might have given different
results, even with a critic so warmly interested in their favour. The
great contemporary master of workmanship, and indeed of all literary
arts and technicalities, had not unnaturally dazzled a beginner. But it
is best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most often
overlooked.

BURNS. I have left the introductory sentences on Principal Shairp,
partly to explain my own paper, which was merely supplemental to his
amiable but imperfect book, partly because that book appears to me truly
misleading both as to the character and the genius of Burns. This seems
ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to blame; so good a Wordsworthian
was out of character upon that stage.

This half-apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except upon a
remark called forth by my study in the columns of a literary Review. The
exact terms in which that sheet disposed of Burns I cannot now recall;
but they were to this effect--that Burns was a bad man, the impure
vehicle of fine verses; and that this was the view to which all
criticism tended. Now I knew, for my own part, that it was with the
profoundest pity, but with a growing esteem, that I studied the man's
desperate efforts to do right; and the more I reflected, the stranger it
appeared to me that any thinking being should feel otherwise. The
complete letters shed, indeed, a light on the depths to which Burns had
sunk in his character of Don Juan, but they enhance in the same
proportion the hopeless nobility of his marrying Jean. That I ought to
have stated this more noisily I now see; but that any one should fail to
see it for himself is to me a thing both incomprehensible and worthy of
open scorn. If Burns, on the facts dealt with in this study, is to be
called a bad man, I question very much whether I or the writer in the
Review have ever encountered what it would be fair to call a good one.
All have some fault. The fault of each grinds down the hearts of those
about him, and--let us not blink the truth--hurries both him and them
into the grave. And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault,
as all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its
consequences, to gloss the matter over, with too polite biographers, is
to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring beacons on a perilous
seaboard; but to call him bad, with a self-righteous chuckle, is to be
talking in one's sleep with Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.

Yet it is und