ith authority about another man we must have fellow-feeling
and some common ground of experience with our subject. We may praise or
blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in
ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be
his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand
enter for us into the tissue of the man's character; those to which we
are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots,
exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands
to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that
we respect or virtues that we admire. David, king of Israel, would pass
a sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or David Hume. Now,
Principal Shairp's recent volume, although I believe no one will read it
without respect and interest, has this one capital defect--that there is
imperfect sympathy between the author and the subject, between the
critic and the personality under criticism. Hence an inorganic, if not
an incoherent, presentation of both the poems and the man. Of "Holy
Willie's Prayer," Principal Shairp remarks that "those who have loved
most what was best in Burns's poetry must have regretted that it was
ever written." To the "Jolly Beggars," so far as my memory serves me, he
refers but once; and then only to remark on the "strange, not to say
painful," circumstance that the same hand which wrote the "Cottar's
Saturday Night" should have stooped to write the "Jolly Beggars." The
"Saturday Night" may or may not be an admirable poem; but its
significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first
appears, when it is set beside the "Jolly Beggars." To take a man's work
piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to
avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is
displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken,
apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that
Burns, _teres atque rotundus_--a burly figure in literature, as, from
our present vantage of time, we have begun to see him. This, on the
other hand, is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary
clergyman, whom we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but
orderly and orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too often hurt
and disappointed by the behaviour of his