Edinburgh, for the use of a unique and precious copy of the garland known as The Merry Muses of Caledonia and the set of chapbooks hereafter referred to as the Motherwell Collection; and to Mr. Walter Raleigh, Liverpool, and Mr. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, London, for assistance in tracing the life of Burns's favourite stave from its beginnings in Provence to its earliest known appearance in Scots verse. In the matter of notes and explanations, the Editors have done their best to restrict themselves to essentials, and to state their facts and theories as briefly as is consistent with exactness of effect. All the same, the sum of their commentary bulks formidably, to say the least; and the reason is not far to seek. Burns borrowed largely from his predecessors; he lived a hundred years ago; first and last he was what is called a local poet. Indeed, it is fair to say of him that he was the satirist and singer of a parish: so that even in his own time much of his verse, though it survives as verse of genius, was intelligible through all its niceties of meaning to his fellowparishioners alone. In these days, therefore, it has appeared the safer as well as the more serviceable course rather to err on the score of too much commentary than on that of not enough. Tis in much the same spirit that the Editors have compiled their Glossary. There are not a few Scots readers of Burns to whom that Glossary will seem full to excess. But the dialect he wrote is fading swiftly into the past (such curiosities of interpretation as 'broth' for 'broose,' as meal' for 'drammock,' are of late years not unknown); and it has seemed reasonable to assume that, to say nothing of most Englishmen, there are Scotsmen all the world over, who will not disclaim such help as is here afforded them, in the work of realising the full import of some words which, mayhap, they have forgotten, and of others which, mayhap, they never rightly knew. For the annotations on certain staves and sources of inspiration, their purpose is to emphasise the theory that Burns, for all his exhibition of some modern tendencies, was not the founder of a dynasty but the heir to a flourishing tradition and the last of an ancient line: that he is demonstrably the outcome of an environment, and not in any but the narrowest sense the unnatural birth of Poesy and Time which he is sometimes held to be. Being a great artist, he derives from a numerous ancestry; and, like all great artists, he is partly an effect of local and peculiar conditions and partly the product of immediate and remote forbears. Genius apart, in fact, he is ultimus Scotorum, the last expression of the old Scots world, and therewith the culmination of a school deep-rooted in the past, which, by producing such men as Dunbar and Scott and Alexander Montgomerie, as Ramsay and Fergusson and the nameless lyrists of the songbooks, made it possible for him to be. W. E. H. LONDON, January 1st, 1896. T. F. H. |