affairs--till which in some measure be compassed at mine own peril and
cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as many as are not
loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges that I can give
them."

The poem was published in 1667, so that for at least twenty-six years
the poet was utilizing all the available resources of civilization and
scholarship to make himself "more fit."

But we may cite against Macaulay's theory also a brief passage in the
essay on Burns by Thomas Carlyle--surely a prose-poet, if ever there
was one. Treating of the achievement of Burns in spite of his
crude surroundings, ignorance, and lack of most that distinguishes
civilization from that childlike simplicity of primaeval life
which Macaulay regards as the more favorable to developing poetical
temperament, Carlyle says of the ploughman-poet:

"Let it not be objected that he did little. He did much, if we
consider where and how. If the work performed was small, we must
remember that he had his very materials to discover; for the metal
he worked in lay hid under the desert moor, where no eye but his had
guessed its existence; and we may almost say, that with his own hand
he had to construct the tools for fashioning it. For he found himself
in deepest obscurity, without help, without instructions, without
model; or with models only of the meanest sort. An educated man
stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine,
filled with all the weapons and engines which man's skill has been
able to devise from the earliest time; and he works, accordingly, with
a strength borrowed from all past ages. How different is _his_ state
who stands on the outside of that storehouse, and feels that its gates