man, hope of him; leave him to try yet what he will do. While life lasts,
hope lasts for every man.

Of Rousseau's literary talents, greatly celebrated" target="_blank" title="a.著名的">celebrated still among his
countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I call

unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in Rousseau.
Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes pictures of a

certain gorgeousattractiveness: but they are not genuinelypoetical. Not
white sunlight: something _operatic_; a kind of rose-pink, artificial

bedizenment. It is frequent, or rather it is universal, among the French
since his time. Madame de Stael has something of it; St. Pierre; and down

onwards to the present astonishing convulsionary "Literature of
Desperation," it is everywhere abundant. That same _rose-pink_ is not the

right hue. Look at a Shakspeare, at a Goethe, even at a Walter Scott! He
who has once seen into this, has seen the difference of the True from the

Sham-True, and will discriminate them ever afterwards.
We had to observe in Johnson how much good a Prophet, under all

disadvantages and disorganizations, can accomplish for the world. In
Rousseau we are called to look rather at the fearfulamount of evil which,

under such disorganization, may accompany the good. Historically it is a
most pregnantspectacle, that of Rousseau. Banished into Paris garrets, in

the gloomy company of his own Thoughts and Necessities there; driven from
post to pillar; fretted, exasperated till the heart of him went mad, he had

grown to feel deeply that the world was not his friend nor the world's law.
It was expedient, if any way possible, that such a man should _not_ have

been set in flat hostility with the world. He could be cooped into
garrets, laughed at as a maniac, left to starve like a wild beast in his

cage;--but he could not be hindered from setting the world on fire. The
French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious

speculations on the miseries of civilized life, the preferability of the
savage to the civilized, and such like, helped well to produce a whole

delirium in France generally. True, you may well ask, What could the
world, the governors of the world, do with such a man? Difficult to say

what the governors of the world could do with him! What he could do with
them is unhappily clear enough,--_guillotine_ a great many of them! Enough

now of Rousseau.
It was a curious phenomenon, in the withered, unbelieving second-hand

Eighteenth Century, that of a Hero starting up, among the artificial
pasteboard figures and productions, in the guise of a Robert Burns. Like a

little well in the rocky desert places,--like a sudden splendor of Heaven
in the artificial Vauxhall! People knew not what to make of it. They took

it for a piece of the Vauxhall fire-work; alas, it _let_ itself be so
taken, though struggling half-blindly, as in bitterness of death, against

that! Perhaps no man had such a false reception from his fellow-men. Once
more a very wasteful life-drama was enacted under the sun.

The tragedy of Burns's life is known to all of you. Surely we may say, if
discrepancy between place held and place merited constitute perverseness of

lot for a man, no lot could be more perverse then Burns's. Among those
second-hand acting-figures, _mimes_ for most part, of the Eighteenth

Century, once more a giant Original Man; one of those men who reach down to
the perennial Deeps, who take rank with the Heroic among men: and he was

born in a poor Ayrshire hut. The largest soul of all the British lands
came among us in the shape of a hard-handed Scottish Peasant.

His Father, a poor toiling man, tried various things; did not succeed in
any; was involved in continual difficulties. The Steward, Factor as the

Scotch call him, used to send letters and threatenings, Burns says, "which
threw us all into tears." The brave, hard-toiling, hard-suffering Father,

his brave heroine of a wife; and those children, of whom Robert was one!
In this Earth, so wide otherwise, no shelter for _them_. The letters

"threw us all into tears:" figure it. The brave Father, I say always;--a
_silent_ Hero and Poet; without whom the son had never been a speaking one!

Burns's Schoolmaster came afterwards to London, learnt what good society
was; but declares that in no meeting of men did he ever enjoy better

discourse than at the hearth of this peasant. And his poor "seven acres of
nursery-ground,"--not that, nor the miserable patch of clay-farm, nor

anything he tried to get a living by, would prosper with him; he had a sore
unequal battle all his days. But he stood to it valiantly; a wise,

faithful, unconquerable man;--swallowing down how many sore sufferings
daily into silence; fighting like an unseen Hero,--nobody publishing

newspaper paragraphs about his nobleness; voting pieces of plate to him!
However, he was not lost; nothing is lost. Robert is there the outcome of

him,--and indeed of many generations of such as him.
This Burns appeared under every disadvantage: uninstructed, poor, born

only to hard manual toil; and writing, when it came to that, in a rustic
special dialect, known only to a small province of the country he lived in.

Had he written, even what he did write, in the general language of England,
I doubt not he had already become universally recognized as being, or

capable to be, one of our greatest men. That he should have tempted so
many to penetrate through the rough husk of that dialect of his, is proof

that there lay something far from common within it. He has gained a
certain recognition, and is continuing to do so over all quarters of our

wide Saxon world: wheresoever a Saxon dialect is spoken, it begins to be
understood, by personal inspection of this and the other, that one of the

most considerable Saxon men of the Eighteenth Century was an Ayrshire
Peasant named Robert Burns. Yes, I will say, here too was a piece of the

right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the
world;--rock, yet with wells of living softness in it! A wild impetuous

whirlwind of passion and faculty slumbered quiet there; such heavenly
_melody_ dwelling in the heart of it. A noble rough genuineness; homely,

rustic, honest; true simplicity of strength; with its lightning-fire, with
its soft dewy pity;--like the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god!

Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me that
Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was usually the

gayest of speech; a fellow of infinitefrolic, laughter, sense and heart;
far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or such

like, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. This basis
of mirth ("_fond gaillard_," as old Marquis Mirabeau calls it), a primal

element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and earnest
qualities, is one of the most attractivecharacteristics of Burns. A large

fund of Hope dwells in him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a
mourning man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth

victorious over them. It is as the lion shaking "dew-drops from his mane;"
as the swift-bounding horse, that _laughs_ at the shaking of the

spear.--But indeed, Hope, Mirth, of the sort like Burns's, are they not the
outcomeproperly of warm generousaffection,--such as is the beginning of

all to every man?
You would think it strange if I called Burns the most gifted British soul

we had in all that century of his: and yet I believe the day is coming
when there will be little danger in saying so. His writings, all that he

_did_ under such obstructions, are only a poor fragment of him. Professor
Stewart remarked very justly, what indeed is true of all Poets good for

much, that his poetry was not any particular faculty; but the general
result of a naturally vigorous original mind expressing itself in that way.

Burns's gifts, expressed in conversation, are the theme of all that ever
heard him. All kinds of gifts: from the gracefulest utterances of

courtesy, to the highest fire of passionate speech; loud floods of mirth,
soft wailings of affection, laconic emphasis, clear piercinginsight; all

was in him. Witty duchesses celebrate him as a man whose speech "led them
off their feet." This is beautiful: but still more beautiful that which

Mr. Lockhart has recorded, which I have more than once alluded to, How the
waiters and ostlers at inns would get out of bed, and come crowding to hear

this man speak! Waiters and ostlers:--they too were men, and here was a
man! I have heard much about his speech; but one of the best things I ever

heard of it was, last year, from a venerable gentleman long familiar with
him. That it was speech distinguished by always _having something in it_.

"He spoke rather little than much," this old man told me; "sat rather
silent in those early days, as in the company of persons above him; and

always when he did speak, it was to throw new light on the matter." I know
not why any one should ever speak otherwise!--But if we look at his general

force of soul, his healthy _robustness_ every way, the rugged
downrightness, penetration, generous valor and manfulness that was in

him,--where shall we readily find a better-gifted man?
Among the great men of the Eighteenth Century, I sometimes feel as if Burns

might be found to resemble Mirabeau more than any other. They differ
widely in vesture; yet look at them intrinsically. There is the same burly

thick-necked strength of body as of soul;--built, in both cases, on what
the old Marquis calls a _fond gaillard_. By nature, by course of breeding,

indeed by nation, Mirabeau has much more of bluster; a noisy, forward,
unresting man. But the characteristic of Mirabeau too is veracity and

sense, power of true _insight_, superiority of vision. The thing that he
says is worth remembering. It is a flash of insight into some object or

other: so do both these men speak. The same raging passions; capable too
in both of manifesting themselves as the tenderest noble affections. Wit;

wild laughter, energy, directness, sincerity: these were in both. The