is sometimes its only consoling attribute, the dignity
of reserve. We know of no more unsavory calling than this, unless it be
that of the Egyptian dealers in mummy, peddling out their grandfathers
to be ground into pigment. Obsequious to the last moment, the jackal
makes haste to fill his belly from the ribs of his late lion almost
before he is cold.

Mr. Taylor is too manly and well-bred to be guilty of any indiscretions,
much more of any indecencies. He let Haydon tell his own story, nor
assumed the function of a judge. And wisely, as we think; for, commonly,
when men take it upon themselves uncalled, their inability to conceive
the special weakness that is not theirs, (and which, perhaps, was but
the negative of a strength equally alien to them.) their humanly narrow
and often professionally back-attic view of character and circumstance,
their easy after-dinner superiority to what was perhaps a loathing
compromise with famine and the jail, fit them rather for the office of
_advocatus diaboli_ than of the justice which must be all-seeing that it
may be charitable. It is so hard to see that a sin is sometimes but a
thwarted and misdirected virtue! When Burns sighed that "the light that
led astray was light from Heaven," he was but unconsciously repeating
what a poet who of all men least needed the apology had said centuries
before.

We do not admit, that, because a man has published a volume or a
picture, he has published himself, excommunicated his soul from the
sanctuary of privacy, and made his life as common as a tavern-threshold
to every blockhead in the parish,--or that any Pharisee who kept
carefully to windward of his virtues, out of the way of infection, has
thereby earned the right to mismoralize his failings after he is dumbly
defenceless. The moral compasses that are too short for the aberration
may be, must be, unequal to the orbit. We would not deny that Burns was
a chamberer and a drunkard because he was a great poet; but we would not
admit that whiskey and wenches made him any the less the most richly
endowed genius of his century, with just title to the love and
admiration of men. It is not for us to decide whether he, who, by
doubling the suggestive and associative power of any thought, fancy,
feeling, or natural object, has so far added permanently to the sum of
human happiness, is not as sure of a welcome and a well-done from the
Infinite Fatherliness as he that has turned an honest penny by prin