The last meeting he attended before his fatal illness was called to prepare a letter of gratitude to God for preserving the life of the king when the London bolshevistic mob tried to kill him on his way to the House of Commons. Assisting to prepare this letter to the king was the last public act of Burns.
Had his weaknesses been tenfold what they were, his biographers should have said nothing about them, for in spite of his human weakness he had divine power to reveal to all men Christ's teachings--democracy and brotherhood, based on the value of the individual soul. He was also the greatest poet of religion, ethics, and love; and he holds a high place among the loving interpreters of Nature.
To relate facts in his life to account for the development of his powers, so that he was able to be so great a revealer of the highest things in the lives of men and women, should have been the work of his biographers.
It is worthy of note that Wordsworth wrote to the publishers of the biography of Burns in regard to the true attitude of a biographer. He objected to recording imputed failings, and expressed indignation at Dr Currie for devoting so much attention to the infirmities of Burns.
Chambers and Douglas were in most respects better than his other early biographers. The Rev. Lauchlan MacLean Watt, of Edinburgh, wrote for the Nation's Library in 1914 the sanest, truest book yet written about Burns.
Many people still speak of Burns as an 'uneducated man.' Although a farmer, he was in reality a well-educated man. He was not a finished scholar in the accepted sense of the universities, but both in his poetry and in his unusually forceful and polished prose he was superior to most of the university men of his time. He had read many books, the best books that his intelligent father could buy, or that he could borrow from friends or from libraries. In addition to school-books, he names the following among those books read in his youth and young manhood--_The Spectator_, Pope's Works, Shakespeare, Works on Agriculture, _The Pantheon_, Locke's _Essay on the Human Understanding_, Stackhouse's _History of the Bible_, Justice's _British Gardener_, Boyle Lectures, Allan Ramsay's Works, Doctor Taylor's _Doctrine of Original Sin_, _A Select Collection of English Songs_, Hervey's _Meditations_, Thomson's Works, Shenstone's Works, _The Letters by the Wits of Queen Anne's Reign_, Sterne's _Tristram Shandy_, Mackenzie's _The Man of Feeling_, Macpherson's _Ossian_, two volumes of _Pamela_, and one novel by Smollett, _Ferdinand, Count Fathom_. In addition to these he had read some French and some Latin books, guided by one of the greatest teachers of his time, John Murdoch, who was so great that when he established a private school in London his fame spread to France, and some leading young men, notably Talleyrand, came to receive his training and inspiration.