IV. CHAP. larity. The Cotter's Saturday Night, Tam o'Shanter's rollicking ride, the Jolly Beggars' carouse, the exquisite lines to his dead Mary, proved the variety of his fertile genius, and justified the popularity which his writings at once acquired. The vigorous and beautiful poetry which Burns thus produced gave men a new standard of criticism. The decasyllabic metre, which Pope had made fashionable, was at once discarded, and most of the great writers of the period adopted either original or other styles. Crabbe. There is, indeed, one poet, who forms an exception to this rule. Crabbe was born in 1754; his earliest poem, 'The Library,' was published in 1781; and, though his literary life extended till 1819, his style was formed before Burns's vigorous language had revolutionised poetry. He could not escape from the groove in which his ideas moved, and he continued till the close of his life composing the jingling decasyllabic verse which he had made popular at the beginning of it. His poems were the natural consequence of his position in life. He was born at Aldborough, a town which is now rising into a dreary watering-place, but which was then a little fishing hamlet, returning two members to Parliament. Abandoning medicine, for which he had originally been designed, for literature, he was ordained; accepted in the first instance the curacy of his native borough, and afterwards some desirable pieces of preferment which the Duke of Rutland's partiality obtained for him. His usual method, in writing poetry, was to string together a variety of stories which he had learned in the ordinary rounds of a country parish. Every one of his parishioners was, in his eyes, a hero; every village lass a heroine. This one had married for money, and had been unhappy ; another had married for love, and was happy. One man wanted a family, and had no children; another had a troop of children and no money. One pretty girl had been seduced and deserted by a villain; another had resisted temptation and had married happily in her own rank of life. Simple stories of this kind could, of course, be collected in every almshouse and every cottage. Crabbe strung them together in very rythmical couplets and called them poetry. The generation in which he wrote read, approved, and admired them. But the poems, after all, were not poetry, but mere tales in rhyme. There was nothing but the metre to distinguish them from prose. CHAP. IV. The critic who desires to understand the nature of the great poetical revival which took place towards the close of the eighteenth century cannot do better than compare the verses of Crabbe with the poetry of Burns. The purer taste, which Burns had originated, almost immediately produced a new school of poetry: the two men who were his leading successors in this school were also Scotchmen. Campbell and Scott, however, both commenced Campbell. their poetical careers after the outbreak of the French Revolution; and both of them felt the convulsion which was shaking society to the centre. But the feelings which were thus excited affected the two writers in very different ways. It was Campbell's especial characteristic to be always looking forward; it was Scott's habit to be always looking back. Campbell's first great poem, 'The Pleasures of Hope,' was written at a period when the hopes of freedom had fallen to the lowest ebb. Liberty in France had been extinguished by military ambition; Poland had been cruelly partitioned among the neighbouring empires. Campbell described the fall of freedom in some of the most beautiful lines which were ever composed; and the vigour of his descriptions breathed new life into the cause of the popular party, both in England and Europe. The generous feelings which Campbell thus displayed may be traced through his later works. In 'Gertrude of Wyoming,' for instance, which ranks second CHAP. among his longer pieces, the author's sympathy is with the Americans in rebellion against the British Empire. IV. Scott. A love of freedom, then, is the distinguishing characteristic of Campbell's poetry. Twenty years later his disposition might possibly have driven him into the violent language which some of his successors habitually used. But Campbell was not exposed to the influences to which Byron and Shelley afterwards succumbed. He began to write amidst the reaction which revolutionary excesses had occasioned. Like Mackintosh, he shared the generous feelings which were contained in the 'Vindicia Gallicæ,' but, like Mackintosh, he was horrified at the excesses of the Revolution. In Campbell's verse Britain is the land of freedom, and the navy's glory is shared by all Britons. It is recorded that, on one occasion, his enthusiasm for the cause of liberty exposed him to some suspicion. He was arrested, and his papers were seized. But the sheriff, who made the arrest, found in the poet's travelling cases the few lines Ye Mariners of England,' which are perhaps the most heartstirring national verses in the language. No better refutation could have been given to the unworthy suspicions which had been cast on the author. Campbell, then, was full of the generous ideas which he must have learned in his very boyhood; but equally ardent in his enthusiastic support of the war with France in which his country was engaged. Scott never looked forward. There is hardly a passage either in his writings or in his biography which can be quoted to prove that he thought that the succeeding age was likely to be more generous or more happy than the preceding one. His ideas were essentially antiquarian, and all his best pieces dealt with former ages. The Lay' is a tale of Border warfare; Marmion' of Flodden; 'The Lady of the Lake' of James V.; The Lord of the Isles' of Bruce; 'Rokeby' of the civil wars of the seventeenth century. The same thing is true of the novels which the great author subsequently produced with marvellous rapidity. The first of them all was a tale of 'sixty years since'; 'Guy Mannering' was, chronologically, a continuation of Waverley '; 'The Antiquary' of Guy Mannering.' But the third of the series only brought the author up to the period of his own youth. Having ventured so near his own time, Scott immediately reverted to the period on which he was fondest of dwelling. 'Rob Roy' is a story of the middle of the eighteenth century; Old Mortality' of the seventeenth; The Black Dwarf' of the earlier years of the eighteenth century. The Legend of Montrose' is a tale of the civil wars; The Heart of Midlothian' of George 11.; the Bride of Lammermoor' belongs to a still earlier period. The Monastery,' 'The Abbot,' and 'Kenilworth' are all stories of the sixteenth century; while in ‘Ivanhoe' the novelist carries his readers back to the days of the Crusades. This list, which it would be possible to extend, includes the whole of Scott's earlier novels. The mere recital of it makes it obvious that Scott refrained, as a rule, from writing about his own times, and that his thoughts were almost always concentrated on the wild life which his fellow-countrymen had led in previous ages. Yet Scott, antiquarian as he was, felt the force of the reaction in which nearly all his contemporaries participated. Almost every line of his writings is intensely national. But there is the broadest distinction between the nationality of Scott and the nationality of Campbell. There is hardly a line in Campbell to show that he is a Scotchman. 6 Ye mariners of England, that guard our native seas;' 'And England sent her men of men the chief;' 'Now, joy, old England, raise, for the tidings of thy might,' 'Steer, helmsman, till you steer our way by stars beyond the line: we go to found a realm, one day, like England's self to shine,' are СНАР. IV. CHAP. 6 a few examples of the many which might be quoted to prove that, in Campbell's verse, his individuality as a Scotchman is almost always merged in his nationality as an Englishman. But Scott, on the contrary, never forgets he is a Scotchman. 'It is the harp of the North' which he desires to waken. It is of the old times and old manners, before a stranger filled the Stuarts' throne,' that the latest minstrel sung. He cannot avoid the passing wish that Flodden had been Bannockburn.' The hero of his first novel is an Englishman, but an Englishman who, amidst Scotch surroundings, strikes a blow for Prince Charlie at Preston Pans. This distinction between the two authors was the inevitable consequence of their different dispositions. A Scotchman who was always looking back was sure to dwell upon the old rivalries of the Scotch and English; while a Scotchman who was always looking forward was as certain to remember that the thoughts and interests of the two nations had become. identical. Scott, to the end of his life, was never able to free himself entirely from the old Scotch feeling. George IV., indeed, won his heart; but then George IV. put on a Stuart tartan in Edinburgh. The only occasion on which Scott seriously attempted to interfere with politics was on the attempt of Parliament to extend to Scotland a measure of currency reform which it was applying to England. The intense love of his own country which is perceptible in all of Scott's novels accounts, however, for much of their beauty and much of their popularity. He saw Scotland as no one had ever seen it before. Up to the time at which he wrote there was no general taste for scenery. It is a striking observation of a forgotten writer, which has been reproduced by Mackintosh, that there is no single term in Greek or Latin for prospect.' So recent is the taste for scenery,' wrote Mackintosh on another occasion, that a tour through Great Britain, published |