do, make friends of them.

The Cult of Burns.

All the same, this disability weighs me down with a sense of hopeless
obtuseness when I consider the deportment of the average intelligent
Scot at a Burns banquet, or a Burns _conversazione_, or a Burns
festival, or the unveiling of a Burns statue, or the putting up of a
pillar on some spot made famous by Burns. All over the world--and all
under it, too, when their time comes--Scotsmen are preparing
after-dinner speeches about Burns. The great globe swings round out of
the sun into the dark; there is always midnight somewhere; and always
in this shifting region the eye of imagination sees orators
gesticulating over Burns; companies of heated exiles with crossed arms
shouting "Auld Lang Syne"; lesser groups--if haply they be
lesser--reposing under tables, still in honor of Burns. And as the
vast continents sweep "eastering out of the high shadow which reaches
beyond the moon," and as new nations, with _their_ cities and
villages, their mountains and seashores, rise up on the morning-side,
lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops,
wend or are carried out of action with the dawn.

Scott and Burns.

None but a churl would wish this enthusiasm abated. But why is it all
lavished on Burns? That is what gravels the Southron. Why Burns? Why
not Sir Walter? Had I the honor to be a fellow-countryman of Scott,
and had I command of the racial tom-tom, it seems to me that I would
tund upon it in honor of that great man until I dropped. To me, a
Southron, Scott is the most imaginative, and at the same time the
justest, writer of our language since Shakespeare died. To say this is
not to suggest that he is comparable with Shakespeare. Scott himself,
sensible as ever, wrote in his _Journal_, "The blockheads talk of my
being like Shakespeare--not fit to tie his brogues." "But it is also
true," said Mr. Swinburne, in his review of the _Journal_, "that if
there were or could be any man whom it would not be a monstrous
absurdity to compare with Shakespeare as a creator of men and inventor
of circumstance, that man could be none other than Scott." Greater
poems than his have been written; and, to my mind, one or two novels
better than his best. But when one considers the huge mass of his work,
and its quality in the mass; the vast range of his genius, and its
command over that range; who shall be compared with him?

These are the reflections which occur, som