No man's memory was ever more unjustly dealt with than the memory of Robert Burns. His first editor published many poems that Burns said on his death-bed should be allowed 'to sink into oblivion,' and told all of weakness that he could learn in order that he might be regarded as just. He considered justice to himself of more consequence than justice to Burns, or to humanity. His only claim to be remembered is the fact that he prepared the poems of Burns for publication, and wrote his biography. It is much to be regretted that he had not higher ideals of what a biography should be, not merely for the memory of the man about whom it is written, but for its influence in enlightening and uplifting those who read it. Biographers should reveal not weaknesses, but the things achieved for God and humanity.
Carlyle, writing of the biographers of Burns, says: 'His former biographers have done something, no doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr Currie and Mr Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one important thing: their own and the world's true relation to the author, and the style in which it became such men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr Currie loved the poet truly, more perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or even to himself; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain patronising, apologetic air, as if the polite public might think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar and a gentleman, should do such honour to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith; and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet's biographers should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly what he saw. Mr Walker offends more deeply in the same kind, and both err alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of his attributes, virtues, and vices, _instead of a delineation of the resulting character as a living unity_.'
The biographers of Robert Burns criticised reputed defects of his--defects common among men of all classes and all professions in his time--but failed to give him credit for his revelations of divine wisdom. They bemoaned his lack of religion--though he was a reverently religious man--instead of telling the simple truth that he was the greatest religious reformer of his time in any part of the world. They said he was not a Christian because he did not perform certain ceremonies required by the churches, when freer and less bigoted men would have told the real fact, that he was one of the world's greatest interpreters of Christ's highest ideals--democracy and brotherhood. He still holds that high rank. They related idle gossip about his vanity and other trivial stories, instead of being content with proclaiming him the greatest genius of his time in the comprehensiveness of his visions, and in the scope of his powers. Some of them tried to prove that he was not a loyal man; they should have revealed him as the giant leader of men in making them conscious of the value of liberty and of the right of every man to its fullest enjoyment.