I think, indeed, one best part of Burns is the unquestionable
proof he presents of the perennial existence among the laboring
classes, especially farmers, of the finest latent poetic elements in
their blood. (How clear it is to me that the common soil has always
been, and is now, thickly strewn with just such gems.) He is
well-called the _Ploughman_. "Holding the plough," said his brother
Gilbert, "was the favorite situation with Robert for poetic
compositions; and some of his best verses were produced while he was
at that exercise." "I must return to my humble station, and woo my
rustic muse in my wonted way, at the plough-tail." 1787, to the Earl
of Buchan. He has no high ideal of the poet or the poet's office;
indeed quite a low and contracted notion of both:
"Fortune! if thou'll but gie me still
Hale breeks, a scone, and whiskey gill,
An' rowth o' rhyme to rave at will,
Tak' a' the rest."
See also his rhym'd letters to Robert Graham invoking patronage; "one
stronghold," Lord Glencairn, being dead, now these appeals to "Fintra,
my other stay," (with in one letter a copious shower of vituperation
generally.) In his collected poems there is no particular unity,
nothing that can be called a leading theory, no unmistakable spine or
skeleton. Perhaps, indeed, their very desultoriness is the charm
of his songs: "I take up one or another," he says in a letter to
Thompson, "just as the bee of the moment buzzes in my bonnet-lug."
Consonantly with the customs of the time--yet markedly inconsistent in
spirit with Burns's own case, (and not a little painful as it remains
on record, as depicting some features of the bard himself,) the
relation called _patronage_ existed between the nobility and gentry
on one side, and literary people on the other, and gives one of the
strongest side-lights to the general coloring of poems and poets.
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