On at least two occasions, moreover, Burns was offered pay for journalistic writing in party newspapers. The origin, extent, and duration of his relations with Peter Stuart of the London _Star_ are all obscure, but it is plain that Stuart as a zealous Whig tried to get Burns as a regular contributor. The poet refused. When he struck off a satirical skit he was willing to give it to Stuart, but the only pay he accepted was a free subscription to the paper. Thus he managed to acquire the reputation, injurious to his hopes in government employ, of being a partisan writer without any reward except notoriety. Again in 1794 Patrick Miller, Jr., his landlord’s son who had been put into Parliament at the age of twenty-one, persuaded James Perry of the London _Chronicle_ to offer Burns what for those days was a fair salary if he would come to London and devote his talents to the press. Again Burns refused. He realized well enough that the prosperity of a newspaper was often short-lived and he feared to jeopardize his children’s future by exchanging an assured though meagre income for the chances of the journalistic profession. Besides, the writer in a partisan paper in 1794 was risking jail as well as economic insecurity, as the sedition trials then in progress had proclaimed to all the kingdom. But if he was not to support himself by writing how was he to support himself? That question hammered in his mind from the time he abandoned the Jamaica project until the early spring of 1788. Even before he went to Edinburgh he had thought of the Excise. But he found his Edinburgh patrons cold to all hints. These gentlemen reasoned simply. Burns was the ploughman poet: ergo, he should continue to plough. The only definite gesture made towards getting him government work was Mrs. Dunlop’s. She offered an introduction to Adam Smith in the hope that Smith might help him to a job in the customs, but the philosopher had left for London the day before Burns presented his letter. Moreover Smith no longer took an interest in much except his own health, and if Burns sought later to renew his application nothing came of it. His most favourable opportunity to cultivate the acquaintance of high officials was lost when he allowed William Nicol to drag him away from Blair Athole, where Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise, was one of the guests, and where Henry Dundas was shortly to appear.