SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR S LIFE. 20 



with the white pick-maw sailing about the sober 

 ploughman's team-gang, the sights and sounds that 

 had their being ere man betook himself to build 

 cities and live in masses, were the educating in- 

 fluences that had made John Younger what he came 

 to be, and which inspired him with an ambition to 

 interpret in plain story the life of Robert Burns. 

 And common consent, though candid enough to 

 admit that some of his conclusions might be open to 

 objection, confessed that John Younger was in a large 

 degree successful in what he had undertaken. His 

 critical estimate of Burns had a rough matter-of- 

 fact quality about it. He did not sail in the clouds 

 in flights of eloquence, or discourse in grand allegori- 

 cal tropes like Carlyle. With a pooh, pooh, and a 

 humph of contempt, he ridiculed the so-called ro- 

 mance, " The glory and the joy," with which 

 imaginative writers had surrounded the bard's exis- 

 tence. Very much romance indeed, he thought, 

 there was about the greatest man in a nation lying 

 in a stable loft, and spending his pain-racked mid- 

 nights ainid the perfumes of such an abode, listen- 

 ing to the nags below stirring, stamping, or riving 

 at thefusionless bog hay ! He considered that Burns 

 was too much the companion of every day suffering 

 to sustain any such picture as Wordsworth had 



