a single man’. At times, however, Burns teams up his ‘Scottish Dialect’ with non-
dialect words, as in the fourth word in the first line of ‘To a Mouse’: ‘Wee, sleeket,
cowran, tim’rous beastie’. One of Burns’s models was James Beattie, not for his
Scoticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of
Speech and Writing, but for The Minstrel(1774). Burns, ‘The Simple Bard’, was a
professional minstrel who knew his art and his audience.nFurther reading
Chapman, R. W. (ed.),Boswell’s Life of Johnson(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). Gives
the age as well as the man.
Fairer, D. and C. Gerrard (eds),Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998).
Mack, M.,Alexander Pope: A Life(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1985).
Detailed literary biography.
Rogers, P. (ed.),The Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1978). A good short account.226 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790