we shall be enabled to make the requisite distinction. There are two points of view in which he was sufficiently versed in the scenes he describes to treat them luminously. On the grand and leading features of his history he appears to have profoundly meditated, until they presented themselves to his mind in the clearest and most distinct order. What may be termed the separate acts of the piece, are indeed exhibited in a masterly manner. As specimens we would adduce the preliminary survey of the Roman empire in its prosperity: likewise the manner in which the connection is traced between that empire and the new Persian; the various migrations of the Goths and Vandals, and especially those of the Huns. It is impossible to have read Gibbon, without obtaining an increased clearness in our view of the several grand changes of the civilized world, by means of which ancient and modern history are linked together. Again: by indefatigable study of such writers as describe the manners and customs of the several countries and ages, which constitute the varying scene of his history, he had become so intimately acquainted with the modes of thinking and acting peculiar to those times and countries, as to have almost attained the clearness of a contemporary author. He enters, and enables his reader to enter, not into the thoughts only, but into the very feelings of the different characters which he describes. A familiar acquaintance of the emperor Julian, for instance, could scarcely have described with greater precision whatever constitutes the chief interest of that important reign. But in what may more properly be called historical painting, he is not equally happy. Rarely does he present to us those affecting pictures in which a whole train of action seems to pass before our eyes. In this respect he is greatly inferior to his two northern rivals. Their histories are read with an interest which is quite independent on the desire of information. We are imperceptibly drawn along by the mere charm of the story; and, having once entered upon their works, cannot easily be persuaded to lay them aside. But Gibbon is read as a task; a pleasing task indeed, at times perhaps an engaging one, but still a task."

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Of the style of our author," says the same critic, "the prevalent feature is art. Not only is it highly laboured, but it exhibits marks of art and labour in its whole structure. Mr Gibbon's acknowledged character as a writer, among his friends, seems to have been, that there was no thought, however original or complicated, which he could not force to assume a decent verbal dress:

If you have thoughts and can't express them,
Gibbon will teach you how to dress them,'-

But he did not possess

was said of him by those who knew him well. what is justly considered as the perfection of art, the talent of concealing it. In all his works, and especially in his history, the traces of the tool are every where visible. He appears to have taken Tacitus for his model, and like that author, to have aimed continually at making his words say as much as possible. It is indeed astonishing, how he contrives to express the minutest shade of a thought, by an unusual collocation, or more emphatic use of common words; and what a multiplicity of views he has the art to combine in the same sentence. His vindication of himself against the misinterpretation of some of his phrases, gave him

an opportunity of pointing out in those particular cases, how very delicately they were poised. We may give as an instance the word accused, which, according to his own explanation, was purposely employed without addition, to signify that the martyr Nemesion might or might not be guilty of robbery. The bishop Eusebius presumed, on the authority of the centurion under whom the reputed delinquent served, that he was innocent; the Pagan magistrate who passed sentence upon him, presumed, as a Pagan, that he was guilty. One thing only was certain-he was accused. But Mr Gibbon's style, to be rightly and fully appreciated, ought to be studied. A single reading will seldom give us a thorough conception of all he means to convey. On a repeated perusal, when the whole connexion has become tolerably familiar to the mind, new light breaks in upon us; and we are surprised to find the entire thought, with all its appurtenances, much richer than we had at first apprehended."

Robert Burns.

BORN A. D. 1759.-DIED A. D. 1796.

ROBERT BURNS was born on the 25th day of January, 1759, in the parish of Alloway, a short distance from the town of Ayr in Scotland. He was of humble parentage, his father being a small farmer, who won his bread by the daily labour of his own hands. In his sixth year, Robert, the eldest child of the family, was sent to school, where he was taught to read and write, and became a good English scholar, though, to use his own words, "it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings." To these acquirements he afterwards added a knowledge of French, together with the elements of Latin and Geometry.

He early evinced a taste for reading, in which it was his good fortune to be encouraged by his parents, who, though poor and struggling hard to maintain their family, knew and appreciated the value of knowledge, and were nobly solicitous to bestow a decent education on their children. Among the books which our future poet had read before he attained his 17th year, he has himself enumerated the following: Salmond's and Guthrie's Geographical Grammar, The Spectator, Tooke's Pantheon, Locke's Essay on the Understanding, Stackhouse's History of the Bible, British Gardener's Directory, Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, Hervey's Meditations, Derham's Physico and AstroTheology, and several of our English poets. The latter were the decided favourites in this list. Blind Harry's rude metrical Life of Sir William Wallace, and a Miscellaneous Collection of Songs, which had come into his possession, formed his earliest poetical readings. Allan Ramsay's Poems, including his exquisite pastoral of the Gentle Shepherd,' and the poems of Robert Fergusson, The Seasons' of Thomson, Pope's works, and some of Shakspeare's plays, were all greedily and oft perused by him, before he had ever composed a single stanza. could not therefore be regarded as uneducated or illiterate; his mind was early stored with such knowledge as lay within his reach; he had as much learning, probably, as Shakspeare himself, to commence authorship upon; and better models than the immortal dramatist to

He

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form his ear and train his fancy, before he conceived the idea of rivalling Ramsay and Fergusson, the most popular of his own country's bards.' Robert was approaching the close of his sixteenth year, when he first "committed the sin of rhyme." The occasion of his first effort at poetry, was a juvenile attachment to "a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass." "I was not so presumptuous," he says, as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song, which was said to be composed by a small country laird's son on one of his father's maids, with whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he : for, excepting that he could shear sheep, and cast peats-his father living in the moorlands-he had no more scholar-craft than myself. Thus with me began my love and poetry." The production thus alluded to is the little ballad commencing

"Oh! once I loved a bonnie lass"

which Burns himself has characterized as " a very puerile and silly performance;" yet, it has been justly remarked by Mr Lockhart, it contains, here and there, lines of which he need hardly have been ashamed at any period of his life.

Long after the conception of his first youthful passion-which, he assures us, was as pure as a poet's first love should be-Robert Burns remained a youth of gentle and rather retiring habits. In 1781, we find him expressing himself, in a letter to his father, in the following correct and dignified strain of feeling and expression: "My health is nearly the same as when you were here, only my sleep is a little sounder, and on the whole I am rather better than otherwise, though I mend by very slow degrees. The weakness of my nerves has so debilitated my mind, that I dare neither review past wants, nor look forward into futurity; for the least anxiety or perturbation in my breast produces most unhappy effects on my whole frame. Sometimes, indeed, when for an hour or two my spirits are a little lightened, I glimmer a little into futurity; but my principal, and indeed my only pleasurable employment is looking backwards and forwards in a moral and religious way; I am quite transported at the thought, that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains, and uneasiness, and disquietudes of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it; and if I do not very much deceive myself, I could contentedly and gladly resign it.

The soul, uneasy, and confined at home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.'

It is for this reason I am more pleased with the 15th, 16th, and 17th verses of the 7th chapter of Revelation, than with any ten times as many

With the known extent of Burns' juvenile reading before us, we are at a loss to understand upon what principles Mr Carlyle, in his celebrated article on Lockhart's Life of Burns, in the 48th volume of the Edinburgh Review, should persist in representing him as entirely a self-taught genius,-who owed nothing to the existing literature of his country; but who sprung forward at a sudden bounce" from the deepest obscurity," and snatched the palm of poesy "without help, without instruction, without model, or with models only of the meanest sort.' This is not true; and, perhaps if it were, it would not greatly detract from the merits and fame of Burns.