In the spring of 1792 Walter Riddell purchased the estate of Goldielea near Dumfries, renamed it Woodley Park in Maria’s honour, and set up as a country gentleman. More accurately, he paid a small deposit on the purchase price without knowing how he would raise the main sum. Burns visited frequently at Woodley Park, though its master bored him. Walter Riddell apparently shared his brother’s convivial habits without his brother’s modicum of literary and intellectual interests, and the poet’s attitude towards him is more clearly shown by the almost total absence of Walter’s name from his letters to Walter’s wife than even by the crude epitaph which described the man as empty-headed and poisonous-hearted. In letter-writing at least the friendship with Maria reached perihelion in the autumn of 1793. Walter was then in the West Indies, trying to raise money on his estate there, and Maria was living alone at Woodley Park with her books, her music, and two baby daughters. By this time Burns was ponderously flirtatious. Maria was the first and fairest of critics, the most amiable and most accomplished of her sex, and it was the final proof of his unhappy lot that when he was in love ‘Impossibility presents an impervious barrier to the proudest daring of Presumption, & poor I dare much sooner peep into the focus of Hell, than meet the eye of the goddess of my soul!’ At least one impassioned lyric which originally began ‘The last time I cam o’er the moor And passed Maria’s dwelling’ had been composed and submitted to the lady’s criticism accompanied by a postscript which transparently disclaimed personal application. In Walter’s absence, many of their meetings during this autumn were at the homes of mutual friends or at the little receptions which Maria held between the acts in her box at the theatre. These latter, however, were sometimes subject to interruptions. On at least one occasion Burns found an army officer--‘a lobster-coated puppy’--already in possession, and withdrew without even announcing himself. Maria chided him for his failure to appear and invited him formally to share her box at the next performance; he kept her supplied with all his latest lyrics, including those addressed to Clarinda. It would be a mistake to take Burns’s impassioned avowals too seriously. Maria was a young and fascinating woman of the type which pleases men better than it does members of her own sex, and Burns thoroughly enjoyed her conversation. To the pleasures of intellectual intercourse her company added a subdued erotic stimulation which he expressed in the only language he knew. The very frankness of his remarks and Maria’s calm acceptance of them is proof that they were neither meant nor taken literally.