The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the
classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his
prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by its constant lapse
into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.
* * * * *
1. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence.
2. The Poems of Thomas Gray.
3. William Collins. Odes.
4. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets.
Edited by Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1878.
5. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged]. Henry Holt &
Co., 1878.
6. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe.
7. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones.
8. Tobias Smollett. Humphrey Clinker.
9. Lawrence Sterne. Tristram Shandy.
10. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and Deserted
Village.
11. William Cowper. The Task and John Gilpin. (Globe
Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1879.
12. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. (Globe
Edition.) London: Macmillan & Co., 1884.
CHAPTER VII.
FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT.
1789-1832.
The burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has
but one parallel in English literary history, namely, the somewhat
similar flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elizabeth
and the first two Stuart kings.
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