e weapon from their hands, no force can wrench the
worship from their hearts. They may not be conversant with our written
annals; but in our oral traditions they are familiar with historic
truths--grand truths conceived according to the People's idea of their
own national mind, as their hearts have kindled in imagination of heroic
or holy men. Imaginary but real--for we all believe that men as good, as
wise, as brave, have been amongst us as ever fancy fabled for a people's
reverence. What manner of men have been their darlings? It would be hard
to say; for their love is not exclusive--it is comprehensive. In the
national memory live for ever characters how widely different!--with all
the shades, fainter or darker, of human infirmity! For theirs is not the
sickly taste that craves for perfection where no frailties are. They do
not demand in one and the same personage inconsistent virtues. But they
do demand sincerity, and integrity, and resolution, and independence,
and an open front, and an eye that fears not to look in the face of
clay! And have not the grave and thoughtful Scottish people always
regarded with more especial affection those who have struggled with
adversity--who have been tried by temptations from without or from
within--now triumphant, now overcome--but, alike in victory or defeat,
testifying by their conduct that they were animated by no other desire
so steadily as by love of their country and its people's good? Not those
who have been favourites of fortune, even though worthy of the smiles in
which they basked; but those who rose superior to fortune, who could not
frown them down. Nor have they withheld their homage from the
unfortunate in this world of chance and change, if, in abasement of
condition, by doing its duties they upheld the dignity of their own
nature, and looked round them on their honest brethren in poverty with
pride.

And how will such a people receive a great National Poet? How did they
receive Burns? With instant exultation. At once, they knew of
themselves, before critics and philosophers had time to tell them, that
a great Genius of their own had risen, and they felt a sudden charm
diffused over their daily life. By an inexplicable law, humour and
pathos are dependent on the same constitution of mind; and in his Poems
they found the very soul of mirth, the very soul of sadness, as they
thought it good with him to be merry, or to remember with him, "that man
was made to mourn."