as

to--

That glib-gabbit Highland baron
The Laird o' Graham,

and--

Erskine a spunkie Norlan billie,

--he has touched their characters as truly as if they had all been his
own familiars. But of his intuitive knowledge of men of all ranks,
there is no need to speak, for every line he writes attests it. Of his
fetches of moral wisdom something has already been said. He would not
have been a Scotchman, if he had not been a moralizer; but then his
moralizings are not platitudes, but truths winged with wit and wisdom.
He had, as we have seen, his limitations--his bias to overvalue one
order of qualities, and to disparage others. Some pleading of his own
cause and that of men of his own temperament, some disparagement of
the severer, less-impulsive virtues, it is easy to discern in him.
Yet, allowing all this, what flashes of moral insight, piercing to the
quick! what random sayings flung forth, that have become proverbs in
all lands--"mottoes of the heart"!

Such are-- (p. 199)

O wad some Power the giftie gie us,
To see oursel as ithers see us:
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion;

Or the much-quoted--

Facts are chiels that winna ding
And downa be disputed;

Or--

The heart ay's the part ay
That makes us right or wrang.

Who on the text, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast
a stone," ever preached such a sermon as Burns in his _Address to the
unco Guid_? and in his epistle of advice to a young friend, what
wisdom! what incisive aphorisms! In passages like these scattered
throughout his writings, and in some single poems, he has passed
beyond all bonds of place and nationality, and spoken home to the
universal human heart.

And here we may note that in that awakening to the sense of human
brotherhood, the oneness of human nature, which began towards the end
of last century, and which found utterance through Cowper first of the
English poets, there has been no voice in literature, then or since,
which has proclaimed it more tellingly than Burns. And then his
humanity was not confined to man, it overflowed to his lower
fellow-creatures. His lines about the pet ewe, the worn-out mare, the
field-mouse, the wounded hare, have long been household wo