When in October he summed up his situation in a long letter to Robert Aiken it was still Jean who was the cause of his secret wretchedness and who was the source of ‘the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse’. The sole passage in the letter which Snyder thought might apply to Mary--‘I have seen something of the storm of mischief thickening over my folly-devoted head’--may now be interpreted as referring instead to the disconcerting reappearance of Betty Paton as a claimant for support. The sole evidence surviving from 1786, apart from Burns’s lyrics, is his sister’s story, told many years after his death, that one day in October he received a letter which he read with a look of agony and then crushed into his pocket as he silently left the house. Connecting this story with Burns’s later statement that ‘a malignant fever hurried my dear girl to her grave before I could even hear of her illness’, biographers have assumed that the painful letter bore the news of Mary’s death. But this, even granting perfect reliability to Isabella Begg’s memory, is pure assumption. Burns’s sole references to her were written from three to five years after the supposed event. With one exception they were intended for the mystification rather than the enlightenment of Robert Riddell and George Thomson. That exception is the composition of ‘Thou Lingering Star’ and the letter to Mrs. Dunlop which accompanied it--both of them written in a neurotic state close to complete nervous breakdown. The Highland Mary we know is the creation of biographers, and should be suffered to abide in the Never-Never Land of romance. The truth about the Burns of flesh and blood had better be sought in his relations with flesh and blood women. In these relations there were three main degrees. The foremost group consists of women who profoundly stirred him, and on whom for a time at least he concentrated his intellect and his affections as well as his desires. In this group belong Jean Armour, Margaret Chalmers, Clarinda, and probably Maria Riddell. Next come the women who engaged his passing fancy, and for whom he felt some tenderness, but who did not influence him deeply or long. Among these are Betty Paton, Anne Park, Jean Lorimer, and Jessie Lewars. A woman who appealed to Burns on either of these bases need not have been his mistress; in fact, only three of those named ever yielded to him. But below these was a third group, represented by Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow, who were mistresses and nothing more--the mere conveniences of the moment. These last never roused even a momentary spark of poetry in their lover. Judged purely on the basis of literary by-product, Mary Campbell belongs in the second group, but not in the first. Even her most ardent champion might hesitate to assert that any lyric addressed to her is the equal of ‘Ae fond kiss’ or ‘Of a’ the airts’. Jessie Lewars and Jean Lorimer both inspired better songs than Mary ever did.