This humor, too, is generously and jovially human, and although Burns’ ridicule is often coarse, it is rarely cruel. He strikes, but it is with the arm of a man, and not with the blasting of a fiend. Gall he does sometimes mingle with the cup of satire, but never the deadly night-shade; the barb he sharpens keenly, but he does not steep it in poison. He painted, it is true, with a breadth and richness of coloring that made men hold their sides and set the table in a roar, the fooleries and absurdities of individuals; the pretensions of sects, and the bitterness of factions; the vanities of professions; the motley trivialities of presumptuous and stolid nonsense; but in the very storm of his sarcasm, he spares our common nature. There is a ridicule which properly may be called diabolical; which desecrates every thing endeared and noble; which laughs not in festivity of spirit, but in bitterness of heart; which like the witches in Macbeth, around the midnight cauldron, shrieks in the irony of satanic mirth over the degradation of humanity. This temper is realized in the writings of Swift, and affected in those of Byron; but we discover no trace of it in the compositions of Burns. Burns would give even to Satan himself the grace of repentance, and a chance of heaven. Burns, like Byron, can pass rapidly from the grave to the grotesque, but altogether in a different spirit. In the one it is the prodigality of fun; in the other it is willfulness of scorn; in the one, it is sport; in the other it is derision; the one as friend to friend mocks humanity pleasantly; the other makes it a Sancho Panza, tosses it in a blanket, and laughs the louder, the more it is humiliated. I believe the spirit of Byron was naturally a fine one; but it was spoiled, if not utterly ruined, as to all its higher capacities and sympathies. I say not that his moral humanity was extinguished, because that would be uncandid; but I do say, that he became fantastic and capricious to such a degree as to fail in the charities which not only soften life, but dignify literature.