on passage money and a substantial payment to Betty Paton reduced his net gain to about twenty. But Burns still had no wish to write poetry for money. He considered that ‘downright Sodomy of Soul’. Poetry was his calling, but he refused to think of it as his livelihood. Another man for other reasons doubted the commercial prospects of poetry. In spite of the handsome balance-sheet of the first edition, John Wilson, the Kilmarnock printer, declined to undertake a second without advance payment for all labour and materials. He felt that the first had glutted the market. His timidity helped to transform Burns from a local celebrity into a national figure. When friends in Mauchline and Ayr suggested republishing the poems in Edinburgh Burns thought it an attractive but impractical dream. But when copies of the book reached people of influence in the capital and they repeated the suggestion it wore a different look. By October the hope of a favourable reception in the city had come to Burns from at least three different sources. His friend, the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun, had sent a copy of the book to Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet; Blacklock had commended it warmly and had even promised--not so warmly--to bring it to the attention of Hugh Blair. The famous professor of rhetoric, Blacklock thought, was too refined in his taste to relish it. Another eminent professor was not so finicky. Dugald Stewart, whose country home was at Catrine a few miles from Mauchline, read and enjoyed the poems, invited the poet to dinner, and added his personal encouragement to the Edinburgh venture. Finally the book reached even the peerage. On November 1st Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Earl of Glencairn’s estates, wrote that he had showed the poems to the Earl and that the Earl had expressed his pleasure in them and his desire to befriend their author. This approbation was heartening as Blacklock’s and even Dugald Stewart’s could not be. The Earl had a reputation for generosity and for keeping his word; he was one of the most popular and influential peers in Scotland and his endorsement would have weight with the people of wealth and fashion on whom the success of a subscription would have to depend. But the Earl had nothing to do with the abandonment of Jamaica. The same letter which brought the news of the Earl’s interest also brought Dalziel’s congratulations on Burns’s giving up his plans for leaving the country. What Glencairn really did was to confirm the poet in his determination to offer his poems to a larger audience.