they want in bloom and brightness, they repay in 

 sweetness and in simplicity. It is in fact '* a delusion" to dwell on his 

 *' preparation ;" he sang from actual impulse ; at "the plough, at the 

 harrow," in the barn and the byre, at the cottage hearth, on the heath, 

 the moor, or the mountain, his verse was unpremeditated. As the sap 

 ascends the stem of the tree, and forcing its way into branch and bud, 

 throws out blossom, and fruit, and foliage, so does true genius work and 

 make itself manifest. There is too much cant about " preparation" — 

 the premeditated poet is no poet of nature's making ; he may be a smooth, 

 a polished, and even an imposing versifier, but he is not one about whose 

 head the lambent light played in infancy, or whose lips were visited by 

 bees in his cradle. And again we must say that in submitting the 

 effusions of this son of genius to the rigid laws of criticism, we force 

 them to an ordeal by which they ought not to be tried : it is as unwise 

 as an attempt to fetter with scientific rule the wild and beautiful melodies 

 of his native land, or those sweeter and wilder still, the impassioned 

 strains of the Emerald Isle. No true critic thought of estimating by the 

 severe rules of academic art, the striking and admirable sculptures of 

 *' Tarn O'Shanter" and '* Souter Johnnie" by that ingenious and self- 

 taught man who laid down the ruder tools of the mason to assume the 

 chisel and hammer of the statuary. Yet as happy and untutored 

 delineations of rustic nature, these figures were unparalleled ; seen they 

 were appreciated and talked of with wonder; their fame spread far and 

 wide ; 5,000Z. were cleared by their exhibition in London, and the corner 

 of every street, the shop of every modeller, the board of every itinerant 

 image-vender, presented diminutive copies of the celebrated originals. 

 So is it with the songs and ballads of Burns ; their charm is their un- 

 sophisticated nature — the evident absence of conventional feeling and 

 sentiment, — and Mr. Cunningham can scarcely render a service to his 

 *' wood- notes wild" by bringing them one by one under the tremendous 

 engine of scholastic criticism. " It is a delusion," a fond one we allow, 

 which misleads him into a notion that they are adapted to this sifting and 

 winnowing. Upon Burns's qualifications for undertaking a heroic 

 poem, we shall offer some strictures hereafter, at present we must speed 

 on, passing over many points upon which we would pause were we not 

 under certain restrictions of space. It is entertaining to observe with 

 what vigilance yet with what •* douce" complacency Mr. C. grasps at 



