that whiskey and wenches made him any the less the most richly endowed genius of his century, with just title to the love and admiration of men.  It is not for us to decide whether he, who, by doubling the suggestive and associative power of any thought, fancy, feeling, or natural object, has so far added permanently to the sum of human happiness, is not as sure of a welcome and a well-done from the Infinite Fatherliness as he that has turned an honest penny by printing a catechism; but we are sure that it is a shallow cant which holds up the errors of men of genius as if they were especial warnings, and proofs of how little the rarest gifts avail.  Is it intended to put men on their guard against being geniuses?  That is scarcely called for till those who yield to the temptation become more numerous.  Do they mean, We, too, might have been geniuses, but we chose rather to be good and dull?  Self-denial is always praiseworthy, and we reconcile ourselves to the Ovid lost in consideration of the Deacon gained.  But if it be meant that the danger was in the genius, we deny it altogether.  Burns’s genius was the one good thing he had, and it was always, as it always must be, good, and only good, the leaven of uncontaminate heaven in him that would not let him sink contentedly into the sty of oblivion with the million other tipplers and loose-livers of his century.  It was his weakness of character, and not his strength or pride of intellect, that betrayed him; and to call his faults errors of genius is a mischievous fallacy.  If they were, then they were no lesson for the rest of us; if they were not, to call them so is to encourage certain gin-and-water philosophers who would fain extenuate their unpleasant vices by the plea that they are the necessary complement of unusual powers,—­as if the path to immortality were through the kennel, and fine verses were to be written only at the painful sacrifice of bilking your washerwoman.

We are over-fond of drawing monitory morals from the lives of gifted persons, tacking together our little ten-by-twelve pinfolds to impound breachy human nature in, but it is only because we know more than we have any business to know of the private concerns of such persons that we have the opportunity.  We are thankful that the character of Shakspeare is wrapped safely away from us in un-Boswellable night.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge the man stood forever in the way of Samuel Taylor Coleridge the poet and metaphysician, and the fault of the poppy-juice in his nature is laid at the door of the laudanum he bought of the apothecary.  Yet all the drowsy juices of Circe’s garden could not hinder De Quincey from writing his twenty-five volumes.  To us nothing is more painful, and nothing seems more cruelly useless, than the parading of mortal weaknesses, especially of those to whom we are indebted for delight and teaching.  For an inherent weakness has no lesson of avoidance in it, being helpless from the first, and by the doom of its own nature growing more and more helpless to the last, not more so in the example than in him who is to profit by it, and who is more likely to have his appetite flattered by good company than his fear aroused by the evil consequence.  Because the swans have a vile habit of over-eating themselves, shall we nail them to the barn-door as a moral lesson to the crows?