The errors of Burns were visited upon him severely in his day; they stand recorded against him; no man can plead his example, for he condemned himself, and the consequences of his aberrations stand warningly side by side with the deeds themselves; but who is he that, with all the perfections of a monotonous propriety, shall confer the same benefits on his country and on his fellow-men? There was in the nature of Burns a manliness, a contempt of every thing selfish and mean, a contempt of all distinctions not based on nature, a hatred of tyranny, a withering scorn of hypocrisy, which, had he not possessed the brilliant genius that he did, would, among his cotemporaries, have diffused that tone of honest uprightness and justness of thinking which are the truest safeguards of a country's liberties and honor, and would have stamped him as a remarkable man. But all these qualities were but the accompaniments of a genius the most brilliant, the wonders and delights of which stand written, as it were, in lightning forever. Besides the irresistible contagion of his merriment, the flashes of wit, the tenderness of his sentiment, the wild laughter of his satiric scorn of cant, and priestcraft, and self-righteousness, the ardor of his patriotism, the gayety of his social songs, there is a tone in his graver writing which breathes over the hearts of his countrymen, and of all the world, the highest and most dignifying feeling that ever hallowed the heart of man.
With Burns, to be a man is the grand distinction. All other distinctions are but the clothes which wrap the figure—the figure itself is the real thing. To be a man, in his eye, was to be the most glorious thing that we have any conception of on this side of heaven; to be an honest man was to be "the noblest work of God!" That was the great sentiment which animated him, and made him come forth from between the stilts of his plow, from his barn or his byre, into the presence of wealth and title, with a calm dignity and a proud bearing which astonished the artificial creatures of society. Titles, carriages, gay garments, great houses, what are they but the things which the man had gathered about him for his pride or his comfort? It was for the man that they were created and gathered together. Without the man they were nothing, had no value, could have no existence. Without that solid, and central, and sentient monarch, titles are but air, gay clothes but the furniture of a Jew's shop, great houses but empty, useless shells, carriages no better than wheel-barrows. From the man they derived all they were or counted for; and Burns felt that he and his poorest brother of the spade, and poorest sister of the spindle, were as entirely and essentially that as the king upon his throne. The king upon his throne! He was set there and arrayed in all his pageantry, and armed with all his power, solely for the man and by the man. In the man and his inner life, the heart, the soul, and the sentiment—that wondrous mystery which, prisoned in flesh and chained by matter to one corner of the limitless universe, yet is endowed with power to range through eternity—to plunge down amid innumerable worlds and their swarming life—to soar up and worship at the foot-stool of the Framer and Upholder of suns and systems, the Father of all being—in him the poet recognized the only monarch of this nether world. For him, not for lords, or millionnaires, or mitered priests, but for him was this august world created. For him were its lands and waters spread abroad; for him the seasons set forward in the harmony of their progress; for him were empires and cities framed, and all the comforts of life, and the precious flowers of love and intellect breathed into the common air, and shed into the common heart. That was the feeling of Robert Burns, which made him tread down all other distinctions as he did the thistles of his own fields. That was the doctrine which he was as surely created and sent forth to preach, as Jesus Christ was to promulgate that glorious Gospel whose especial mission he declared was to the poor. Robert Burns was the apostle of the dignity of man—man, in his own proper nature, standing calmly and invincibly above every artful distinction which sought to thrust him from his place in God's heritage, and set over him the selfish and the base. When contemplating such delusive distinctions, the winged words,
"A man's a man for a' that!"
burst like a lightning flash from the poet's bosom, and became the eternal watchword of self-respecting humanity.
"The king can make a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and a' that;
The rank is but the guinea stamp,
A man's a man for a' that!"
Brave words! glorious truth! The soul of poetry and the whole science of social philosophy compressed into a single stanza, to serve as the stay and comfort of millions of hearts in every moment when most needed.
The pre-eminent merit of Burns, independent of his beauties as a fine poet, is the vigorous inculcation of these sentiments of a just self-estimation into the people. To teach them to regard themselves as objects of worth from their own human nature and destiny, irrespective of the mere mode by which they live, is to confer on the million the noblest benefaction. It is to give them at once a shield against "the proud man's contumely" and the degradations of vice. It is to set their feet on the firm rock of an eternal truth, and to render them alike invulnerable to envy and despair. The man who breathes the soul of a rational dignity into the multitude is the greatest of possible patriots. He who respects virtue and purity in himself will respect those qualities in others; and a nation permeated with the philosophy of Burns would be the noblest nation that the sun ever yet shone upon.
But it is not merely that Robert Burns teaches his fellow-peasants and citizens to fling out of their bosoms the fiends of envy and self-depreciation; taught by those errors for which he has been so severely blamed, he has become, without question, the most efficient, wise, and tender counselor that they ever had. He knows all their troubles and temptations, for he has experienced them; and he gives them the soundest advice under all circumstances. He weeps with them, he rejoices with them, he worships with them, in such a brotherly, and occasionally such a fatherly sympathy, that his poems have become to the poor of Scotland, as they have told me, a sort of second Bible. How beautifully are blended in these stanzas the indignant sense of those oppressions which never crushed more directly the laboring poor than they do at this day in wealthy England, and the consoling truth of a divine retribution:
"Many and sharp the numerous ills
Inwoven with our frame:
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heaven-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.
"See yonder poor o'erlabored wight,
So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow worm
The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful, though a weeping wife
And helpless offspring mourn.