After this, what becomes of the insinuation that Burns made an unhappy marriage,--that he was "compelled to invest her with the control of his life, whom he seems at first to have selected only for the gratification of a temporary inclination;" and, "that to this circumstance much of his misconduct is to be attributed?" Yet this, I believe, is a prevalent impression. Those whose hearts have glowed, and whose eyes have filled with delicious tears over the songs of Burns, have reason to be grateful to Mr. Lockhart, and to a kindred spirit, Allan Cunningham, for the generous feeling with which they have vindicated Burns and his Jean. Such aspersions are not only injurious to the dead and cruel to the living, but they do incalculable mischief:--they are food for the flippant scoffer at all that makes the 'poetry of life.' They unsettle in gentler bosoms all faith in love, in truth, in goodness--(alas, such disbelief comes soon enough!) they chill and revolt the heart, and "take the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love to set a blister there." "That Burns," says Lockhart, "ever sank into a toper, that his social propensities ever interfered with the discharge of the duties of his office, or that, in spite of some transitory follies, he ever ceased to be a most affectionate husband--all these charges have been insinuated, and they are all _false_. His aberrations of all kinds were occasional, not systematic; they were the aberrations of a man whose moral sense was never deadened--of one who encountered more temptations from without and from within, than the immense majority of mankind, far from having to contend against, are even able to imagine," and who died in his thirty-sixth year, "ere he had reached that term of life up to which the passions of many have proved too strong for the control of reason, though their mortal career being regarded as a whole, they are honoured as among the most virtuous of mankind." We are told also of "the conjugal and maternal tenderness, the prudence, and the unwearied forbearance of his Jean,"--and that she had much need of forbearance is not denied; but he ever found in her affectionate arms, pardon and peace, and a sweetness that only made the sense of his occasional delinquencies sting the deeper.