Burns says nothing of difficulties at all, he yet leaves an admirable
letter, out of nothing, in your hands!" We may pit the one critic
against the other, and so leave them, while we peruse the letters, and
form an opinion for ourselves.

While both the verse and the prose of Burns are revelations, his letters
reveal more than his poems the failings and frailties of the man. His
poems, taken altogether, shew him at his best, as we wish to--and as we
mainly do--remember him; a man to be loved, admired, even envied, and by
no means pitied, for his soul, though often vexed with the irritations
incidental to an obscure and toiling lot, has a strength and buoyancy
which readily raise it to divine altitudes, where it might well be
content to see and smile at the petty class distinctions and the paltry
social tyranny from which those irritations chiefly spring. His letters,
on the other hand, present him to us less frequently on those commanding
altitudes. He is oftener careful and concerned about many things,
groping occasionally in the world's ways for the world's gifts, and
handicapped in the struggle for them by a contemptuous and half-hearted
adoption of the world's methods of winning them.

The same personality that stands forth in the poems is everywhere
present in all essential features in the letters. We have in the latter
the same view of life, present and future; the same fierce contentment
with honest poverty; the same aggressive independency of manhood; the
same patriotism, susceptibility to female loveliness, love of sociality,
undaunted likes and dislikes. The humour is the same, though often too
elaborately expressed.[d] In one important respect, however, his letters
fail to reflect that image of him which his poetry presents. It is
remarkable that his descriptions of rural nature, and one might add of
rustic life, so full and plentiful in his verse, are so few and slight