their stay at Lochlea were not marked by much literary improvement in
his brother, we take it that the poet had been 'lying fallow' all those
years; and what a rich harvest do we have now! Here, indeed, was a
reward worth waiting for. To read over the names of the poems, songs,
and epistles written within such a short space of time amazes us. And
there is hardly a poem in the whole collection without a claim to
literary excellence. A month or two previous to the composition of his
first satire he had written what Gilbert calls his first poem, _The
Epistle to Davie_, 'a brother poet, lover, ploughman, and fiddler.' It
is worthy of notice that, in the opening lines of this poem--

'While winds frae aff Ben Lomond blaw,
And bar the doors wi' driving snaw,
And hing us ower the ingle'--

we see the poet and his surroundings, as he sets himself down to write.
He plunges, as Horace advises, in _medias res_, and we have the
atmosphere of the poem in the first phrase. This is Burns's usual way of
beginning his poems and epistles, as well as a great many of his songs.
The metre of this poem Burns has evidently taken from _The Cherry and
the Slae_, by Alexander Montgomery, which he must have read in Ramsay's
_Evergreen_. The stanza is rather complicated, although Burns, with his
extraordinary command and pliancy of language, uses it from the first
with masterly ease. But there is much more than mere jugglery of words
in the poem. Indeed, such is this poet's seeming simplicity of speech
that his masterly manipulation of metres always comes as an
afterthought. It never disturbs us in our first reading of the poem.
Gilbert's opinion of this poem is worth recording, the more especially
as he expressly tells us that the first idea of Robert's becoming an
author was started on this occasion. 'I thought it,' he says, 'at least
equal to, if not superior, to many of Allan Ramsay's epistles, and that
the merit of these and much other Scottish poetry seemed to consist
principally in the knack of the expression; but here there was a strain
of interesting sentiment, and the Scotticism of the language scarcely
seemed affected, but appeared to be the natural language of the poet.'
It startles us to hear Gilbert talking thus of the Scotticism, after
having heard so much of Robert Burns writing naturally in the speech of
his home and county. In this poem we have, at least, the first proof of
that graphic power in which Burns has ne