his work, admirable as in many respects it is, had not sufficient weight to stand against the work of masters like Dryden and Pope, whose methods he rightly enough condemned. The best work of Burns, again, one might almost say his only good work, was done in poems which, from the fact of their being written in the Scots tongue, were in great part unintelligible to English readers. The moment Burns came to write in English he became a slave to artifice, he declined into a diction altogether infelicitous, sometimes even barbarous. More than that, Burns was not a conscious reformer: he worked for the new ideas, but unconsciously, at least not of set purpose. But by his Scottish poems he exerted an influence on Wordsworth the extent of which that magnanimous egotist was not slow to acknowledge. Every one will remember Wordsworth's fine tribute to the memory of the poet :

'Whose light I hailed when first it shone,
When, breaking forth as Nature's own,
It showed my youth

How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth.'

And what we have now to remember is that the influence thus described was passed on from Ramsay to Fergusson, from Fergusson to Burns. Fergusson especially it was who inspired and

stimulated the early efforts of Burns. 'Meeting with Fergusson's Scottish Poems, I strung anew my wildly-sounding lyre with emulating vigour': that is what Burns himself says, and surely it should of itself suffice to keep Fergusson's memory alive among us. That his poems served to set and keep Burns on the right path remains, after all is said, Fergusson's best and highest claim on our consideration; but surely it is no slight one!

THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS

OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL'

'Primores populi arripuit populumque tributim,
Scilicet uni aequus virtuti atque ejus amicis.'
HOR. Sat. ii. 1.

THERE are few great names in American literature; compared with the rich harvests of imaginative work which our own and other European countries have reaped and stored during centuries of placid existence, the great Western Republic can point only to a few scanty ears of corn, garnered but yesterday, as it seems, and with the dew yet fresh upon them.

It is in the nature of things that this should be so, for, as the lives of nations go, America is hardly yet out of her 'teens. Nor have the peculiar circumstances of her history been favourable to the growth of literature and the arts. Her first settlers were austere Puritans, and these 'stern men with empires in their brains' looked upon the Fine Arts with mingled contempt and hatred, as so many devices of the devil with 1 Written 1894. Hitherto unpublished.

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which he snared the souls of men. The struggle for bare subsistence was hardly over when the infant country was called to a death-grapple with her kinsmen across the seas. The triumphant close of that struggle, again, was coincident with the beginning of the modern commercial era, and America lay for long bound in the iron grip of the commercial spirit, straining every nerve to get rich, wholly absorbed, it might have seemed, by the stress and strain and turmoil of the modern world. But a spiritual flowering-time was at hand, and New England, about the middle of the present century, experienced what we might almost call a literary 'revival.'

Mr. James Russell Lowell was one of the most brilliant and versatile of that gifted band who have effectually redeemed American literature from the charge of barrenness, and charmed the readers of two hemispheres. It is too soon yet to attempt to decide what place Mr. Lowell will ultimately be accorded in the literary hierarchy which includes such men as Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier, but certainly it must be a high one. In mere exquisiteness of workmanship Hawthorne certainly surpasses him, and his influence on the thought of the time was not so profound, suggestive, and stimulating as that of Emerson. But he was perhaps the best

all-round man of letters whom America has yet produced. Other writers may excel him in one thing or another, but no one has turned his talents to such good purpose in so many different fields of literary labour. He wrote for fully half a century; in turn he was serious poet, satirical verse-maker, literary critic, political controversialist, and essayist on all sorts of out-of-the-way subjects. And nearly every page he wrote is worth reading, for all his work is marked-not only by high literary excellence, but-by a brilliance and verve, a robust faith in himself, his own opinions, and his own country, that are exhilarating and delightful. With the solitary exception of Walt Whitman, he seems to me the most distinctively national of American men of letters of the highest rank; his works are racier of the soil than either the delicate, sensitive, and shrinking genius of Hawthorne or the transcendentalism of Emerson. Mr. Lowell, however, was national in no petty or exclusive sense, and to all who 'speak the tongue which Shakespeare spake' his death was a loss keenly felt and honestly deplored. To this country, indeed, Mr. Lowell was bound by peculiar ties, and we felt that we also had a share in his triumphs. As Ambassador to the Court of St. James, he represented what was highest and best in American society, and we