eniable that much anger and distress is raised in many
quarters by the least attempt to state plainly what every one well
knows, of Burns's profligacy, and of the fatal consequences of his
marriage. And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary reasons. For,
first, there is, in our drunken land, a certain privilege extended to
drunkenness. In Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above
all when compared with any "irregularity between the sexes." The
selfishness of the one, so much more gross in essence, is so much less
immediately conspicuous in its results, that our demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy
smiles apologetically on its victims. It is often said--I have heard it
with these ears--that drunkenness "may lead to vice." Now I did not
think it at all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard; and I
was obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the too
frequent vanity and meanness of his relations to women. Hence, in the
eyes of many, my study was a step towards the demonstration of Burns's
radical badness.

But, second, there is a certain class, professors of that low morality
so greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you
must never represent an act that was virtuous in itself as attended by
any other consequences than a large family and fortune. To hint that
Burns's marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny the
moral law. Yet such is the fact. It was bravely done; but he had
presumed too far on his strength. One after another the lights of his
life went out, and he fell from circle to circle to the dishonoured
sickbed of the end. And surely, for any one that has a thing to call a
soul, he shines out tenfold more nobly in the failure of that frantic
effort to do right, than if he had turned on his heel with Worldly
Wiseman, married a congenial spouse, and lived orderly and died
reputably an old man. It is his chief title that he refrained from "the
wrong that amendeth wrong." But the common, trashy mind of our
generation is still aghast, like the Jews of old, at any word of an
unsuccessful virtue. Job has been written and read; the tower of Siloam
fell nineteen hundred years ago; yet we have still to desire a little
Christianity, or, failing that, a little even of that rude, old Norse
nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice alike go unrewarded, and was
yet not shaken in its faith.

WALT WHITMAN. This is a case of a second difficulty which lies
conti