ritten to
intimate friends when one is not afraid of being himself, and can speak
freely. In sentiment they are candid and sincere, and in language
transparently unaffected. Whatever occurs to him as he writes goes down;
we have the thoughts of his heart at the time of writing, and see the
varying expressions of his face as he passes from grave to gay, from
lively to severe. Now he is tender, now indignant; now rattling along in
good-natured raillery without broadening into burlesque; now becoming
serious and pensively philosophic without a suggestion of mawkish
morality. For Burns, when he is himself, is always an artist; says his
say, and lets the moral take care of itself; and in his epistles he lets
himself go in a very revelry of artistic abandon. He does not think of
style--that fetich of barren minds--and style comes to him; for style is
a coquette that flies the suppliant wooer to kiss the feet of him who
worships a goddess; a submissive handmaiden, a wayward and moody
mistress. But along with delicacy of diction, force and felicity of
expression, pregnancy of phrase and pliancy of language, what knowledge
there is of men--the passions that sway, the impulses that prompt, the
motives that move them to action. Clearness of vision and accuracy of
observation are evidenced in their vividness of imagery; naturalness and
truthfulness--the first essential of all good writing--in their
convincing sincerity of sentiment. Wit and humour, play and sparkle of
fancy, satire genial or scathing, a boundless love of nature and all
created things, are harmoniously unified in the glowing imagination of
the poet, and welded into the perfect poem. Behind all is the
personality of the writer, captivating the reader as much by his
kindliness and sympathy as by his witchery of words. Others have
attempted poetic epistles, but none has touched familiar intercourse to
such fine issues; none has written with such natural grace or woven the
warp and woof of word and sentiment so cunningly into the web of poetry
as Robert Burns. Looseness of rhythm may be detected, excruciating
rhymes are not awanting, but all are forgiven and forgotten in the
enjoyment of the feast as a whole.

Besides the satires and epistles we have during this fertile period
poems as different in subject, sentiment, and treatment as _The Cotter's
Saturday Night_ and _The Jolly Beggars_; _Hallowe'en_ and _The Mountain
Daisy_; _The Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare Magg