But there was a still deeper psychological hindrance to success at Ellisland. Even had the soil been productive, even had he secured a foreman who could have kept his hands at work, the Burns who undertook Ellisland was not the Burns of Lochlie or even of Mossgiel. Though by no means setting up as a gentleman farmer, he had become conscious of having a position to maintain. Gilbert, he thought, might be able to take over Ellisland and succeed with it; ‘as he can with propriety do things that I _now_ cannot do.’ Physical debility was also to be reckoned with, for he must have got out of training during almost two years of exemption from regular labour, and his weakened heart would prevent his easily recovering his lost tone. But in fact his mind was filled with other matters and metres. That during his first summer he spent alternate fortnights with Jean in Mauchline was a temporary circumstance without relation to the success of the farm thereafter, but that his work for Johnson’s _Museum_ was filling his mind was a fact less easily discounted. In the middle of his first summer he had a fiddler with him for at least two days playing over a collection of Highland music in quest of lyric tunes for Johnson. It was a prelude to his greatest period of lyric creativeness, but it was not an augury of success in managing a poor farm on limited capital. The first season’s harvest offered little encouragement. Wet weather and scanty labour made it difficult to salvage whatever thin crop the fields had produced. Before his lease was six months old Burns was confiding to his friends that he was uncertain of his farm’s doing well, but, as he told Ainslie, he had his Excise commission in his pocket and did not care three skips of a cur dog for the gambols of Fortune. The chance of obtaining the commission had made him willing to undertake the farm; possession added still another psychological handicap to its successful conduct. Embittered youthful memories of the humiliations of a tenant farmer had been reinforced by the development of his poetic vocation to clog whole-hearted effort. Now the existence of his commission held always open a door of escape from any threatened renewal of the old humiliation and thereby unconsciously slowed still further the endeavours which were his only safeguard. He was defeated at Ellisland before he began.