The inequalities of fortune, the pleasures of friendship, the miseries of poverty, the glories of independence, the privileges of wealth allied to generosity, the sin of ingratitude, and similar topics, are continually recurring to prove the elevation at which his spirit usually soared and surveyed mankind. It has been charged against him[b] that these subjects were not the food of his daily contemplation, but were lugged into his letters for the sake of effect, and that their clumsy introduction was frequently apologised for by the complaint that the writer had nothing else to write about. The frequent apologies here spoken of will be hard to find, and the critic's only reason for advancing the charge, for which he would fain find support in the fancied apologies of Burns, is that many of the letters "relate neither to facts nor feelings peculiarly connected with the author or his correspondent." This only means that a very large proportion of Burns's letters are not like the letters of ordinary men, and therefore do not satisfy the critic's idea or definition of a letter. They treat of themes that are not specially _a propos_ of passing events, and therefore they are forced and affected. Few are likely to be imposed upon by such shallow reasoning. Another critic[c] avers that "while Burns says nothing of difficulties at all, he yet leaves an admirable letter, out of nothing, in your hands!" We may pit the one critic against the other, and so leave them, while we peruse the letters, and form an opinion for ourselves. While both the verse and the prose of Burns are revelations, his letters reveal more than his poems the failings and frailties of the man. His poems, taken altogether, shew him at his best, as we wish to--and as we mainly do--remember him; a man to be loved, admired, even envied, and by no means pitied, for his soul, though often vexed with the irritations incidental to an obscure and toiling lot, has a strength and buoyancy which readily raise it to divine altitudes, where it might well be content to see and smile at the petty class distinctions and the paltry social tyranny from which those irritations chiefly spring. His letters, on the other hand, present him to us less frequently on those commanding altitudes. He is oftener careful and concerned about many things, groping occasionally in the world's ways for the world's gifts, and handicapped in the struggle for them by a contemptuous and half-hearted adoption of the world's methods of winning them.