"
[145] The title-page of which our learned Marsh has cited for the
etymology of the word.
[146] In his Jesuits in North America.
LESSING[147]
When Burns's humor gave its last pathetic flicker in his "John, don't let
the awkward squad fire over me," was he thinking of actual
brother-volunteers, or of possible biographers? Did his words betray only
the rhythmic sensitiveness of poetic nerves, or were they a foreboding of
that helpless future, when the poet lies at the mercy of the plodder,--of
that bi-voluminous shape in which dulness overtakes and revenges itself
on genius at last? Certainly Burns has suffered as much as most
large-natured creatures from well-meaning efforts to account for him, to
explain him away, to bring him into harmony with those well-regulated
minds which, during a good part of the last century, found out a way,
through rhyme, to snatch a prosiness beyond the reach of prose. Nay, he
has been wronged also by that other want of true appreciation, which
deals in panegyric, and would put asunder those two things which God has
joined,--the poet and the man,--as if it were not the same rash
improvidence that was the happiness of the verse and the misfortune of
the gauger.
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