an appreciative understanding of them is to concern yourself with the
sentiment. And, indeed, the strength and sincerity of the sentiment
by-and-by draw you away to oblivion of the style, however much it may at
first strike you as redundant and affected. They are not the letters of
a literary man. They have nothing suggestive of the studious chamber and
the midnight lamp. There is often a narrowness of idea in the merely
literary man which limits his auditory to men of his peculiar pattern.
To this narrowness Burns, with all his faults of style, was a stranger.
His letters are the utterances of a man who refused to be imprisoned in
any single department of human thought. He was no specialist, pinned to
one standpoint, and making the width of the world commensurate with the
narrowness of his own horizon. He moved about, he looked abroad; he had
no pet subject, no restricted field of study; nature and human nature in
their multitudinous phases and many retreats were his range, and he
expressed his views as freely and vigorously as he took them.

The general tone of the letters is high. The subject is not seldom of
supreme interest. Questions are discussed which are rarely discussed in
ordinary correspondence. The writer rises above creeds and formularies
and arbitrarily established rule. He speculates on a theology beyond the
bounds of Calvinism, on a philosophy of the soul above the dialectics of
the schoolmen, on a morality at variance with conventional law. He
interrogates the intuitions of the mind and the intimations of nature in
order that, if possible, he may learn something of the soul's origin,
destiny, and supremest duty. But let us hear himself:--

_(a)_ "I have ever looked on mankind in the lump to be nothing better
than a foolish, head-strong, credulous, unthinking mob; and their
universal belief has ever had extremely little weight with me.... I
am drawn by conviction like a Man, not by a halter like an Ass."