Note 77 — Front matter (continued 2)
Reading edition
Perhaps Carlyle is misled in his estimate of Burns by his own high conception of the vocation of the man of letters. The profession of literature is hardly older than our own century; Dr. Johnson is really the first example of it. For a man, unsupported by a patron, to make poetry his means of subsistence, was almost unknown in the eighteenth century. Burns was too proud to depend on a patron, and his refusal to accept money for his contributions to Johnson's Museum and Thomson's Scottish Airs was only in accord with the ideas of his time; besides, he feared that such a proceeding would injure his spontaneity. To receive pay for a volume of poems, originally written without reference to publication, was quite a different matter.
Carlyle, in his lecture on The Hero as Man of Letters, in Heroes and Hero-Worship, develops his own point of view more fully.