Excerpt from Robert Burns But otherwise the story of Burns's life has been told with such minuteness of detail, that the internal evidence of his poetry would seem only to be called in to verify or correct the verdict of tradition and the garbled gossip of those wise after the fact of his fame. It is so easy after a man has compelled the attention of the world to fill up the empty years of his life when he was all unknown to fame, with illustrative anecdotes and almost forgotten incidents, revealed and coloured by the light of after events! This is a penalty of genius, and it is sometimes called fame, as if fame were a gift given of the world out of a boundless and unintelligent curiosity, and not the life-record or work achieved. It is easier to collect ana and to make them into the patchwork pattern of a life than to read the character of the man in his writings; and patchwork, of necessity, has more of colour than the homespun web of a peasant-poet. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.