a moral portrait. Those
who wish to see a comment on his character, at once wise and tender,
should turn to Mr. Carlyle's famous essay on Burns.

What estimate is to be formed of Burns--not as a poet, but as a
man--is a question that will long be asked, and will be variously
answered, according to the principles men hold, and the temperament
they are of. Men of the world will regard him in one way, worshippers
of genius in another; and there are many whom the judgments of neither
of these will satisfy. One thing is plain to every one; it is the
contradiction between the noble gifts he had and the actual life he
lived, which make his career the painful tragedy it was. When,
however, we look more closely into the original outfit of the man, we
seem in some sort to see how this came to be.

Given a being born into the world with a noble nature, endowments (p. 189)
of head and heart beyond any of his time, wide-ranging sympathies,
intellectual force of the strongest man, sensibility as of the
tenderest woman, possessed also by a keen sense of right and wrong
which he had brought from a pure home--place all these high gifts on
the one side, and over against them a lower nature, fierce and
turbulent, filling him with wild passions which were hard to restrain
and fatal to indulge--and between these two opposing natures, a weak
and irresolute will, which could overhear the voice of conscience, but
had no strength to obey it; launch such a man on such a world as this,
and it is but too plain what the end will be. From earliest manhood
till the close, flesh and spirit were waging within him interminable
war, and who shall say which had the victory? Among his countrymen
there are many who are so captivated with his brilliant gifts and his
genial temperament, that they will not listen to any hint at the deep
defects which marred them. Some would even go so far as to claim
honour for him, not only as Scotland's greatest poet, but as one of
the best men she has produced. Those who thus try to canonize Burns
are no true friends to his memory. They do but challenge the
counter-verdict, and force men to recall facts which, if they cannot
forget, they would fain leave in silence. These moral defects it is
ours to know; it is not ours to judge him who had them.

While some would claim for Burns a niche among Scotland's saints,
others would give him rank as one of her religious teachers. This
claim, if not so absurd as the other, is h