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. The effect of the Reformation upon all forms of artistic
creation will be discussed when we come to speak particularly of the
history of Scottish song; for the moment it is sufficient to say that
the absorption in theological controversy was unfavorable to the
continuation of a poetical development. Under James VI, however, there
were a few writers who maintained the tradition, notably Alexander
Montgomery, Alexander Scott, and the Sempills. To the first of these
is to be credited the invention of the stanza called, from the poems
in which Montgomery used it, the stanza of _The Banks of Helicon_ or
of _The Cherry and the Slae_. It was imitated by some of Montgomery's
contemporaries, revived by Allan Ramsay, and thus came to Burns down a
line purely Scottish, as it never seems to have been used in any other
tongue. He first employed it in the _Epistle to Davie_, and it was
made by him the medium of some of his most characteristic ideas.

It's no in titles nor in rank:
It's no in wealth like Lon'on Bank,
To purchase peace and rest.
It's no in makin muckle, mair, [much, more]