To Robert Ainslie he wrote: ‘It is much to be a great character as a lawyer, but beyond comparison more to be a great character as a man.’
To Andrew Aiken, in his ‘Epistle to a Young Friend,’ he wrote:
Where you feel your honour grip,
Let that aye be your border.
In ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’ he expresses his faith in righteousness as a fundamental element in character, where he says:
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.
Burns had a sympathetic heart that overflowed with kindness for his fellow-men, and even for animals, domestic and wild. In a letter to the Rev. G. H. Baird in 1791 he said: ‘I am fain to do any good that occurs in my very limited power to a fellow-creature, just for the selfish purpose of clearing a little the vista of retrospection.’
It was the big heart of Burns that directed the writing of the first part of that sentence, and his modesty that led to the expression of the second part. The joy of remembering a good deed was never his chief reason for doing it. In a ‘Tragic Fragment’ he wrote:
With sincere though unavailing sighs
I view the helpless children of distress.
A number of stories have been preserved to prove that while Burns was strict and stern in dealing with smugglers, and others who made a practice of breaking the law by illegally selling strong drink without licence, he was tenderly kind and protective to poor women who had little stores of refreshments to sell to their friends on fair and market days.
Professor Gillespie related that he overheard Burns say to a poor woman of Thornhill one fair-day as she stood at her door: ‘Kate, are you mad? Don’t you know that the Supervisor and I will be in upon you in the course of forty minutes? Good-bye t’ye at present.’