So in the line of the Scottish "makers" we place him, the inheritor of
the speech of Henryson and Dunbar, of the meters and modes of
Montgomery and the Sempills, Ramsay and Fergusson, the re-creator of
the perishing relics of the lost masters of popular song.
His relation to his English predecessors need not again be detailed,
so little of value did they contribute to the vital part of his work.
But some account should be taken of his connection with the English
literature of his own and the next generation.
The humanitarian movement was well under way before the appearance of
Burns, and the particular manifestations of it in, for example, the
poems of Cowper on animals, owed nothing to the influence of Burns.
But Cowper's hares never appealed to the popular heart with the force
of Burns's sheep and mice and dogs, and the tender familiarity and
wistful jocoseness of his poems to beasts have never been surpassed.
In writing these he was probably, consciously or unconsciously,
affected by the tendency of the time, as he was also in the democratic
brotherhood of _A Man's a Man for a' That_, but, in both cases, as we
have seen, part of the impulse, that part that made his utterance
reach his audience, was derived from his personal intercourse with his
farm stock and from his inborn conviction of the dignity of the
individual. His relations to these elements in the thought and feeling
of his day were, then, reciprocal: they strengthened certain traits in
his personality, and he passed them on to posterity, strengthened in
turn by his moving expression.
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