Robert Burns was a little-known poet, living a life of hard labour as a farmer in Ayrshire, when he had his first collection printed in Kilmarnock in 1786. At this point he was reeling from a broken love affair, and was so discouraged by his life in Scotland that he was planning to emigrate to the West Indies. Publication of the poems was intended to raise funds for the journey. The reception of this edition, however, changed his plans by bringing him to the notice of the country’s literati, among them the novelist Henry Mackenzie, whom he met when he visited Edinburgh. Mackenzie wrote the following glowing review in his magazine, The Lounger, and in so doing established Burns’s fame. As a result of this piece, the list of subscribers to a new edition of his work, published by William Creech the following year, ran across thirty-eight pages.
I know not if I shall be accused of … enthusiasm and partiality when I introduce to the notice of my readers a poet of our own country, with whose writings I have lately become acquainted; but if I am not greatly deceived, I think I may safely pronounce him a genius of no ordinary rank. The person to whom I allude is Robert Burns, an Ayrshire ploughman, whose poems were some time ago published in a country town in the west of Scotland, with no other ambition, it would seem, than to circulate among the inhabitants of the country where he was born, to obtain a little fame from those who had heard of his talents. I hope I shall not be thought to assume too much, if I endeavour to place him in a higher point of view, to call for a verdict of his country on the merit of his works, and to claim for him those honours which their excellence appears to deserve …
One bar [his lowly origins] have opposed to his fame, the language in which the poems were written. Even in Scotland the provincial dialect which [Allan] Ramsay and he have used is now read with a difficulty which greatly damps the pleasure of the reader: in England it cannot be read at all without such a constant reference to a glossary as nearly to destroy the pleasure.
Some of his productions, however, especially those of the graver style, are almost English … [He has] a power of genius not less admirable in tracing the manners than in painting the passions or in drawing the scenery of nature. That intuitive glance with which a writer like Shakespeare discerns the characters of men … forms a sort of problem in the science of the mind, of which it is easier to see the truth than assign the cause. Though I am very far from meaning to compare our rustic bard with Shakespeare, yet whoever will read his lighter and more humorous poems … will perceive with what uncommon penetration and sagacity this Heaven-taught ploughman, from his humble and unlettered station, has looked on men and manners …
Burns possesses the spirit as well as the fancy of a poet. That honest pride and independence of soul which are sometimes the Muse’s only dower, break forth on every occasion in his works. It may be, then, that I shall wrong his feelings while I indulge my own in calling the attention of the public to his situation and circumstances. The condition, humble as it was, in which he found content and wooed the Muses, might not have been deemed uncomfortable; but grief and misfortunes have reached him there; and one or two of his poems hint, what I have learned from some of his countrymen, that he has been obliged to form the resolution of leaving his native land, to seek under a West Indian clime that shelter and support that Scotland has denied him. But I trust means may be found to prevent this resolution from taking place, and that I do my country no more than justice when I suppose her ready to stretch out her hand to cherish and retain this native poet … To repair the wrongs of suffering or neglected merit, to call forth genius from the obscurity in which it has pined indignant, and place it where it may profit and delight the world; these are exertions which give to wealth an enviable superiority, to greatness and to patronage a laudable pride.