Dr. Johnson, as are not a few men who have no pretensions to genius.
The accomplishment is only a marvel to--well, I need not be
particular about the kind of person to whom it is a marvel!

Here, in fairness, the reader should be asked to consider an eloquent
passage of comparison between the knowledge of Burns and of Will,
quoted by Mr. Greenwood {97b} from Mr. Morgan. {97c}

Genius, says Mr. Morgan, "did not guide Burns's untaught pen to write
of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus." No! that was not Burns's
lay; nor would he have found a public had he emulated the
contemporary St. Andrews professor, Mr. Wilkie, who wrote The
Epigoniad, and sang of Cadmeian Thebes, to the delight of David Hume,
his friend. The public of 1780-90 did not want new epics of heroic
Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature accessible to Burns full
of the mediaeval legends of Troy and Athens. But the popular
literature accessible to Will was full of the mediaeval legends of
Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, NOT of Homer, Will made his
market. Egypt he knew only in the new English version of Plutarch's
Lives; of Homer, he (or the author of Troilus and Cressida) used only
Iliad VII., in Chapman's new translation (1598). For the rest he had
Lydgate (perhaps), and, certainly, Caxton's Destruction of Troy,
still reprinted as a POPULAR book as late as 1713. Will did not, as
Mr. Morgan says, "reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations and
manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand
years before he had been begotten. . . " He bestowed the manners of
mediaeval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks. He
accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke. He gave Scotland cannon
three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards.
Look at his notion of "the very manners" of early post-Roman Britain