WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827), the

son of a London hosier, showed an early turn for poetry and drawing. After seven years' apprenticeship with an engraver and a short attendance at the newly opened Royal Academy of Arts, he set up as an engraver in London, doing work for the booksellers and selling his original designs to a small circle of connoisseurs. In 1782 he married a simple gardener's daughter, who proved a jewel of a wife to this singularly eccentric genius. His first collection of lyrical poetry, written between his twelfth and twentieth years, was privately printed by his friends under the title of Poetical Sketches (1783) The other volumes of verse that saw the light during his life-time, were all furnished with illustrations by himself, executed in a very extraordinary and original manner: both text and designs were engraved in relief on copper-plates, and the prints made from these plates were coloured by his own hand, while his wife learnt to do up the pages in boards. The most famous of these books are the Songs of Inno

cence (1789) and the Songs of Experience (1794), which, for the first time in English literature, gave a perfect utterance to the innocence of childhood, and combined again an utter simplicity of diction with the long-forgotten ring of Elizabethan verse-music. His various other writings, the so-called 'prophetic books', as The Book of Thel (1789), The Song of Los (1795), Jerusalem (1804), Tiriel (first printed 1874), his prose rhapsodies in an Ossianic style like the Couch of Death, or the paradoxical aphorisms in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), all of which Blake believed to be superhuman visions and relevations, display a daring imagination, but often, too, unintelligible mysticism. By his contemporaries Blake's poetry was as little appreciated as his art of drawing, whilst to-day his numerous engravings and water-colour paintings, especially his illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts (1797), the Book of Job (1822), and Dante's Divina Comedia (1827), are ranked extremely high for their originality of conception and boldness of execution.

DOBERT BURNS (1759-1796), the

ROE

son of a poor Scottish farmer, was born in a clay cottage at Alloway, near Ayr. He had no other education but what he could get from an intelligent father and an excellent parish schoolmaster and from studying all the books within his reach, which comprised history, theology, and science, as well as the English classics. Brought up to be a farmer, he early became one of his father's chief farm-labourers. At his father's death (1784), he took a farm together with his brother Gilbert at Mossgiel, near Mauchline, where, in spite of hard labour, his poetic genius broke forth in a wonderfully rich outpouring of poetry. Bad crops and an unfortunate love-affair with a mason's daughter, Jean Armour, who after all became his wife in 1788, made him resolve to emigrate to Jamaica. This plan was, however, overthrown by the brilliant success of his poems, which, in order to secure passage-money, he had published at Kilmarnock in 1786. At the instigation of a friend, he now decided to try his fortune in Edinburgh and there to find a publisher for a new enlarged edition. In the Scotch metropolis (1786-1788) he was enthusiastically received by the fashionable and literary circles, and instantly became the lion of the season. A subscription was raised for a second edition, which appeared at Edinburgh in 1787; an arrange

ment was made with J. Johnson, to whose Musical Museum he was to contribute old and new songs; and, in the summer and autumn of 1787, he made several tours through the Highlands and the Border counties. But poetically his Edinburgh sojourn proved unproductive, and by December he had decided to leave Edinburgh and to go back to his old mode of life; only, an injury to his knee detained him till February 1788. Before leaving he had applied for, and was promised, a place in the excise. In the mean time, while waiting for an appointment, he tried once more a farm at Ellisland, near Dumfries, where he settled with Jean, now his wife (1788). In the following year he obtained an appointment as exciseman in a Dumfries district; and so he soon afterwards gave up his farm, which had again proved a failure, and removed to the town of Dumfries, where he stayed for the last six years of his life. The long rides across the country, which his duty involved, inspired him to some of his finest work; but, unfortunately, his office also exposed his natural taste for conviviality to too many temptations, which undermined his always weak constitution, and accidentally led to a rheumatic fever, from which he died at the early age of 37 years.

Burns is undoubtedly the greatest poet of Scotland, and as such he was the con

tinuator and fulfiller of a long tradition of Scotch poets, among whom Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) and especially Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) were his immediate predecessors and recognised masters in manner and in matter. On the other hand he was also influenced, though far less, by the English poets of the century, especially Pope and Thomson. But in spite of all this he was a poetic genius of singular originality and spontaneity; and the one volume he ever published, the Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786, augmented in three subsequent editions), contains masterpieces of an inspired perfection to be matched with anything in the English language. Burns is above all a lyric poet, though he is hardly less great as a humorist and satirist. His love-songs, full of an intense passion and an unaffected artlessness, have hardly ever been surpassed. Other characteristic features of his poetry are an undaunted manliness and love of independence, strong Scottish patriotism, a great power of observation and realistic description, a deep feeling for nature and animals, and a never failing humour qualities which are found in his songs as well as in his poems. Of the latter class

there require special mention such masterpieces as The Twa Dogs (on social distinctions), the two spirited pictures of Scotch peasant life in The Holy Fair and Halloween, The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie (a pet ewe), the domestic idyll of The Cotter's Saturday Night (— all published in the Kilmarnock volume of 1786), the frolicsome alehouse scene of The Jolly Beggars, and the glorious witch-story of Tam o' Shanter (1791), which was suggested by the picturesque ruin of old Alloway Kirk. His bestknown satires are The Twa Herds (against the rigorous Calvinism of the 'Auld Licht'), Holy Willie's Prayer (against hypocrisy), and Death and Doctor Hornbook (against dabbling in medicine). Many of his songs, f. i. those contributed to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803) and G. Thomson's Scottish Airs (1793-1805), were written for, and adapted to, old Scotch tunes, and, therefore, can hardly be rightly valued, if taken apart from their music. The language of most of his poems and songs is Lowland Scotch, but very often not a pure dialect, but rather a mixture of Scotch and Southern English; only comparatively few are written in literary English.

But the cheerful Spring came kindly on,
And show'rs began to fall;

John Barleycorn got up again,
And sore surpris'd them all.

The sultry suns of Summer came, And he grew thick and strong: His head weel arm'd wi' pointed spears, That no one should him wrong.

The sober Autumn enter'd mild,
When he grew wan and pale;
His bending joints and drooping head
Show'd he began to fail.

His colour sicken'd more and more,
He faded into age;

And then his enemies began
To show their deadly rage.

They've taen a weapon long and sharp,

And cut him by the knee; Then ty'd him fast upon a cart,

Like a rogue for forgerie.

They laid him down upon his back,
And cudgell'd him full sore.
They hung him up before the storm,
And turn'd him o'er and o'er.