Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/164

458 interested attention what he had himself felt with keen emotions of pain or pleasure. You actually see what he describes; you more than sympathise with his joys; your bosom is inflamed with all his fire; your heart dies away within you, infected by the contagion of his despondency. He exalts, for a time, the genius of his reader to the elevation of his own; and, for the moment, confers upon him all the powers of a poet. Quotations were endless; but any person of discernment, taste, and feeling, who shall carefully read over Burns' book, will not fail to discover, in its every page, abundance of those sentiments and images to which this observation relates;—it is originality of genius, it is keenness of perception, it is delicacy of passion, it is general vigour and impetuosity of the whole mind, by which such effects are produced. Others have sung, in the same Scottish dialect, and in familiar rhymes, many of the same topics which are celebrated by Burns; but what, with Burns, pleases or fascinates, in the hands of others, only disgusts by its deformity, or excites contempt by its meanness and uninteresting simplicity.

A third quality which the life and the writings of Burns show to have belonged to his character, was a quick and correct discernment of the distinction between right and wrong—between truth and falsehood; and this, accompanied with a passionate preference of whatever was right and true, with an indignant abhorrence of whatever was false and morally wrong. It is true that he did not always steadily distinguish and eschew the evils of drunkenness and licentious love; it is true that these, at times, seem to obtain even the approbation of his muse; but there remains in his works enough to show, that his cooler reason, and all his better feelings, earnestly rejected those gay vices which he could sometimes, unhappily, allow himself to practise, and sometimes recommend to others, by the charms which his imagination lent them. What was it but the clear and ardent discrimination of justice from injustice, which inspired that indignation with which his heart often burned, when he saw those exalted by fortune, who were not exalted by their merits? His Cottar's Saturday Night, and all his grave poems, breathe a rich vein of the most amiable, yet manly, and even delicately correct morality. In his pieces of satire, and of lighter humour, it is still upon the accurate and passionate discernment of falsehood, and of moral turpitude, that his ridicule turns. Other poets are often as remarkable for the incorrectness, or even the absurdity of their general truths, as for interesting- sublimity, or tenderness of sentiment, or for picturesque splendour of imagery: Burns is not less happy in teaching general truths, than in that display of sentiment and imagery, which more peculiarly belongs to the province of the poet. Burns's morality deserves this high praise, that it is not a system merely of discretion; it is not founded upon any scheme of superstition, but seems to have always its source, and the test by which it is to be tried, in the most diffusive benevolence, and in a regard for the universal good.

The only other leading feature of character that appears to be strikingly displayed in the life and writings of Burns, is a lofty-minded consciousness of his own talents and merits. Hence the fierce contemptuous asperity of his satire; the sullen and gloomy dignity of his complaints, addressed, not so much to alarm the soul of pity, as to reproach injustice, and to make fortunate baseness shrink abashed ; that general gravity and elevation of his sentiments, which admits no humbly insinuating sportiveness of wit, which scorns all compromise between the right and the expedient, which decides, with the authoritative voice of a judge, from whom there is no appeal, upon characters, principles, and events, whenever they present themselves to notice. From his works, as from his conversation and manners, pride seems to have excluded the effusions of vanity. In the com-