e that has produced its great men.

And with a more especial propriety do we claim this justice in our
triumphal celebration of poets, who, like Burns, were led by the
character of their minds to derive the matter and impulse of their song,
in a stricter sense, from themselves. For they have laid bare to all
eyes many of their own weaknesses, at the side of their higher and purer
aspirations. Unreserved children of sincerity, by the very
open-heartedness which is one great cause of their commanding power, and
contagiously diffuses every zealous affection originating in their
nobility of nature--by this grown to excess, made negligent of
instinctive self-defence, and heedless of misconstruction, or overcome
by importunate and clinging temptations--to what charges have they not
been exposed from that proneness to disparaging judgments so common in
little minds! For such judgments are easy indeed to the very lowest
understandings, and regard things that are visible to eyes that may
seldom have commerced with things that are above. But they who know
Burns as we know him, know that by this sometimes unregulated and
unguarded sympathy with all appertaining to his kind, and especially to
his own order, he was enabled to receive into himself all modes of their
simple, but not undiversified life, so that his poetry murmurs their
loves and joys from a thousand fountains. And suppose--which was the
case--that this unguarded sympathy, this quick sensibility, and this
vivid capacity of happiness which the moment brings, and the frankness
of impulse, and the strength of desire, and the warmth of blood, which
have made him what he greatly is, which have been fire and music in his
song, and manhood, and courage, and endurance, and independence in his
life, have at times betrayed or overmastered him--to turn against him
all this self-painting and self-revealing, is it not ungrateful,
barbarous, inhuman? Can he be indeed a true lover of his kind, who would
record in judgment against such a man words that have escaped him in the
fervour of the pleading designed to uphold great causes dear to
humanity?--who would ignobly strike the self-disarmed?--scornfully
insult him who, kneeling at the Muses' confessional, whispers secrets
that take wings and fly abroad to the uttermost parts of the earth? Can
they be lovers of the people who do so? who find it in their hearts thus
to think, and speak, and write of Robert Burns?--He who has reconciled