CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Poe'ry of Robert Burns. Edited by William Ernest Henley and Thom is F. Henderson. Vol. II. "Posthumous Pieces."
(T. C. and E. C. Jack, Edinburgh.)—In one of Edward Fitzgerald's
letters he relates that when Tennyson as a young man went over Burns's ground in Dumfries he fell, by his own confession, into a passion of tears. "And A. T.," he adds, "not given to the melting mood at alL" A feeling similar in kind if not in degree may be acknowledged on the perusal of Burns's "Posthumous Pieces," garnered up with much critical care and with copious annotations in this volume. Some of these pieces are full of genius, and a few will be always regarded as among his most characteristic poems, hut the mass of them are probably of the class which the dying poet had in his mind when he expressed a fear that his idlest rhymes would be collected to the injury of his fame. And it must be admitted that what Matthew Arnold called the "poetical 'baggage " of a great poet is a serious impediment to his reputation. There are, we think, scores of lines here which, as poetry, are utterly worthless,—lines that served the purpose of the anoment, and were better to have died with it. It is the penalty -of greatness, and Burns's free and, in a sense, careless nature has made it more than commonly conspicuous in his case.
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