One feels painfully in his poems the want of great characters; and still more painfully that he has not drawn them, simply because they were not there to draw.  That he has a true eye for what is noble, when he sees it, let his “Lament for Glencairn” testify, and the stanzas in his “Vision,” in which, with a high-bred grace which many a courtly poet of his day might have envied, he alludes to one and another Scottish worthy of his time.  There is no vein of saucy and envious “banausia” in the man; even in his most graceless sneer, his fault—­if fault it be—­is, that he cannot and will not pretend to respect that which he knows to be unworthy of respect.  He sees around him and above him, as well as below him, an average of men and things dishonest, sensual, ungodly, shallow, ridiculous by reason of their own lusts and passions, and he will not apply to the shams of dignity and worth, the words which were meant for their realities.  After all, he does but say what every one round him was feeling and thinking; but he said it; and hypocritical respectability shrank shrieking from the mirror of her own inner heart.  But it was all the worse for him.  In the sins of others he saw an excuse for his own.  Losing respect for and faith in his brother-men, he lost, as a matter of course, respect for himself, faith in himself.  The hypocrisy which persecutes in the name of law, whether political or moral, while in private it transgresses the very law which is for ever on its tongue, is turned by his passionate and sorely-tempted character into a too easy excuse for disbelieving in the obligation of any law whatsoever.  He ceases to worship, and therefore to be himself worshipful—­and we know the rest.

“He might have still worshipped God?” He might, and surely amid all his sins, doubts, and confusions, the remembrance of the old faith learned at his parent’s knee, does haunt him still as a beautiful regret—­and sometimes, in his bitterest hours, shine out before his poor broken heart as an everlasting Pharos, lighting him homewards after all.  Whether he reached that home or not, none on earth can tell.  But his writings show, if anything can, that the vestal-fire of conscience still burned within, though choked again and again with bitter ashes and foul smoke.  Consider the time in which he lived, when it was “as with the people, so with the priest,” and the grand old life-tree of the Scottish Kirk, now green and vigorous with fresh leaves and flowers, was all crusted with foul scurf and moss, and seemed to have ceased growing, and to be crumbling down into decay; consider the terrible contradiction between faith and practice which must have met the eyes of the man, before he could write with the same pen—­and one as honestly as the other—­“The Cottar’s Saturday Night,” and “Holy Willie’s Prayer.”  But those times are past, and the men who acted in them gone to another tribunal.  Let the dead bury their dead; and, in the meantime, instead of cursing