"Oh, ye wha are sae guid yoursel', Sae pious and sae holy, Ye've nought to do but mark and tell Your neebors' fauts and folly,-- Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill, Supplied wi' store o' water, The heapèd happer's ebbing still, And still the clap plays clatter,-- "Hear me, ye venerable core, As counsel for poor mortals, That frequent pass douce Wisdom's door For glaikit Folly's portals! I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes, Would here propone defences, Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes, Their failings and mischances." Alas for it! we must all say, in dwelling upon the life of poor Burns, that he so frequently needed to appear as counsel for poor mortals--in his own behoof; and that "their donsie tricks, their black mistakes, their failings and mischances" should form so large a portion of the record of that life, which under other circumstances might have been one of the most brilliant and beautiful of all in the annals of genius. For Burns, although born to such a lowly life, and having in his youth so few advantages of education or general culture, might by sheer force of genius have attained as proud a position as any man of his time, had he but learned to rule over himself in his youth, and not given full rein to those passions which his "veins convulsed," and which "still eternal galloped." Could he but have governed himself-- "When social life and glee sat down All joyous and unthinking, Till, quite transmogrify'd, they've grown Debauchery and drinking,"-- there would have been a far different story to have told of the life of Robert Burns. What ripe fruits of his genius we might have had, had he not burned out the torch of that brilliant intellect at the early age of thirty-eight. What poems he might have written--he who did immortal work with all his drawbacks--had he kept his brain clear and his life sweet even for the short span of life allotted him! How high might he have soared in the years which he might have hoped from life, had he but moved at a slower pace, in those reckless years, the record of which is so painful to the great world of admiring and pitying friends, who cherish his memory so tenderly. Yet there is in his case everything to mitigate a severe judgment upon his youthful follies; and the great world has always judged him leniently, knowing the story of his early life, and the temptations which at that day must have surrounded a youth of his temperament among the peasants of Scotland. Of the strength of those temptations we probably can form but a slight idea. "What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted."