A BURNS CONCORDANCE.* So many foolish, ill-advised, or altogether unnecessary
books on Burns have been published, especially in Scotland, that it becomes a positive duty to give a hearty welcome to any work that is the outcome of the great Scotch cult of the last half- century, and is, at the same time, a labour of good sense and good taste as well as of love. Such a volume is this Concord- ance to Burns, which we have no hesitation in describing as the most important contribution that has been made to the class of literature to which it belongs for at least a quarter of a century. A book of the sort had, indeed, become a necessity. Its author, Mr. J. B. Reid, speaks of a portion of it as being "useful to those Scotsmen whose acquaintance with their native tongue has become vague and shadowy;" and he also endorses Mr. Ruskin's eulogy of that tongue as " the sweetest, richest, subtlest, most musical of all the living dialects of Europe." A positively pathetic interest attaches to both hope and eulogium. They indirectly convey the conviction that by the mass of modern Scotchmen, Barns must be studied very much as Goethe is studied, and that because the tongue which he used with so much effect has sunk from a language into a dialect. Mr. Ruskin's eloge is perhaps a little too sweeping; but the fact that here we have a large, closely printed, double- columned concordance of nearly six hundred pages deyoted to Burns alone, undoubtedly goes a long way to justify it. Burns is not generally accounted a voluminous writer, although, as the author of this work reminds us, there are six hundred distinct pieces in his Poems and Songs. This volume, how- ever, which claims to be not only a complete verbal but a com- plete phrase concordance, contains over 11,400 words and 52,000 quotations. Yet, although Mr. Reid has sought to do and has done the amplest justice to Burns, he has not attempted,
• A Complete Word and Phrase Concordance to the Poems and Songs of Hobert Burns, incorporating a Glossary of Scotch Words; With Notes, Index, and Appendix If Readings. Compiled and Edited by J. B. Reid, M.A. Glasgow : Kerr and Richardson. 1889.
like so many editors, to improve upon him. He has adopted as the text of the poems and songs from which he has quoted, that of the first editions which were prepared by the author himself. Then alterations and additions made by Burns's own hand are embodied in the work and explained in an appendix. " Titles " and " first lines " are given when pos- sible, as Burns himself gave them. Beautiful paper and clear though small type make this volume as much a work of art as it has obviously been of heart.
With a faultless edition of Burns and this Concordance, indeed, even an English student ought to have little difficulty in mastering as much of the Scotch dialect as he will find necessary with a view to understanding and enjoying its subtleties. For Mr. Reid's happy idea of making his book a phrase concordance enables one at a glance to see how Burns rang the changes on the words he used. It may even help to solve some disputed questions in philology. Take, for example, " wean," as the Scotch equivalent for "child," as it occurs in the famous and pathetic— "To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife."
The popular and generally accepted explanation of the word is that it is a contraction of "wee ane,"—i.e., little one. Johnson tells us that " in Scotland wee denotes small or little ; as a wee ane, a little one or child," and a line which Jamieson quotes from Ross's "Helenore,"-
"The name the wee ane got was Helenore,"
bears out this view. It has, however, been suggested that wean is derived from the Anglo-Saxon wen-an,—that it means, in fact, a child that has been weaned. Mr. Reid, of course, quotes all the lines from Burns in which the word occurs. One of them,-
" A smytrie o' wee duddie weans," may be said to give some countenance to the second of these theories of the derivation of the word, the more especially as another quotation given by Mr. Reid,—
" An' cleed her bairns, man, wife, an' wean,
In mourning weed,"
suggests a difference in significance between " bairn " and " wean." Burns, of course, would have had no scruple in heaping, and as a matter of fact did heap, diminutives on diminutives, when they appeared to aid lucidity or illustrate affection. But "wee," in "wee duddie weans," does neither. The probability, therefore, is that Burns used the word with- out troubling himself as to the question of its origin, which, therefore, is left open.
Mr. Reid's Concordance will, among other things, encourage the suspicion that Burns invented Scotch words to suit his pur- pose. Take, for example, the immortal and inimitable " tapetless, ramfeezl'd hizzie," which loses all its strength when translated into "heedless, exhausted girl." It is rather curious that Mr. Reid is unable to show that Burns used either of these two adjectives in any other line than that quoted. Jamieson, we find, makes out " tapetless" to be the equivalent of "tabetless," which, however, means " benumbed," or "destitute of strength." But surely this is, to say the least of it, far-fetched. Would Burns have brought two adjectives meaning practically the
same thing into such close juxtaposition P As for "ram- feezl'd," the Scotch lexicographer becomes hopelessly and amusingly bewildered, and learnedly and desparingly asks, as Jonathan Oldbuck himself might have done,—" Teut. ranvme, vectis, a lever, and futsel-en agitare, factitare, q. exhausted in working with a lever? or shall we rather trace it to ramme, aries ?" But these are only two proofs of how "wonders from the familiar start" in such a book as this Concordance to Burns.
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