Of the rarer power of satire to
rise above the local, temporal, and personal to the exhibiting of
universal elements in human life, there are comparatively few
instances in Burns. The _Address to the Unco Guid_ is perhaps the
finest example; and here, as usually in his work, the approach to the
general leads him to drop the scourge for the sermon.
In his tendency to preach, Burns was as much the inheritor of a
national tradition as in any of his other characteristics. A strain of
moralizing is well marked in the Scottish poets even before the
Reformation, and, since the time of Burns, the preaching Scot has been
notably exemplified not only in a professed prophet like Carlyle, but
in so artistic a temperament as Stevenson. Nor did consciousness of
his failures in practise embarrass Burns in the indulgence of the
luxury of precept. Side by side with frank confessions of weakness we
find earnest if not stern exhortations to do, not as he did, but as he
taught. And as Scots have an appetite for hearing as well as for
making sermons, his didactic pieces are among those most quoted and
relished by his countrymen. The morally elevated but poetically
inferior closing stanzas of _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ are an
instance in point; others are the morals appended to _To a Mouse_ and
_To a Daisy_, and to a number of his rhyming epistles.
These epistles are among the most significant of his writings for the
reader in search of personal revelations.
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