Grant me that, with a heart unyielding
to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary
fame.
That his critical and literary instincts were yet undeveloped there is
ample proof. Take his comment, at the age of nineteen, on the verses of
Leyden :--
Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye,
For that was a day
When we stood in our array
Like the lion's might at bay.
"Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with Mitchell consumes
almost a volume) he writes: "Read Shakespeare. If you have not, then I
desire you read it (_sic_) and tell me what you think of _him_," etc.
Elsewhere the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays" illustrates the
lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been previously travestied
in the more stilted passages of the letters of Burns. "Many of his
opinions are not to be adopted. How odd does it look to refer all the
modifications of national character to the influence of moral causes.
Might it not be asserted with some plausibility that even those which
he denominates moral causes originate from physical circumstances?" The
whole first volume of this somewhat overexpanded collection overflows
with ebullitions of bile, in comparison with which the misanthropy of
Byron's early romances seems philanthropy, e.g.--
How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this
world.
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