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 seasons, the accident of a
thousand accidents, a living mystery moving through the seen
to the unseen; he is sown in dishonor; he is matured under all
the varieties of heat and cold, in mists and wrath, in snow and
vapors, in the melancholy of autumn, in the torpor of winter as
well as in the rapture and fragrance of summer, or the balmy
affluence of spring, its breath, its sunshine; at the end he
is reaped, the product not of one climate but of all; not of
good alone but of sorrow, perhaps mellowed and ripened, perhaps
stricken and withered and sour. How, then, shall we judge
any one?--how, at any rate, shall we judge a giant, great in
gifts and great in temptation, great in strength, and great in
weakness? Let us glory in his strength and be comforted in his
weakness, and when we thank heaven for the inestimable gift of
Burns, we do not need to remember wherein he was imperfect, we
can not bring ourselves to regret that he was made of the same
clay as ourselves.--LORD ROSEBERY.
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