Scotland/Scots > Life of Robert Burns

noBERT BURNS. 123
mouths but his own, a peculiarly offensive one:—
far removed from that of the favoured districts in
which the ancient minstrelsy appears, with rare
exceptions, to have been produced. Even in the
elder days, it seems to have been proverbial for its
coarseness ; * and the Covenanters were not likely
to mend it. The few poets f whom the West of
Scotland had produced in the old time, were all
men of high condition; and who, of course, used
the language, not of their own villages, but of
Holyrood. Their productions, moreover, in so
far as they have been produced, had nothing to do
with the peculiar character and feelings of the men
of the West. As Burns himself has said,—“ It is
somewhat singular, that in Lanark, Renfrew, Ayr,
&c., there is scarcely an old song or tune, which,
from the title, &c., can be guessed to belong to,
or be the production of, those counties. ”
The history of Scottish literature, from the
union of the crowns to that of the kingdoms,
has not yet been made the subject of any separate
work at all worthy of its importance; nay, how¬
ever much we are indebted to the learned la¬
bours of Pinkerton, Irving, and others, enough
of the general obscurity of which Warton com¬
plained still continues, to the no small discredit
of so accomplished a nation. But how miser¬
ably the literature of the country was affected
* Dunbar, among other sarcasms on his antagonist
Kennedy, says: —
“ I haif on me a pair of Lothiane hipps
Sail fairer luglis mak, and inair perfyte,
Than thou can blabber with thy Garrick lipps. ”—
f Such as Kennedy, Shaw, Montgomery, and, more
lately, Hamilton of Gilbertfield ;
“ Who bade the brakes of Airdrie long resound
The plaintive dirge that mourn’d his favourite hound.”