(1783); Songs of Innocence (1787); The Book of Thel (1787); The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790); The Gates of Paradise (1793); The Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793); America (1793); Europe (1794); The Book of Urizen (1794); Songs of Experience (1794); The Song of Los (1795); The Book of Ahaniah (1795); Jerusalem (1804). Most of these belong to the class of "apocalyptic" literature; to the casual reader they appear chaotic

and obscure, and often quite unintelligible. Despite the daring originality and pregnancy of their thought (as in the remarkable Marriage of Heaven and Hell), they will therefore appeal only to a few chosen disciples here and there. Such part of Blake's poetry as, on the other hand, concerns every lover of literature is to be found in the Sketches and in the Songs of Innocence and Experience. These have a spontaneity and a charm which make us forget their not infrequent technical imperfections. In the purity of their lyric note they are all but unique in the English literature of the time. Their democratic sentiment is also important. But most significant of all is their love of nature, of simple life, of childhood and home, in which they point directly forward to the Lyrical Ballads. Blake stood apart from the general literary movements of his age. But he reveals the influence of the Elizabethan revival, of the growing love of Spenser, of Percy's Reliques, of Chatterton, and, in the formlessness of his "apocalyptic writings, of Ossian. Though his work is in many ways prophetic, it was little known, and therefore exercised a very slight influence only on his contemporaries and immediate successors.

ROBERT BURNS (1759-96)

Life and Character.-Robert Burns came of a Kincardineshire family of small farmers, and was born in his father's "auld clay bigging" at Alloway, two miles from Ayr, in 1759. His education included an excellent grounding in English, and subsequently French and the rudiments of Latin. This he supplemented by wide reading in standard literature. He worked on his father's farm from childhood

till he was twenty-three, by which time he had gained a local reputation as a poet and a philanderer. Having failed in farming on his own account, he was on the point of emigrating to Jamaica when his plans were changed by the success of his volume of poems (1786), which brought him some money and introduced him to the literary and fashionable society of Edinburgh. With the proceeds of a second

edition (1787) he took the farm of Ellisland, near Dumfries. His union with Jean Armour was regularized by marriage in 1788. But illfortune still pursued him, and to eke out a livelihood he became an exciseman. Then, his farm going from bad to worse, he gave it up altogether (1791) and removed to Dumfries, with his government position as his only means of support. In the autumn of 1795 his health, never very robust, broke down completely, and he died in July of the following year. He wrote great songs to the last-for example, Duncan Gray and O wert thou in the Cauld Blast. Of Burns's moral failings, and especially of his dissipation and profligacy, enough has always been made; such "thoughtless follies," in his own words, "laid him low" and have "stained his name." Sufficient stress, on the other hand, has not always been thrown upon his generosity, his wide

sympathies, and his manly independence, as shown, for example, in his relations with his aristocratic patrons in the capital.

Works and Characteristics.-Endowed with a marvellous gift of song, Burns is supreme in his lyrics; but he is also great as a descriptive poet and as a satirist; and in all these capacities his absolute sincerity lies at the root of his power. True to himself and to the soil from which he sprang, he fashioned his verse directly out of his own experiences and the things amid which he was born and bred. He is thus the faithful interpreter of the Scottish peasant folk-of their thoughts, feelings, joys, sorrows, passions, superstitions, racy humour, homespun philosophy-even of their lawlessness and debaucheries.

Leeze me on drink! it gies us mair
Than either school or college;
It kindles wit, it waukens lear,
It pangs us fou o' knowledge.
Be't whisky-gill, or penny wheep,
Or onie stronger potion,

It never fails, on drinkin' deep,

To kittle up our notion,

By night or day.-The Holy Fair.

After his songs, such masterpieces in little of vivid description, rollicking fun, and pungent satire as The Jolly Beggars, Tam o' Shanter, and Holy Willie's Prayer, show his genius at its highest.

When lyart leaves bestrow the yird,
Or, wavering like the bauckie-bird,
Bedim cauld Boreas' blast;

When hailstanes drive wi' bitter skyte,
And infant frosts begin to bite,
In hoary cranreuch drest;
Ae night at e'en a merry core
O' randie, gangrel bodies,

In Poosie-Nansie's held the splore,
To drink their orra duddies:
Wi' quaffing and laughing,
They ranted an' they sang;
Wi' jumping and thumping,

The vera girdle rang.-The Jolly Beggars.

His best work is almost entirely in his Scots poetry; that written in standard English has generally by contrast too "literary" a flavour, while it often falls into the artificial mannerisms of the time. This criticism even applies to some extent to his most ambitious effort, The Cottar's Saturday Night, a poem in Spenserian stanzas, and partly in Scots, partly in English. Though by no means the unlettered ploughman of popular fancy for he read widely and critically Burns was little. influenced, and not at all for good, by standard English literature. His poetic ancestry is rather to be sought among his Scottish predecessors, especially Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, and in the folk-poetry of the Scottish peasantry. More than any other poet of his age, he brought the passion of the natural man -the passion of war, of conviviality, of love-into our verse. His essentially democratic quality must also be emphasized. He was much affected by the revolutionary stir of thought in the closing decades of the century. A European note thus finds its way into his poetry, which is full of the worth of natural simple manhood, irrespective of caste and place: "The rank is but the guinea's stamp; the man's the gowd for a' that." His broad geniality and the tender sensibility which overflowed from him to the humblest things in nature-the mountain daisy, the mouse, the hunted hare-are aspects of this all-embracing human

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feeling. His work as a whole is an admirable embodiment of his poetic creed, as summed up in his Epistle to John Lapraik :

But it should also be noted that he is a great poetic artist-the greatest poetic genius of later Scottish literature. He has a classic sense of style, and his best lyrics are as flawless as a song of Catullus. He has attained the reward which always follows perfection, and certain of his writings have become a part of the mind of the English-speaking world to an extent scarcely paralleled save by Shakespeare.

GEORGE CRABBE (1754-1832)

Life and Character.-George Crabbe was born in 1754 at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where his father was a collector of salt dues and part owner of a fishing-boat. He received a fair elementary education; was apprenticed in 1768 to a surgeon, and for a time practised medicine in his native town. His work, however, was distasteful to him, and in 1780 he removed to London to try his fortunes in literature. Disappointments awaited him, and he was at the end of his resources when he was rescued from his misery by the kindness of Burke, who got Dodsley to publish his poem The Library (1781). The same year he took orders, and afterwards held various livings successively and (for his views concerning pluralities were of the laxest) together. He married in 1783, and in 1792 inherited a fortune from his wife's uncle. His last cure was at Trowbridge, where he settled in 1814, and where he died in 1832. Crabbe was a man of hot temper, strong prejudices, and rather hard nature, but he mellowed greatly in the latter part of his life, and at Trowbridge he endeared himself to his flock.

Works.-The Candidate (1780); The Library (1781); The Village (1783); The Newspaper (1785); The Parish Register (1807); The Borough (1810); Tales in Verse (1812); Tales of the Hall (1819).

Characteristics. Crabbe is the great realist of English poetry. He takes his subjects from actual life (mainly from the life of the middle and lower classes), and his imagination handles them in a hard, literal way. Uncompromising adherence to visible truth is his guiding principle. He thus stands in conscious antagonism to that traditional arcadianism which still lingered among the conventions of polite literature: "I paint the cot, as truth will paint it, and as bards will not " (The Village). His reaction against the poetic falsification of life carried him, however, to the opposite extreme. He dwells almost too much upon the dark and