Could genius enjoy the advantage of being judged by its peers, it would stand a better chance for contemporary fame; but overshadowed, as it so often is, by foibles, waywardness, and those passions alike common to the humble and the exalted, it must pass through the crucible of time to fit it for sincere homage. Robert Burns, whose struggle with fate began almost beside the cradle, and whose youth was one ceaseless buffeting with misfortune, is an illustration in point. His productions are not of a character to set aside altogether the remembrance of his follies, though we are all inclined to treat the memory of the Scottish bard with indulgence and half reverence, while we hasten to acknowledge his great and unquestioned genius. Burns was sadly addicted to whiskey and tobacco, which led Byron, as we have already said, to call him "a strange compound of dirt and deity." The author of "Childe Harold" forgot the proverb about those who live in glass houses. Burns, from early youth, was subject to extraordinary fits of dejection, which amounted to a species of hypochondria, long before convivial society had inoculated him with the then popular vice of intemperance. He became finally an incongruous mixture of mirth and melancholy, while poverty with its attendant ills was seldom from his door. He writes to a friend: "I have been for some time pining under secret wretchedness; the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, and some wandering stabs of remorse settle on my vitals like vultures when my attention is not called away by the claims of society or the vagaries of the Muse." Poor, ill-fated genius![146] By his follies and indulgences he as surely committed suicide in his thirty-seventh year as did the starving, half-delirious Chatterton on his bed of straw. Mrs. Dunlop, an early patroness of Burns, had in her family an old and favored housekeeper, who did not exactly relish her mistress's attention to a man of such low estate. In order to overcome her prejudice, her mistress induced the domestic to read one of Burns's poems, the "Cotter's Saturday Night." When Mrs. Dunlop inquired her opinion of the poem, the housekeeper replied with quaint indifference, "Aweel, madam, that's vera weel." "Is that all you have to say in its favor?" asked the mistress. "'Deed, madam," she replied, "the like o' you quality may see a vast in 't; but I was aye used the like o' all that the poet has written about in my ain father's house, and atweel I dinna ken how he could hae described it any other gate." When Burns heard of the old woman's criticism, he remarked that it was one of the highest compliments he had ever received.