The SATURDAY NIGHT may
or may not be an admirable poem; but its significance is
trebled, and the power and range of the poet first appears,
when it is set beside the JOLLY BEGGARS. To take a man's
work piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts,
is the way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty.
The same defect is displayed in the treatment of Burns as a
man, which is broken, apologetical, and confused. The man
here presented to us is not that Burns, TERES ATQUE ROTUNDUS
- a burly figure in literature, as, from our present vantage
of time, we have begun to see him. This, on the other hand,
is Burns as he may have appeared to a contemporary clergyman,
whom we shall conceive to have been a kind and indulgent but
orderly and orthodox person, anxious to be pleased, but too
often hurt and disappointed by the behaviour of his red-hot
PROTEGE, and solacing himself with the explanation that the
poet was "the most inconsistent of men." If you are so
sensibly pained by the misconduct of your subject, and so
paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an
excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer.
Indeed, we can only be sorry and surprised that Principal
Shairp should have chosen a theme so uncongenial. When we
find a man writing on Burns, who likes neither HOLY WILLIE,
nor the BEGGARS, nor the ORDINATION, nothing is adequate to
the situation but the old cry of Geronte: "Que diable allait-
il faire dans cette galere?" And every merit we find in the
book, which is sober and candid in a degree unusual with
biographies of Burns, only leads us to regret more heartily
that good work should be so greatly thrown away.
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