Then it is amusing to read Dr Gregory’s critical letter to Burns, who must have required all his admiration for the great doctor to bear patiently the numerous suggestions which he showered upon him.
‘DEAR SIR,—I take the first leisure hour I could command, to thank you for your letter and the copy of verses enclosed in it. As there is real poetic merit, I mean both fancy and tenderness, and some happy expressions, in them, I think they well deserve that you should revise them carefully and polish them to the utmost. This I am sure you can do if you please, for you have great command both of expression and of rhymes; and you may judge, from the two last pieces of Mrs Hunter’s poetry that I gave you, how much correctness and high polish enhance the value of such compositions. As you desire it, I shall with great freedom give you my _most rigorous_ criticisms on your verses. I wish you would give me another edition of them, much amended, and I will send it to Mrs Hunter, who, I am sure, will have much pleasure in reading it. Pray give me likewise for myself, and her too, a copy (as much amended as you please) of the “Waterfowl on Loch Turit.”
‘The “Wounded Hare” is a pretty good subject, but the measure or stanza you have chosen for it is not a good one: it does not _flow_ well; and the rhyme of the fourth line is almost lost by its distance from the first, and the two interposed, close rhymes. If I were you I would put it into a different stanza yet.
‘Stanza 1.—The execrations in the first two lines are too strong or coarse, but they may pass. “Murder-aiming” is a bad compound epithet and not very intelligible. “Blood-stained” in Stanza III. line 4 has the same fault: _Bleeding_ bosom is infinitely better. You have accustomed yourself to such epithets and have no notion how stiff and quaint they appear to others and how incongruous with poetic fancy and tender sentiments. Suppose Pope had written “Why that bloodstained bosom gored” how would you have liked it? _Form_ is neither a poetic nor a dignified nor a plain common word: it is a mere sportsman’s word: unsuitable to pathetic or serious poetry.
“Mangled” is a coarse word. “Innocent,” in this sense, is a nursery word; but both may pass.