good verse at sixty; but he did not begin till he had reached more than the meridian of life.

But poetical individuality is the feature in which these remarkable men bore to each other the

There are some points of resemblance between strongest resemblance. We mean by poetical Byron and Burns which cannot escape the most individuality that their pursuits were insulated, casual observer. There was about each of them and each spent his life in the service of the mua striking personal independence. This trait ses. It is true that Burns wrote a number of properly displayed is to be admired: but in both it was offensive. Where it is obtruded unnecessarily, we suspect its genuineness. The bard need not solicit favors: but then he need not reject what are intended as testimonials of kindness. There is something exceedingly repulsive in several acts of Burns, and that towards his best friends. Dr. Blair gave him good advice and he rewarded the Doctor by saying that he never had a ray of genius. He rejects all attempts to keep him from expressing his Jacobinical politics at a time when the French Revolution threatened the institutions of England. He is indignant when Thompson offers to pay him for his songs, and yet he had taken seven hundred pounds from the sale of his works. Byron quarrelled with his mother and with his guardian-drew himself back upon being introduced to old Dr. Parr, because the Doctor was a pedant-and treats even his prince with incivility. These things to a sensible man are affected puerilities, since nothing can excuse a poet from the obligation of being a gentleman. They both possessed a fiery temperament. It is probable that Burns would have been at the battle of Preston Pans, had he lived in the early part of the eighteenth century, and we know that Byron went to Greece on warlike business, but we have never had much confidence in the personal courage of poets. The most of them have shown the white feather, with the exception of Korner and one or two of the Greek Tragedians. They are valiant enough with the harp, provided they can be placed out of the range of the balls.

letters in prose, some of which are sufficiently vulgar for Billingsgate, and this grossness we regret to add has in several instances found place in his rhymes. But no man was ever more faithful to his vocation. To be a poet was his ambition: but he kept singularly clear of ambition to be any thing but a poet. His beau ideal of greatness was to travel over Scotland, to step off her battle fields-to measure her mountains and explore her vallies. His muse never crossed the Tweed, or rose above the north battlement of Caledonia's hills. To be a patriot poet was the proud distinction which he eagerly coveted; resigning to others the palm of oratory, and applause derived from successful legislation. It is equally certain that Byron kept himself true to his poetical segregation, though the proposition at first sight is somewhat startling. He made three speeches in the House of Lords, but he had not then ascertained for what he was designed. He wrote a prose letter in opposition to the theory of Bowles: but the letter was about the poetry of Pope. His letters to Murray and Moore are numerous: but they are about Manfred, Don Juan and Sardanapalus. Even after he had entered on his Quixotic expedition, and had reached the wind-mills of Missolonghi, he did not entirely break squares with the muses. The number of his metrical compositions, and the facility with which he wrote them, evinced that he was marked out for the ideal rather than for any thing practical, and that he had become quite a stray sheep when he got into the train of It would have been ridicu- Mars. This individuality is of immense imporlous if Burns had been at Culloden, as it was ri-tance in forming a poet. No one ever associates diculous in Byron to have interfered with the affairs of Western Greece. Mars had no laurel for the man who would not ride a spirited horse without five pair of reins. Nature is not apt to place a pen and a sword into the right hand of the same individual, and the sword had doubtless passed into the left hand of the Missolonghi hero, though he had been engaged in several frays at Venice, Pisa and Florence. In military tact and prowess they were about equal-the one answering for an awkward squad in Dumfries, and the other for a parade in a poor town half burnt by the Turks. Xenophon, Cervantes, Gibbon and Steele were soldiers: but neither was born a Poet. Poeta nascitur—miles fit.*

We cannot permit our correspondent's imputation against the fraternity of poets to go forth without the ex pression of our dissent. It may be true, indeed, that great

poets have rarely displayed military talent, but to question ranted than to deny all musical taste to one who cannot their personal courage on that account is scarcely less warplay upon the harpsichord. The position of our ingenious correspondent might be easily refuted by reference to the lives of poets, from Sir Philip Sidney on the field of Zutphen, down to Lamartine rejecting the drapeau rouge in the

balcony of the Hotel de Ville. If with the Italian minstrel,
as he addresses us through the translation of Lord Byron,
we believe that

"Many are poets who have never penned
Their inspiration,"

or adopt the idea that "heroes are but poets in action," we
will see at once how unfortunate is this sweeping assertion.
There are also some other positions of our gifted correspon-
dent in which we do not accord with him, but we feel assured
that his striking parallel between the ploughman and the
peer will be read with interest, as well from the attractive-
ness of the subject as from the spirited manner in which it
has been treated.-[Ed. Sou. Lit. Mess.

history with Homer, Virgil and Tasso any fur- determined to be miserable, notwithstanding his ther than as tributary to their Poems. Milton, splendid endowments. Burns ardently desired it is admitted, wrote prose: but it was prose that to be happy. He experienced many gleams of can hardly be distinguished from rhyme. The cheerfulness and resolved and re-resolved against pursuits of Pope and Cowper were not mixed. habits adverse to his interests. But with him Fortune seems to The one sung all his life on the Thames, and the nothing seemed to prosper. other on the Ouse. The same is true of Words- have committed him to the cells of her Inquisiworth, and for this reason, he has made better tion. Rays of light fell on him for a time in verses than Southey or Coleridge. Southey Edinburgh; and Dugald Stuart, McKenzie and should have been an historian alone, and Cole-Blair were among those who were held in astonridge nothing beyond a colloquial or professorial ishment by his colloquial powers. But his counphilosopher. With Shakespeare an absorption try retransmitted him to the plough, when he of all pursuits took place, save the one for which he was intended. It was as perfect as any modification that ever took place in rays of light, and left him like a rejoicing swan among the green fields and the woodlands of poetry. As a states- an exciseman. man he might have been equal perhaps to single-ling, his muse was still propitious. His poetry speech Hamilton, or as a soldier, he might have been a sort of

Lieutenant Colonel to the Earl of Mar.

ought to have been invested with some intellectual employment. The rugged toils of a farm were his portion, till his removal to Dumfries, and then he rode over the hills of Nithsdale as Under circumstances so appal

was a rich assemblage of blossoms and fruits: but they seemed to gush from the summit of a tree, all the limbs of which were trained in iron rings. The admirers of Byron have been anxious to give him the crown of a poetical martyrdom. They have tried to excite sympathy even for his poverty, though he married an heiressgot immense sums for his works-gave Moore four thousand pounds-received a hundred thousand from Col. Wildman, and supplied the Greeks with money to carry on a war. He went abroad when he pleased. He smoked his Turkish or Belgian pipe-lived in Italian cities, and was regaled by the spices of the Levant.

There are some points of discrepancy between Byron and Burns which deserve a statement. Adventitious circumstances exercise no slight control over the destinies of men, and the contrast of these men is more striking than the resemblance. The one was born on the banks of the Ayr, in a dilapidated hovel, and heavy work was the lot of his sire. One poor cow was fed at the door of the tenement, and one faithful dog guarded the premises at night. There were no lawns embellished by deer, or fields enlivened by There were points of difference in the educapicturesque flocks. There were feudal castles tion of these surprising men. Sir Walter Scott in Scotland, but they held other families than has said, that the education of Burns was as the one from which the poet rose. There were good as that of one-half of the Scottish nobility. parks, but he was not their possessor. And yet This may be true, but we look in vain for such that hovel was a hermitage above which the a poet among the privileged orders of Scotland. muses poised themselves when Burns was born, If among them that amount of education has though he was heir to nothing but the sounds of not given rise to any celebrated minstrel, the a river to the hawthorn bush-to clumps of the wonder is not diminished that it should have prolarch—and to the wild heather with its purple blos-duced such an one from the peasantry. He resom. It is not necessary to say that Byron com- ceived the bare elements of knowledge. He menced life under different circumstances. He could read and write-had a smattering of French, was of noble and Norman extraction-heir to a and understood calculation to a limited extent. title and owner at least prospectively of New- Various books fell in his way, which his mind stead Abbey in the shire of Nottingham. That immediately devoured. On such a basis his imAbbey had stood for six hundred years, and was agination commenced its operations, nurtured, surrounded by historical and monkish legends. however, by the external scenery of his country. Burns represented a numerous, hard-working The fir tree, the haw, the loch, the burn, the brae, peasantry, and Byron a luxurious nobility. It is the glen, the flood, the mountain, the stars, were in vain to explain away the hardships of the one, his preceptors. Scotland was the hall in which or the chartered privileges of the other, because nature read lectures to her fond and admiring they were realities. Byron turned his heel in- pupil, not about the Pyramids of Egypt-the Chideed on the House of Lords, but he was tenacious uese wall-the siege of Troy-or the adventures of his title and he would rather have been born of Ulysses, but about her own secluded charms. on the lap of Heraldry than in the mines of Peru. He has described his own education in his Vision. Byron had much to make him happy. His woes Scotland, though barren, became to him a kind were of his own creation, for he was invincibly of Hesperian garden. He slew every dragon

that opposed his entrance, and took off the golden | the moors, the bridges, the straths, the traditions, fleece of poetry suspended upon the interior of the history, the rustic customs and the harvest her heather soil. How different was the train-moons of his native land were the themes which ing of the Newstead Bard. We doubt not that resounded from his cymbal. Painters have folhis education was irregular; but then he made it lowed in his wake, and engravers have reduced irregular by his own volition. He possessed into the captivity of their art every object he every advantage which Harrow could afford has described. But the materials of Byron and was subsequently sent to one of the col-were foreign and his pictures were remote as leges in the University of Cambridge. He pro- possible from being English. He abjured his bably held in contempt the mental discipline to country not only by withdrawing his person from which many submit in that ancient and renowned the number of her peers, but in his poetry. University. Others besides Byron have spoken Other bards had depicted the scenery of the slightingly of Oxford and Cambridge. Milton ap- Wye, the castles of the Thames, the groves of pears never to have liked his college, and Gibbon the Trent, and the downs of the Humber. They always spoke coldly of Pembroke, but Dr. Johnson had penetrated the dales and stood on the hills alleges that any youth who goes to either of those of England. They had lingered among her Universities must be inspired by the genius of ruins, and watched the foam of her coast. From the place. He spends his terms among all the Forest Hill, in the Shire of Oxford, Milton had associations which English Literature has it in sketched one of her rural prospects-the imagiits power to present from the days of Alfred to nation of Shakespeare had revelled among her the present time. Their gates, and gardens-green saloons-Pope had waked his harp among their groves, their streams and towers, are all the flocks and shades of Windsor. Cowper had haunted. Some cells return sound but once, but moralised over her gardens-Southey had mused these antique grottoes of taste and letters, are among her lakes-Crabbe had portrayed her always echoing back the names of a thousand boroughs-Montgomery had exposed her evils-illustrious men upon the ear of England. They Logan had marshalled barons on her plains, and claim the experiments of Newton-the discove- Thomson had followed round the circle of her ries of Lord Verulam-the investigations of seasons, but Byron went abroad. He planted Locke the loud notes of Milton-the ethics of his foot on the soil of Greece-talked with its Johnson and the pictures of Addison. Byron shepherds-denounced Lord Elgin, and emmust have derived advantage from Cambridge, balmed its classic ruins. He was in all the even though he might have left it without being cities of Italy-on the field of Waterloo-in the able to construct an equilateral triangle upon a Mediterranean and Egean-by the lake of given straight line. He could not have been in- Geneva-in the vale of Chamouni-at the base different to the collision of mind with mind-to of Mont Blanc-along the Jura-among the casthe lectures of professors-to libraries, and to tled steeps of the Rhine-on the Alps, and by the classical reminiscences which rise in throngs the swift waters of the Rhone. Had England by the Cam. A University might have ruined been a valley like the one which Dr. Johnson Burns; but it had no slight agency in creating Byron.

has stocked so abundantly with the means of happiness, Byron's restiff temperament would In looking over the poetry of the Scot, our at- have driven him beyond its enclosures to survey tention is immediately struck by the home mate- those pyramids which nature has reared around rials out of which it is wrought. He was an- Geneva and those cities and villas where hunointed by the Muse of Coila and to that Muse manity appeared to him in new and picturesque his allegiance was undeviating. The vow of forms. There appears to have been something Hannibal was one of perpetual hostility to Rome. more fascinating to him in an Algerine pirateThat of Burns was one of perpetual devotion to or in Albanian robbers-or in Ægean corsairs Scotland. He seems to have been shut up with- than in the sedate habits of his countrymen. in her cardinal points-to have gazed on her Scotland owes to Burns a debt which marble eastern sun and western star, on her highland monuments cannot repay, for he increased the snows and her Nithdale flowers. He loved her attachment of every peasant to her soil; but brown clouds and misty skies, and her surface England owes Byron nothing, for the colors of was to him a chequered floor on which he moved his fine pencil were lavished on the glaciers of forward to the Mosaic temple of the muses. the Alps-on the clouds of Florence, and the His subjects and imagery were local. The kirks, myrtles of Greece.

* The contrast here, we must allow, Between the two was narrow, When Burns was going to the Plough

And Byron went to Harrow.-[ED. MESS.

The moral sense of Burns was probably superior to that of Byron though in correct moral principle they were both sad delinquents. It is painful to dwell on this part of their history.

Ideality is supposed always to imply a love of satire. He could not have been so dispassionthe fair and sublime in Nature. Why should its ately severe, nor could he so triumphantly have possessors be deficient in the sublime of morals? restored the balance of power which had been But both these men abused the finest powers lost in the literary world. But under like cirwith which two men ever were entrusted. It is cumstances he could have made his critics more disgusting to the last degree to read some of the ridiculous. He had a keener sense of the ludiletters of Byron, in which he deals out vulgar crous than Byron. He discerned all the salient curses upon the quill with which they were writ-points of human character, and his humor was ten. His impiety was notorious. He recklessly inimitable. Humor is one of the finest qualities violated many sacred obligations. He branded a poet can possess. It was absent from Milton, with opprobrium many men virtuous and en- for Carlyle has said with truth that all his atlightened. He lived in habits repulsive to all tempts at wit and intellectual playfulness were morals. He received good counsel only where elephantine. it was mixed up with a due recognition of his Had Byron remained in England he could talents. He infused scepticism into his Childe not possibly have done as much for South as Harold, and ribaldry into his Cain. He ex- Burns has done for North Britain. He would pressed scorn for old Institutions. He wrote not have endeared the country so perfectly to its Hebrew Melodies, but their ultimate object was inhabitants. To have bought the best cottage in nothing more than the display of versatile talent. England would have promoted his happiness; Burns, however, was a man comparatively in- but foreign sights were necessary to the enlargenocent. He had a warm and grateful heart-ment of his genius. His descriptive power was he was not slow to acknowledge his faults-he immense, and could not have been confined to is overwhelmed with grief at the death of Glen- the dense beeches of England, its white roses, cairn he is kind as a husband, indulgent as a father, a generous brother and a constant friend. He threatens friendships with dissolution, but has no intention at the time of dissolving his social ties. He felt the charm of home, the pleasures of the fireside, and the endearments of domestic life. It is impossible that the Cotter's Saturday Night could ever have been written by a man who had never felt the propriety of devotion. An easy independence would have corrected most of his faults, and that independence Scotland ought to have bestowed. Poverty acted to him the part of a high pressure engine, and it reduced him to a wreck even on that tide of moss-each Italian hermitage and each Turkish song which he made to flow on the rivers, and which had enriched the profoundest dells of his country.

and its arboreta, nor could he have found there the grotesque objects which Burns found in the other half of the island. He could have had few sympathies in common with her shepherds, hedgers and weavers. It was well for his fame that he early fell in with an old Turkish History which operated on his mind like a talisman, and directed his views to Eastern subjects and gave rise to a succession of brilliant oriental tales. The translation of his mind, away from familiar scenes, threw a romance into his poetry which never fails to bewitch his readers. The lonely goat-the rustling herd—the church covered with

kiosk assume new hues as he lifts among them his tinted censer. And surely he was a profound ruler of the passions. He saw their operation on a much larger scale than Burns, living, as he did, where despotism was always in the ascendant. He had more breadth in his subjects than Burns, and a wider command of language; but he bordered much more on the rhetorical. The Scotch Bard was always true to Nature and passion. He never strains after words because of a love for the florid. His language is plain but as well suited to a prince as a peasant. He has had imitators; but their efforts have been relinquished as hopeless whilst the imitators of Byron are still warm with hope that they may one day rival their master.

As a satirist Byron was equal to Pope, but inferior to Churchill. Criticism was of great advantage to the young aspirant. His Hours of Idleness were probably a production which he had brought with him from Cambridge and having totally mistaken the politics of Byron, the Edinburgh Reviewers gave it a severe dressing. The castigation which he gave them in return was right, because there was real poetry in the work which they had criticised. Lord Brougham, Jeffrey and particularly the Rev. Sidney Smith, had become both presumptuous and conceited. There was something truly admirable in a mere stripling's coming forward to assail these formi- The poems of Burns will probably be more dable giants. He told them that with the leaves durable than those of Byron, and permanency of their Review he should certainly light his Per- must always be a touchstone of merit. The sian pipe, and nothing could better have express-Scottish dialect will make some productions of ed the depth of his scorn. Burns could not pos- the former less popular abroad, but it cannot sibly have written so scorching and indignant a effect their popularity at home. The Scotch

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