For love, or for celebrating the effects of whisky,
English is immeasurably inferior. The free use of the diminutive
termination in _ie_ or _y_--a termination capable of expressing
endearment, familiarity, ridicule, and contempt as well as mere
smallness--not only has considerable effect in emotional shading, but
contributes to the liquidness of the verse by lessening the number of
consonantal endings that make English seem harsh and abrupt to many
foreign ears. Moreover, the very indeterminateness of the dialect, the
possibility of using varying degrees of "broadness," increased the
facility of rhyming, and added notably to the ease and spontaneity of
composition. Thus in Scots Burns was not only more at home, but had a
medium in some respects more plastic than English.
Language, however, was not the only element in his inheritance which
helped to determine the nature and quality of Burns's production. He
was extremely sensitive to suggestion from his predecessors, and
frankly avowed his obligations to them, so that to estimate his
originality it is necessary to know something of the men at whose
flame he kindled.
As the Northern dialect of English was, before the Reformation, in a
fair way to become an independent national speech, so literature north
of the Tweed had promise of a development, not indeed independent, but
distinct. Of the writers of the Middle Scots period, Henryson and
Dunbar, Douglas and Lindesay, Burns, it is true, knew little; and the
tradition that they founded underwent in the latter part of the
sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries an experience in
many respects parallel to that which has been described in the matter
of language.
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