the facts dealt with in this study, is to be called a bad
man, I question very much whether either I or the writer in
the Review have ever encountered what it would be fair to
call a good one. All have some fault. The fault of each
grinds down the hearts of those about him, and - let us not
blink the truth - hurries both him and them into the grave.
And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault, as
all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by
its consequences, to gloss the matter over, with too polite
biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring
beacons on a perilous seaboard; but to call him bad, with a
self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one's sleep with
Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.

Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised
in many quarters by the least attempt to state plainly, what
every one well knows, of Burns's profligacy, and of the fatal
consequences of his marriage. And for this there are perhaps
two subsidiary reasons. For, first, there is, in our drunken
land, a certain privilege extended to drunkenness. In
Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above all
when compared with any "irregularity between the sexes." The
selfishness of the one, so much more gross in essence, is so
much less immediately conspicuous in its results that our
demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy smiles apologetically on its victims.
It is often said - I have heard it with these ears - that
drunkenness "may lead to vice." Now I did not think it at
all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard; and I
was obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the
too frequent vanity and meanness of his relations to women.