cause they have never felt the force of temptation. What power could
tempt them? The tree may be parched and blistered in the heat of
noonday, but the parasitical fungus draining its sap remains cool--and
poisonous. So in the glow of sociability the Pharisee remains cold and
clammy; the fever of love leaves his blood at zero. How can such
anomalies understand a man of Burns's wild and passionate nature, or,
indeed, human nature at all? The broad fact remains, however much we may
deplore his sins and shortcomings, they are the sins and shortcomings of
a large-hearted, healthy, human being. Had he loved less his fellow men
and women, he might have been accounted a better man. After all, too, it
must be remembered that his failings have been consistently exaggerated.
Coleridge, in his habit of drawing nice distinctions, admits that Burns
was not a man of degraded genius, but a degraded man of genius. Burns
was neither the one nor the other. In spite of the occasional excesses
of his later years, he did not degenerate into drunkenness, nor was the
sense of his responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a man less
clear and acute in the last months of his life than it had ever been.
Had he lived a few years longer, we should have seen the man mellowed by
sorrow and suffering, braving life, not as he had done all along with
the passionate vehemence of undisciplined youth, but with the fortitude
and dignity of one who had learned that contentment and peace are gifts
the world cannot give, and, if he haply find them in his own heart,
which it cannot take away. That is the lesson we read in the closing
months of Burns's chequered career.

But it was not to be. His work was done. The message God had sent him
into the world to deliver he had delivered, imperfectly and with
faltering lips it may be, but a divine message all the same. And because
it is divine men still hear it gladly and believe.

Let all his failings and defects be acknowledged, his sins as a man and
his limitations as a poet, the want of continuity and purpose in his
work and life; but at the same time let his nobler qualities be weighed
against these, and the scale 'where the pure gold is, easily turns the
balance.' In the words of Angellier: 'Admiration grows in proportion as
we examine his qualities. When we think of his sincerity, of his
rectitude, of his kindness towards man and beast; of his scorn of all
that is base, his hatred of all knavery which in its