Poetical Works of Robert Burns. With Life and Notes by
William Wallace, LL.D. (W. and R. Chambers. 35. 8d.)—No one is better qualified to annotate in an effective and illuminating way the poems of Burns than Dr. Wallace. It is clear that he knows everything that there is to be known about the poet, his surroundings, his friends, his antagonists, and the general circum- stances of his life. He gives the reader the origin of the songs, &c., for Burns would often take the fragment of an old ballad and shape it into something of poetical form. If any one is mentioned—as, for instance, in " The Kirk's Alarm" the poet mentions a number of people—Dr. Wallace knows all about him or her. This and the poem which precedes it, "To James Tennant of Glenconner," occupy something less than seven pages, but the annotation to them implies a most industrious inquiry into the history, private and public, of a number of obscure persons. Then the ignorance of the Southern reader, deplorable as it is, is indulged with a running glossary, infinitely more convenient, as every one will allow, than the customary addition in dictionary form. The "Biographical Sketch" is, to our mind, scarcely so satisfactory. A Scottish moralist always seems to fall into a certain confusion when ho has to write about Burns. On p. 10 we read that Burns, who had married Jean Armour two years before, "committed a breach of conjugal fidelity," and twenty lines further on we are told that "it goes without saying that he was the most careful and affectionate of fathers."— With this may be mentioned Goldsmith's Poetical Works, Edited by Austin Dobson (H. Frowde, 3s. 61.), a revised and enlarged reprint of the edition of 1838. It now contains all the verse that Goldsmith wrote ; and some fresh notes have been added by the editor.
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