an may best hope to live in the memory of man, is there
not something unnatural, something monstrous, in seeking to eternize
here below, that of which the proper doom is obscurity and oblivion? How
beneficent thus becomes the power of example! The good that men do then
indeed "lives after them"--all that was ethereal in their being alone
survives--and thus ought our cherished memories of our best men--and
Burns was among our best--to be invested with all consistent
excellences; for far better may their virtues instruct us by the love
which they inspire, than ever could their vices by aversion.

To dwell on the goodnesses of the great shows that we are at least
lovers of virtue--that we may ourselves be aspiring to reach her serene
abodes. But to dwell on their faults, and still more to ransack that we
may record them, _that_ is the low industry of envy, which, grown into a
habit, becomes malice, at once hardening and embittering the heart.
Such, beyond all doubt, in the case of our great poet, was the source of
many "a malignant truth and lie," fondly penned, and carefully corrected
for the press, by a class of calumniators that may never be extinct;
for, by very antipathy of nature, the mean hate the magnanimous, the
groveling them who soar. And thus, for many a year, we heard "souls
ignoble born to be forgot" vehemently expostulating with some puny
phantom of their own heated fancy, as if _it_ were the majestic shade of
Burns evoked from his Mausoleum for contumely and insult.

Often, too, have we been told by persons somewhat presumptuously
assuming the office of our instructors, to beware how we suffer our
admiration of genius to seduce us from our reverence of virtue. Never
cease to remember--has been still their cry--how far superior is moral to
intellectual worth. Nay, they have told us that they are not akin in
nature. But akin they are; and grief and pity 'tis that ever they should
be disunited. But mark in what a hateful, because hypocritical spirit,
such advices as these have not seldom been proffered, till salutary
truths were perverted by misapplication into pernicious falsehoods. For
these malignant counsellors sought not to elevate virtue, but to degrade
genius; and never in any other instance have they stood forth more
glaringly self-convicted of the most wretched ignorance of the nature
both of the one and the other, than in their wilful blindness to so many
of the noblest attributes of humanity in the