Hence, in the eyes of many, my study was a step towards the
demonstration of Burns's radical badness.

But second, there is a certain class, professors of that low
morality so greatly more distressing than the better sort of
vice, to whom you must never represent an act that was
virtuous in itself, as attended by any other consequences
than a large family and fortune. To hint that Burns's
marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny
the moral law. Yet such is the fact. It was bravely done;
but he had presumed too far on his strength. One after
another the lights of his life went out, and he fell from
circle to circle to the dishonoured sickbed of the end. And
surely for any one that has a thing to call a soul he shines
out tenfold more nobly in the failure of that frantic effort
to do right, than if he had turned on his heel with Worldly
Wiseman, married a congenial spouse, and lived orderly and
died reputably an old man. It is his chief title that he
refrained from "the wrong that amendeth wrong." But the
common, trashy mind of our generation is still aghast, like
the Jews of old, at any word of an unsuccessful virtue. Job
has been written and read; the tower of Siloam fell nineteen
hundred years ago; yet we have still to desire a little
Christianity, or, failing that, a little even of that rude,
old, Norse nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice alike
go unrewarded, and was yet not shaken in its faith.

WALT WHITMAN. - This is a case of a second difficulty which
lies continually before the writer of critical studies: that
he has to mediate between the author whom he loves and the