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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: demonstration of Burns's radical badness.
But second, there is a certain class, professors of that low
morality so greatly more distressing than the better sort of
vice, to whom you must never represent an act that was
virtuous in itself, as attended by any other consequences
than a large family and fortune. To hint that Burns's
marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny
the moral law. Yet such is the fact. It was bravely done;
but he had presumed too far on his strength. One after
another the lights of his life went out, and he fell from
circle to circle to the dishonoured sickbed of the end. And
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