to the aunt who brought him up, Mrs. Catherine Porten, "at whose name I feel a tear of gratitude trickling down my cheek." This phrase, with its hackneyed literary fiction, is almost the only one which appears in all of the six drafts of the autobiography which have come down to us. There can be no doubt, first, that Gibbon meant what he said, and secondly, that he thought this the most proper way of saying it; the whole man is there if you come to think of it. The book is unsurpassed, unique, indeed, in a quality which it would be difficult to define; nothing could be further from naïveté, yet it comes to the same. His analysis of complicated states of mind is so lucid, so frank, and so exact, and he is so perfectly convinced that he need be ashamed of nothing which goes to make up Edward Gibbon that his narrative is as candid as simplicity transformed into print. He has a wonderful apprehension, too, of common things in their true inwardness, which may be illustrated by two phrases: "that early and invincible love of reading which I would not exchange for the treasures of India"; and the description of his chamber at Lausanne, "which instead of a companionable fire must be warmed by the dull invisible heat of a stove." Admirable writer!

His merits as a historian need not be discussed here. As a writer, he shows everywhere the influence of French, which had so strong a fascination for him that he composed in that language his first published work, and hesitated whether to employ it for his History. He learnt enormously from Voltaire, and his irony is that of France rather than of England. There is no period in history in which the Channel made so little of a division as in the third quarter of that century. English ideas were the fashion in France, English

liberty was cited as the model for Europe. Gibbon wrote hardly less for continental than for English scholars while his contemporary, David Hume, found himself more famous in Paris than in London.

Hume is another of the great writers who lie outside the scope of this book. The literary quality of his work, though it helped to spread the influence of his ideas, is not like that of Gibbon's; for if Gibbon were untrustworthy and superficial as a historian, we should still read his Autobiography, and perhaps also his History, for the splendour of its style, the lucidity of its thought, and the dignity of its narrative. Hume as a historian has been superseded though not discredited; his most important work, the Treatise of Human Nature, makes him a landmark in the history of philosophy -not of literature.

All these men stand on the eve of the great change which they half foresaw and wholly deprecated that shook Europe and altered in great measure the constitution of society. No such change is without its effects on literature, and we have to consider the beginnings of a new order both in poetry and in prose.

CHAPTER XIV.

BURNS.

We now have to consider the immense contribution made by Scotland to the literature of the English tongue from the middle of the eighteenth century onward. It is necessary first to understand that: whereas in Ireland and Wales up to that period the only true vernacular was the ancient Celtic tongue (Cymric in Wales, Gaelic in Ireland), there existed in Scotland two unrelated vernacular dialects; one, that of the Highlands, a Gaelic hardly distinguishable from the Irish, and called, indeed, the Erse; the other, that of the Lowlands, a dialect of English, which had early become stereotyped by literature. In the century which followed the death of Chaucer, King James I. of Scotland, educated in. captivity at Windsor, wrote verses in that speech of the Thames Valley which Chaucer had set to Romance rhythms; but he wrote also poems in the very different English that was spoken at his own court. Up till the reign of Elizabeth, Scotland produced far more poetry of importance than did the southern kingdom. William Dunbar is a writer who has some claim to be named with Villon. Under the James who first joined the thrones we

find literature at the Scotch court no longer vernacular; Drummond of Hawthornden rivals Spenser in his odes and sonnets. But among the country places the dialect literature survived, in ballad, song, and satire, written by peasant and noble, by farmers and schoolmasters, by earls' daughters and village ale-wives, till at last it flowered into the greatest peasant poet that the world has ever seen. There existed a Lowland Scots literature without break or cessation for at least four hundred years before Burns wrote. His literary ancestry was as old as that of Gray or Collins, but it was distinct and separate from theirs-in so far, at least, as he was a poet of the vernacular.

Side by side with this there existed in Scotland a great body of Gaelic literature, much of it comparatively recent, and closely analogous to the other vernacular. There were Jacobite songs in Gaelic as in Lowland Scots (or Lallan); there were love songs and drinking songs; and it is here that the Gaelic influence is most perceptible in the work of Burns and his forerunners. Music, which is of no tongue, was held in common by speakers of Gaelic and speakers of "Lallan," and the most famous Scottish songs are written to Gaelic airs. At the very time when Pope and his school had pinned English down to hard unelastic rhythms, Burns was writing verse which had the free music of wind and running water, as others had written it before him. The Flowers o' the Forest, written by a sister of Lord Minto's, has exactly the rhythm of a Gaelic song printed in Dr. Hyde's Love Songs of Connaught: it has also the Gaelic and not the English system of rhyme. But the most characteristic features of what may be called the classical literature of the Gaels have no reflection in Lowland Scots. The poetry produced in Ireland and Scotland, perhaps

seven or eight centuries ago, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, came into the knowledge of Europe through the medium of eighteenth-century English. Macpherson's adaptations from the Ossianic poems began to appear in 1760. They went through a score of editions in fifty years, being continually republished, and translated into many languages. His paraphrase, in itself of no great merit, and made from late and adulterated versions of the epic compositions, does not belong to the history of English literature, except in so far as its success proves the growing hunger for a poetry that should get back to primitive nature, and away wholly from the region of vers de société; and also in so far as it paved the way for Scott by stimulating curiosity about the Highland life and traditions.

By far more important, however, as a forerunner of Scott is Bishop Percy, who in 1765 published his Reliques of Ballad Poetry. The northern vernacular (for Lallan was spoken on both sides of the border) possessed an amazing wealth of stories set to rough but effective verse, commemorating duels and combats, raids and ridings, the lifting of brides and of cattle. There will be more to say of this in connection with Scott; but it must be remembered that Burns as well as Scott was nourished on these ballads, knew them by heart, collected them and emended them. And also it must be observed that twenty years before Burns published his own verses the attention of literary men had been attracted to the literary riches of the dialect in which he was to write. They were prepared to judge him by the standard of the literature to which he belonged, a literature untouched by the conventions of a drawing room.

His contemporary, William Blake, writing in English, was less fortunate. But it must be under

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