From this era of light in his course; from this day, bright with fame and conscious virtue, we trace him along a path devious and clouded. We follow him through the toil of a profitless farm, to the struggles of a country gauger, and from these to a destitute death-bed. In all his follies and his sufferings, we behold him true to a manly nature, loyal to noble principles; and however seamed and deformed may have been the surface of his life, virtue remained unshaken in the centre of his soul. With a large family, and only seventy pounds a year, he had an open hand for the poor, and a hospitable roof for stranger and for friend; and although he died owing no man any thing, yet he has been stigmatized as a prodigal and a spendthrift. He gave the world his immortal songs without money and without price; and with the generosity of benignant genius, he sympathized with every effort of the humble men around him for a nobler life, he ministered to their intellectual wants, and he aided their intellectual struggles. Accordingly, we observe him at a time when he was harassed with cares and overcome with toil on a barren farm, establishing a book club in his neighborhood, forming its rules, and directing its operations. To estimate this in the true spirit, we must remember that it was sixty years ago, when as yet there had been no “Mechanics’ Institutions” in the land, and when Lyceums were not; when cheap editions of standard works had not arisen even on a printer’s dream, and “Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” were enfolded, as the poets say, in the mighty womb of futurity. Dr. Currie, of Liverpool, a genial and eloquent (though patronizing) biographer of Burns, in narrating this portion of his life, questions the utility of literary studies for the great masses of the people. Strange questioning this, in a life of Burns—the cottage-boy, whom the little knowledge of a rustic school awakened for eternity; raised from the clods of the valley to a place among the stars, a burning and imperishable light; and who, but for that little knowledge, might have been as nameless clay as any that nurtures the grass of a village church-yard.
The ideas of Currie have almost vanished with his times; still even yet we occasionally hear some small-souled cynic, some snail-shell philosopher, who thinks himself of those sages with whom wisdom is to perish, sneer scornfully at popular knowledge. Popular knowledge, it is true, is not the wisdom of Solomon; it has not the depth of Bacon, or the sublimity of Newton; still, so far as it goes, it is a good, and though the pedant may deride, the philanthropist will rejoice. And what, after all, is the ground of Mr. Pedant Wiseacre’s pride? Perhaps some learned investigation on the contraction of the Greek kai, or the tail of the Greek gamma. Seriously, the critic and the scholar, when true to their noble office, deserve our admiration and our gratitude; but those who grub merely for withered roots, which never produce either fruits or flowers; and, then, with insect vanity, give themselves airs of scorn, are themselves saved from contempt, only because all creatures have their uses. It is well for society that there should always be men of great and solid learning; and evil would be the day when slight acquirement should be a substitute for laborious thought; but it is also desirable that these accumulated treasures should be widely and bountifully distributed. It is good to have deep fountains in our munitions of rocks, but it is not good that these fountains should waste themselves in darkness; it is not good that they should merely feed the gorgeous river, and the mighty cataract, they should also steal along in the sunny streamlet, and give beauty to the secluded nook. Let there be rich men, and let them rejoice in their riches; let there be great men, and let them exult in their greatness; let there be men of strong intellect, but let them in their strength be merciful; it is not, however, the great, the noble, or the strong, that are ever of destructive nature; it was the lean kine of Egypt that became the devourers—and yet were as skinny as before; so there are poor, lean, hungry animals of the critic species—unproductive as they are voracious, that are naturally the most unsparing and the most ferocious.