COPYRIGHT, 1897, 1898, 1899, BY THE CHICAGO Record. COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY VICTOR F. LAWSON. C. J. PETERS & SON, TYPOGRAPHERS, INTRODUCTORY STUDY. In the study of all human effort it is the personal element that is the most interesting. It is also the most fructifying. This is the justification of biography. This is the reason why, in the study of literature for example, so much of the work is rightfully the study of the lives and characters of authors. We recognize the truth of the principle instinctively. We feel readily enough that we are not so much concerned in knowing the characteristics of a great man's greatness, the limitations of it, the history of it, as we are in knowing what sort of man it was who was great. We want to know how the qualities to which his greatness was due comported with the other qualities that he had. In plain words, we want to see how nearly the individual characteristics of a great man are like the characteristics of common humanity. It is the universal instinct of self-betterment that prompts this feeling. We know well that the inspiration of a great example is possible only when it seems possible. That it may seem possible it must proceed from a life not wholly unlike our own. The example of a great life would be valueless to us if that life were so unlike our own as to have nothing in common with it. Burns, Scott, and Byron were all great men; and in the lives of every one of the three there is an inspiration for any one that seeks it. But the inspiration to be derived from the life of Burns is far greater than that to be derived from the lives of the other two. Why? Because we instinctively recognize in Burns a great human heart, that is to say, a heart throbbing in complete unison with the great common heart of humanity. "He was touched with the feeling of our infirmities," - could this be said of any human being if not of Burns? Who can read his life without tears tears of sympathy and sorrow welling up at almost every turn in the story? Intrinsically so noble, and yet by the stress of his environment, and by mistakes of judgment and of conduct, condemned to a life that had so much that was ignoble in it. How typical of the life so many have to live! It was the fashion, for some fifty years or more, for the world strongly to condemn Burns. But that fashion has passed away. The world has forgiven him. Not a fault or a failing but has been forgiven to him richly. And this not by reason of any newly developed looseness of judgment or newly developed laxity of principle; but because the world has recognized in him a heart that, had years been granted him, would have turned out all right: "Wha does the utmost that he can, Will whyles do mair." Inherited ten Scott was born under a brighter star. dencies, parental influences, education, social advantages, character, disposition, mental endowment, the circumstances of his environment and his existence generally, In all led up to the realization of a great success. scarcely any other than one thing, in all his life, did Scott fail to make the most of himself and his chances. But had not that one mistake been made, had not Scott entangled himself in the business of printing and publishing, and so in the end brought ruin upon his fine fabric of realized hopes and dreams, who will say that his life would have had the same interest for posterity, or that his fame would have endured so perpetually resplendent in all its pristine wonder of brilliancy and power? Even without our knowing it, our judgment of the poet and the romancist is influenced by our appreciation of the character of the man in whom the poet and the romancist were existent. We cannot even think of Scott without thinking of the heroic fortitude of him. who at fifty-five years of age sat down to write off by the earnings of his pen a debt of $750,000! For Scott we have nothing but admiration and wonder; but for Byron, as for Burns, there must always be pity. The pity, however, proceeds not from so deep or so general a spring. Every heart finds in Burns an answering throb of tenderness and brotherhood: "Should auld acquaintance be forgot And never brought to min'? "For a' that, and a' that, Our toils obscure and a' that, But Byron's freedom-loving spirit is frequently a thing of books and culture, and his sentiment the utterance of a feeling wholly personal to himself without even the suggestion of a general application: "Arouse ye Goths and glut your ire." "A land of slaves shall ne'er be mine "Teach me - too early taught by thee! It fain would form my hope in heaven." Besides, there was a note of unreality in Byron. His griefs, his sorrows, his despairs, were melodramatic. His loving was hyperbolical and effusive. Even his passionate utterances for freedom lacked "the one thing needful," the air of conviction. It was only in his satirehis on-rushing, over-rushing, everywhere-pervading floods of invective and denunciation, glowing with fiery wit and sarcasm as waves of the sea are at times lit up by sunlight that Byron appeared in his own true, unapproachable self. Yet when he was in this mood, his mind was not always at its sanest. But it was always at its mightiest. But despite the unreality and the putting forward of himself as an object of commiseration, and the bookishness of his rhapsodies on liberty, freedom, etc., there was nevertheless much in Byron that was genuinely true and honest; much, too, that, if considered well, still merits our sympathy. The stars ran evil in their courses the day of his nativity. That he was not a far worse |