this pathetic and awful
subject, the poet himself, pleading for those who have transgressed!

One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving _why_ they do it,
And just as lamely can ye mark
How far, perhaps, they rue it.

Who made the heart, 'tis _he_ alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord--its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias.

Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's _resisted_.

How happened it that the recollection of this affecting passage did not
check so amiable a man as Dr. Currie, while he was revealing to the
world the infirmities of its author? He must have known enough of human
nature to be assured that men would be eager to sit in judgment, and
pronounce _decidedly_ upon the guilt or innocence of Burns by his
testimony; nay, that there were multitudes whose main interest in the
allegations would be derived from the incitements which they found
therein to undertake this presumptuous office. And where lies the
collateral benefit, or what ultimate advantage can be expected, to
counteract the injury that the many are thus tempted to do to their own
minds; and to compensate the sorrow which must be fixed in the hearts of
the considerate few, by language that proclaims so much, and provokes
conjectures as unfavourable as imagination can furnish? Here, said I,
being moved beyond what it would become me to express, here is a
revolting account of a man of exquisite genius, and confessedly of many
high moral qualities, sunk into the lowest depths of vice and misery!
But the painful story, notwithstanding its minuteness, is
incomplete,--in essentials it is deficient; so that the most attentive
and sagacious reader cannot explain how a mind, so well established by
knowledge, fell--and continued to fall, without power to prevent or
retard its own ruin.

Would a bosom friend of the author, his counsellor and confessor, have
told such things, if true, as this book contains? and who, but one
possessed of the intimate knowledge which none but a bosom friend can
acquire, could have been justified in making these avowals? Such a one,
himself a pure spirit, having accompanied, as it were, upon wings, the
pilgrim along the sorrowful road which he trod on foot; such a one,
neither hurried down by its slippery descents, nor entangled among its
thorns, nor perplexed by its winding