ion at home." For his worshippers too a most
questionable thing! If doing Hero-worship well or badly be the test of
vital wellbeing or illbeing to a generation, can we say that _these_
generations are very first-rate?--And yet our heroic Men of Letters do
teach, govern, are kings, priests, or what you like to call them;
intrinsically there is no preventing it by any means whatever. The
world _has_ to obey him who thinks and sees in the world. The world
can alter the manner of that; can either have it as blessed continuous
summer sunshine, or as unblessed black thunder and tornado,--with
unspeakable difference of profit for the world! The manner of it is
very alterable; the matter and fact of it is not alterable by any
power under the sky. Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can
take its choice. Not whether we call an Odin god, prophet, priest, or
what we call him; but whether we believe the word he tells us: there
it all lies. If it be a true word, we shall have to believe it;
believing it, we shall have to do it. What _name_ or welcome we give
him or it, is a point that concerns ourselves mainly. _It_, the new
Truth, new deeper revealing of the Secret of this Universe, is verily
of the nature of a message from on high; and must and will have itself
obeyed.--

My last remark is on that notablest phasis of Burns's history,--his
visit to Edinburgh. Often it seems to me as if his demeanour there
were the highest proof he gave of what a fund of worth and genuine
manhood was in him. If we think of it, few heavier burdens could be
laid on the strength of a man. So sudden; all common _Lionism_, which
ruins innumerable men, was as nothing to this. It is as if Napoleon
had been made a King of, not gradually, but at once from the Artillery
Lieutenancy in the Regiment La Fere. Burns, still only in his
twenty-seventh year, is no longer even a ploughman; he is flying to
the West Indies to escape disgrace and a jail. This month he is a
ruined peasant, his wages seven pounds a year, and these gone from
him: next month he is in the blaze of rank and beauty, handing down
jewelled Duchesses to dinner; the cynosure of all eyes! Adversity is
sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity,
there are a hundred that will stand adversity. I admire much the way
in which Burns met all this. Perhaps no man one could point out, was
ever so sorely tried, and so little forgot himself. Tranquil,
unastonished; not abash