who would
otherwise have "died and given no sign," has taken courage, and
spoken out the thought within him, in verse or prose, not always
wisely and well, but in all cases, as it seems to us, in the belief
that he had a sort of divine right to speak and be heard, since Burns
had broken down the artificial ice-wall of centuries, and asserted,
by act as well as song, that "a man's a man for a' that." Almost
every volume of working men's poetry which we have read, seems to re-
echo poor Nicoll's spirited, though somewhat over-strained address to
the Scottish genius:

This is the natal day of him
Who, born in want and poverty,
Burst from his fetters and arose,
The freest of the free.

Arose to tell the watching earth
What lowly men could feel and do,
To show that mighty heaven-like souls
In cottage hamlets grew.

Burns! thou hast given us a name
To shield us from the taunts of scorn:
The plant that creeps amid the soil
A glorious flower has borne.

Before the proudest of the earth
We stand with an uplifted brow;
Like us, thou wast a toil-worn man,
And we are noble now!

The critic, looking calmly on, may indeed question whether this new
fashion of verse-writing among working men has been always conducive
to their own happiness. As for absolute success as poets, that was
not to be expected of one in a hundred, so that we must not be
disappointed if among the volumes of working men's poetry, of which
we give a list at the head of our article, only two should be found,
on perusal, to contain any writing of a very high order, although
these volumes form a very small portion of the verses which have been
written, during the last forty years, by men engaged in the rudest
and most monotonous toil. To every man so writing, the art,
doubtless, is an ennobling one. The habit of expressing thought in
verse not only indicates culture, but is a culture in itself of a
very high order. It teaches the writer to think tersely and
definitely; it evokes in him the humanising sense of grace and
melody, not merely by enticing him to study good models, but by the
very act of composition. It gives him a vent for sorrows, doubts,
and aspirations, which might otherwise fret and canker within,
breeding, as they too often do in the utterly dumb English peasant,
self-devouring meditation, dogged melancholy, and fierce fanaticism.
And if the effect of verse-writing had stopped there, all had been
well; b