the sustained creative power and knowledge of life and character which make
the great dramatist or narrative poet than the bird's song is to be
compared with an opera of Wagner. But such comparisons need not be pressed;
and the song of bird or poet appeals instantly to every normal hearer,
while the drama or narrative poem requires at least some special
accessories and training. Burns' significant production, also, is not
altogether limited to songs. 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' (in Spenser's
stanza) is one of the perfect descriptive poems of lyrical sentiment; and
some of Burns' meditative poems and poetical epistles to acquaintances are
delightful in a free-and-easy fashion. The exuberant power in the religious
satires and the narrative 'Tam o' Shanter' is undeniable, but they belong
to a lower order of work.

Many of Burns' poems are in the Lowland Scots dialect; a few are wholly in
ordinary English; and some combine the two idioms. It is an interesting
question whether Burns wins distinctly greater success in one than in the
other. In spite of his prevailing literary honesty, it may be observed, his
English shows some slight traces of the effort to imitate Pope and the
feeling that the pseudo-classical style with its elegance was really the
highest--a feeling which renders some of his letters painfully affected.
[Footnote: For the sake of brevity the sternly realistic poet George Crabbe
is here omitted.]

THE NOVEL. We have traced the literary production of the eighteenth century
in many different forms, but it still remains to speak of one of the most
important, the novel, which in the modern meaning of the word had its
origin not long before 1750. Springing at that time into apparently sudden
popularity, it replaced the drama as the predominant form of literature and
has continued such ever since. The reasons are not hard to discover. The
drama is naturally the most popular literary form in periods like the