Search Scotland over, from the Pentland to the Solway, and there is not
a cottage-hut so poor and wretched as to be without its Bible; and
hardly one that, on the same shelf, and next to it, does not treasure a
Burns. Have the people degenerated since their adoption of this new
manual? Has their attachment to the Book of Books declined? Are their
hearts less firmly bound, than were their fathers', to the old faith and
the old virtues? I believe he that knows the most of the country will be
the readiest to answer all these questions, as every lover of genius and
virtue would desire to hear them answered.... Extraordinary ... has been
the unanimity of his critics. While differing widely in their estimates
of his character and _morale_, they have, without a single exception,
expressed a lofty idea of his powers of mind and of the excellence of
his poetry. Here, as on the subject of Shakespeare, and on scarcely any
other, have Whigs and Tories, Infidels and Christians, bigoted Scotchmen
and bigoted sons of John Bull, the high and the low, the rich and the
poor, the prosaic and the enthusiastic lovers of poetry, the
strait-laced and the morally lax, met and embraced each other.--J. G.
LOCKHART. _Life of Burns._