in after years, (about 1815,) speaking to me of Mr. Roscoe's political writings, especially those which had connected his name with Burke, declared that he always felt of him in that relation, not so much as of a feeble man, but absolutely as of a Sporus, (that was his very expression,) or a man emasculated. Right or wrong in his views, he showed the most painful defect of good sense and prudence, in confronting his own understanding, so plain and homely, with the Machiavelian Briareus of a hundred arms - the Titan whom he found in Burke: all the advantages of a living antagonist over a dead one, could not compensate odds so fearful in original power.

It was a striking illustration of the impotence of mere literature against natural power and mother wit, that the only man who was considered indispensable in these parties, for giving life and impulse to their vivacity, was a tailor; and not, I was often assured, a person deriving a designation from the craft of those whose labors he supported as a capitalist, but one who drew his own honest daily bread from his own honest needle, except when he laid it aside for the benefit of drooping literati, who needed to be watered with his wit. Wit, perhaps, in a proper sense, he had not-it was rather drollery, and, sometimes, even buffoonery. These, in the lamentable absence of the tailor, could be furnished of an inferior quality by Mr. Shepherd, who (as may be imagined from this fact) had but little dignity in private life. I know not how far he might alter in these respects; but, certainly, at that time, (1801-2,) he was decidedly or could be a buffoon; and seemed even ambitious of the title, by courting notice for his grotesque manner and coarse stories, more than was altogether compatible with the pretensions of a scholar and a clergyman. I must have leave to think that such a man could not have emerged from

any great university, or from any but a sectarian training. Indeed, about Poggio himself there were circumstances which would have indisposed any regular clergyman of the Church of England or of the Scottish Kirk, to usher him into the literature of his country. With what coarseness and low buffoonery have I heard this Mr. Shepherd in those days run down the bishops then upon the bench, but especially those of any public pretensions or reputation, as Horsely and Porteus, and, in connection with them, the pious Mrs. Hannah More! Her he could not endure. Of this gentleman having said something disparaging, I am bound to go on and add, that I believe him to have been at least a truly upright man-talking often wildly, but incapable of doing a conscious wrong to any man, be his party what it might; and, in the midst of fun or even buffoonery, a real, and, upon occasion, a stern patriot. Mr. Canning and others he opposed to the teeth upon the Liverpool hustings; and would take no bribe, as others did, from literary feelings of sympathy, or (which is so hard for an amiable mind to resist) from personal applications of courtesy and respect. Amusing it is to look back upon any political work of Mr. Shepherd's, as upon his 'Tour to France' in 1815, and to know that the pale pink of his Radicalism was then accounted deep, deep scarlet.

Nothing can better serve to expound the general force of intellect amongst the Liverpool coterie than the quality of their poetry, and the general standard which they set up in poetry. Not that even in their errors, as regarded poetry, they were of a magnitude to establish any standard or authority in their own persons. Imitable or seducing there could be nothing in persons who wrote verses occasionally, and as a muggуor or by-labor, and were themselves the most timid of imitators. But to

me, who, in that year, 1801, already knew of a grand renovation of poetic power of a new birth in poetry, interesting not so much to England as to the human mind it was secretly amusing to contrast the little artificial usages of their petty traditional knack, with the natural forms of a divine art - the difference being pretty much as between an American lake, Ontario or Superior, and a carp pond or a tench preserve. Mr. Roscoe had just about this time published a translation from the Balia of Luigi Tansillo - a series of dullish lines, with the moral purpose of persuading young women to suckle their own children. The brilliant young Duchess of Devonshire, some half century ago, had, for a frolic a great lady's caprice - set a precedent in this way; against which, however, in that rank, medical men know that there is a good deal to be said ; and in ranks more extensive than those of the Duchess, it must be something of an Irish bull to suppose any general neglect of this duty, since, upon so large a scale, whence could come the vicarious nurses? There is, therefore, no great sense in the fundamental idea of the poem, because the abuse denounced cannot be large enough; but the prefatory sonnet, addressed to the translator's wife, as one at whose maternal breast six sons successive' had hung in infancy- this is about the one sole bold, natural thought, or natural expression of feeling, to which Mr. Roscoe had committed himself in verse. Everywhere else, the most timid and blind servility to the narrowest of conventional usages, conventional ways of viewing things, conventional forms of expression, marks the style. For example, Italy is always Italia, Scotland Scotia, France Gallia; so inveterately had the mind, in this school of feeling, been trained, alike in the highest things and in the lowest, to a horror of throwing itself

boldly upon the great realities of life: even names must be fictions for their taste. Yet what comparison between 'France, an Ode,' and 'Gallia, an Ode?'-Dr. Currie was so much occupied with his professional duties, that of him I saw but little. His edition of Burns was just then published, (I think in that very month,) and in everybody's hands. At that time, he was considered not unjust to the memory of the man, and (however constitutionally phlegmatic, or with little enthusiasm, at least in external show) not much below the mark in his appreciation of the poet.

So stood matters some twelve or fourteen years; after which period, a ‘craze arose on the subject of Burns, which allowed no voice to be heard but that of zealotry and violent partisanship. The first impulse to this arose out of an oblique collision between Lord Jeffrey and Mr. Wordsworth; the former having written a disparaging critique upon Burns's pretensions- a little, perhaps, too much colored by the fastidiousness of long practice in the world, but, in the main, speaking some plain truths on the quality of Burns's understanding, as expressed in his epistolary compositions. Upon which, in his celebrated letter to Mr. James Gray, the friend of Burns, himself a poet, and then a master in the High School of Edinburgh, Mr. Wordsworth commented with severity, proportioned rather to his personal resentments towards Lord Jeffrey than to the quantity of wrong inflicted upon Burns. Mr. Wordsworth's letter, in so far as it was a record of embittered feeling, might have perished; but, as it happened to embody some profound criticisms, applied to the art of biography, and especially to the delicate task of following a man of original genius through his personal infirmities or his constitutional aberrations - this fact, and its relation to Burns and the

author's name, have all combined to embalm it. Its momentary effect, in conjunction with Lord Jeffrey's article, was to revive the interest (which, for some time, had languished under the oppression of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron) in all that related to Burns. Fresh Lives appeared in a continued succession, until, upon the death of Lord Byron in 1824, Mr. Allan Cunningham, who had personally known Burns, so far as a boy could know a mature man, gave a new impulse to the interest, by an impressive paper, in which he contrasted the circumstances of Burns's death with those of Lord Byron's; and also the two funerals both of which, one altogether, and the other in part, Mr. Cunningham had personally witnessed. A man of genius, like Mr. Cunningham, throws a new quality of interest upon all which he touches; and having since brought fresh research and the illustrative power of the arts to bear upon the subject, and all this having gone on concurrently with the great modern revolution in literature that is, the great extension of a popular interest, through the astonishing reductions of price the result is, that Burns has, at length, become a national, and, therefore, in a certain sense, a privileged subject, which, in a perfect sense, he was not, until the controversial management of his reputation had irritated the public attention. Dr. Currie did not address the same alert condition of the public feeling, nor, by many hundred degrees, so diffused a condition of any feeling which might imperfectly exist, as a man must consciously address in these days, whether as the biographer or the critic of Burns. The lower-toned

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enthusiasm of the public was not of a quality to irritate any little enthusiasm which the worthy Doctor might have felt. The public of that day felt with regard to Burns. exactly as with regard to Bloomfield-not that the quality