let him cast the first stone." It has raised to a national rule of conduct the divine precept given utterance to by the poet they honor:

SELECTED CRITICAL STUDIES

AND REMINISCENCES.

LORD ROSEBERY'S CHARACTERIZATION OF BURNS.

THE secret of Burns' extraordinary hold on mankind lies in two words, - inspiration and sympathy. Try and reconstruct Burns as he was. A peasant, born in a cottage that no sanitary inspector in these days would tolerate for a moment; struggling with desperate effort against pauperism, almost in vain; snatching at scraps of learning in the intervals of toil, as it were with his teeth; a heavy, silent lad, proud of his ploughing. All of a sudden, without preface or warning, he breaks out into exquisite song like a nightingale from the brushwood, and continues singing as sweetly with nightin

gale pauses till he dies. A nightingale sings because.

he cannot help it; he can only sing exquisitely, because he knows no other. So it was with Burns. What is this but inspiration? One can no more measure or reason about it than measure or reason about Niagara. If his talents were universal, his sympathy was not less So. His tenderness was not a mere selfish tenderness for his own family, for he loved all mankind except the cruel and the base. Nay, we may go further, and say that he placed all creation, especially the suffering and despised part of it, under his protection. The oppressor in every shape, even in the comparatively innocent em

bodiment of the factor and the sportsman, he regarded with direct and personal hostility.

We have something to be grateful for even in the weaknesses of men like Burns. Mankind is helped in its progress almost as much by the study of imperfection as by the contemplation of perfection. Had we nothing before us in our futile and halting lives but saints and the ideal, we might fail altogether. We grope blindly along the catacombs of the world, we climb the dark ladder of life, we feel our way to futurity, but we can scarcely see an inch around or before us. We stumble and falter and fall, our hands and knees are bruised and sore, and we look up for light and guidance. Could we see nothing but distant, unapproachable impeccability, we might well sink prostrate in the hopelessness of emulation and the weariness of despair. Is it not, then, when all seems blank and lightless and lifeless, when strength and courage flag, and when perfection seems as remote as a star, is it not then that imperfection helps us? When we see that the greatest and choicest images of God have had their weaknesses like ours, their temptations, their hour of darkness, their bloody sweat, are we not encouraged by their lapses and catastrophes to find energy for one more effort, one more struggle? Where they failed we feel it a less dishonor to fail; their errors and sorrow make, as it were, an easier ascent from infinite imperfection to infinite perfection. Man, after all, is not ripened by virtue alone. Were it so, this world were a paradise of angels. No! Like the growth of the earth, he is the fruit of all the seasons the accident of a thousand accidents, a living mystery moving through the seen to the unseen. He is sown in dis