Though as Burns became more heavily burdened with labour and responsibility his letters grew shorter and fewer than at the peak of the correspondence during the summer of 1788, no serious rift appeared until December, 1792. When it came it was the result of Burns’s pride working in combination with his want of tact. Among the servants on Mrs. Dunlop’s estate was a milkmaid named Jenny Little, whom Burns’s success had inspired to burst into rime. Burns had already endured a good deal of her output, both from manuscripts sent to him by Mrs. Dunlop and from a pilgrimage of adoration which Jenny had made to Ellisland in 1790--an unsuccessful pilgrimage, for she had found the poet laid up with a broken arm and in no mood for entertaining an aspiring poetess. When Burns reached Dunlop in 1792 he found his patroness’s interest in her protégée still unshaken. With her assistance Jenny had recently printed her poems, and Mrs. Dunlop produced the volume with the request that Burns give his opinion of certain of the verses which she pointed out. He said, ‘Do I have to read all those?’ in a tone which she afterwards described as the equivalent of a slap in the face. It was supreme tactlessness. Burns was bored and showed it. A more politic man would have waded through the verses however much his jaw might ache with suppressed yawns. But boredom was not the worst aspect of the incident from Burns’s point of view: his pride was wounded. Of all his patrons in the upper ranks of society Mrs. Dunlop alone had kept up her interest in him and had appeared to treat him as an equal. Now she unconsciously revealed that she saw no _essential_ difference between his writing and Jenny Little’s. To her he was after all merely a peasant poet with the accent on the adjective; the difference between him and Jenny Little was a difference in degree and not in kind. Both wrote in dialect; she failed to see that one wrote Scots poetry and the other Scots twaddle.