This attention to the inner springs of character gives the key to Carlyle's critical work. How fruitful this was is seen in his essay on Burns. He steered an even course between the stern moralists, whose indignation at the sins of Burns the man blinded them to the genius of Burns the poet, and the flippant Bohemians, who thought that by bidding defiance to the conventionalities and moralities Burns proved his title to the name of genius, and whose voices are yet unduly with us in much spirituous devotion and rhymeless doggerel at the return of each 25th of January. While laying bare the springs of Burns' genius, Carlyle, with unerring precision, also puts his finger on the weak point in the poet's moral nature. So faithfully did Carlyle apply his critical method that he may be considered to have said the final word about Burns. When Goethe spoke of Carlyle as a great moral force he must have had in his mind the ethical tone of Carlyle's critical writing--a tone which had its roots in the idea that judgment upon a man should be determined, not by isolated deviations from conventional or even ethical standards, but by consideration of the deep springs of character from which flow aspirations and ideals. In his _Heroes and Hero-Worship_ Carlyle elaborates his critical theory thus: 'On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who is called there "the man according to God's own heart?" David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough--blackest crimes--there was no want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask: Is this your man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults? What are the outward details of a life, if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten?... The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin: that is death.... David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below.' This canon faithfully applied enabled Carlyle to invest with a new and living interest large sections of literary criticism. Burns, Johnson, Cromwell and others of like calibre, were rescued by Carlyle from the hands of Pedants and Pharisees. To readers wearied with the facile criticism of conventional reviewers, it was a revelation to come into contact with a writer like Carlyle, who not only gave to the mind great inspirational impetus, but also a larger critical outlook; it was like stepping out of a museum, or a dissecting-room into the free, fresh, breezy air of Nature.