Cowper discovered that walking was beneficial. He conducts our eye through the
scene:Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain
Ofspacious meads with cattle sprinkled o’er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course,
Delighted. There, fast rooted in his bank
Stand, never overlook’d, our fav’rite elms
That screen the herdsman’s solitary hut;
While far beyond and overthwart the stream
That as with molten glass inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds ....The landscape includes cattle, ‘the herdsman’s solitary hut’, ‘hedge-row beauties
numberless, square tow’r, / Tall spire’ and ‘Groves, heaths, and smoking villages
remote’. Such English scenes are found in similar combinations in Ann Finch, Pope,
Thomson, Collins and Gray, but Cowper composes them best and converses most
sanely. He was admired by Jane Austen and by the painter John Constable (1776–
1837), and echoed by Wordsworth and Coleridge. He wrote one poem of absolute
despair, ‘The Castaway’.Robert Burns
During the 18th century writers came to the metropolis of Britain from the
provinces, and from Ireland and Scotland. The second President of the United
States, John Adams, came to England for a classical education. Edinburgh and
Dublin had their own Enlightenments, feeding their own national literatures, but
also making an impression on English literature through Edgeworth, Burns, Scott
and others. Scottish enlighteners were mostly academics who mostly wrote prose.
Poetry written in Scots was previously unknown in England, as Gaelic writing was
in Edinburgh.The Reformation and the Unions of crowns and parliaments had not
helped Scotland’s imaginative vernacular literature.
This came to English notice for the first time with Robert Burns (1759–1796),
the last of the pre-Romantics (p. 208). As the composer of songs and ballads,
Scotland’s national poet made an immediate impact on English poetry. On the title
page of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786), Burns presents
himselfas ‘The Simple Bard, unbroke by Rules of Art’. An Edinburgh reviewer
distilled this into ‘a heaven-taught ploughman’. Burns did plough a poor tenant
farm, but had been taught his letters, and the English Augustans, French and some
Latin, by a graduate employed by his father, also a poor tenant-farmer. Though
‘unbroke by rules of art’, he was well aware of them, writing in English until in his
twenties he discovered that the Scots he spoke had been revived as a literary medium
by Allan Ramsay and especially Robert Fergusson. His work furthered the ballad
tradition in English promoted by Percy’s Reliques (see p. 236), and helped
Wordsworth and Coleridge towards their Lyrical Ballads(1798).
Burns had intended this Kilmarnock publication to pay for his emigration to
Jamaica. His satires on Calvinism had given offence, and he and his pregnant Jean
Armour had had to do public penance in the kirk. But in Edinburgh, Henry
Mackenzie, author ofThe Man of Feeling(1771), commended these Scottish dialect
poems in The Lounger. The loungers toasted the ploughman poet, who drank in224 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790