difficult from what he has left to form
any very definite image of the man. Although his poems are for the most
part occasional, founded upon actual circumstances, or written to relieve
him from the over-pressure of angry or melancholy moods, and although the
writer is by no means shy or indisposed to speak of himself, his
personality is not made clear to us. There is great gap of time between
him and the modern reader; and the mixture of gold and clay in the
products of his genius, the discrepancy of elements, beauty and
coarseness, Apollo's cheek, and the satyr's shaggy limbs, are explainable
partly from a want of harmony and completeness in himself, and partly
from the pressure of the half-barbaric time. His rudeness offends, his
narrowness astonishes. But then we must remember that our advantages in
these respects do not necessarily arise from our being of a purer and
nobler essence. We have these things by inheritance; they have been
transmitted to us along a line of ancestors. Five centuries share with
us the merit of the result. Modern delicacy of taste and intellectual
purity--although we hold them in possession, and may add to their sheen
before we hand them on to our children--are no more to be placed to our
personal credits than Dryden's satire, Pope's epigram, Marlborough's
battles, Burke's speeches, and the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo.
Intellectual delicacy has grown like our political constitution. The
English duke is not the creator of his own wealth, although in his
keeping it makes the earth around him a garden, and the walls of his
house bright with pictures. But our inability to conceive satisfactorily
of Dunbar does not arise from this alone. We have his works, but then
they are not supplemented by personal anecdote and letters, and the
reminiscences of contemporaries. Burns, for instance,--if limited to his
works for our knowledge of him,--would be a puzzling phenomenon. He was
in his poems quite as spoken as Dunbar, but then they describe so wide an
area, they appear so contradictory, they seem often to lead in opposite
directions. It is, to a large extent, through his letters that Burns is
known, through his short, careless, pithy sayings, which imbedded
themselves in the memories of his hearers, from the recollections of his
contemporaries and their expressed judgments, and the multiform
reverberations of fame lingering around such a man--these fill up
interstices between wor