Murdoch was not the man to set a poetic child’s imagination on fire, and since he applied the usual schoolmasterly standard of judging the pupils according to their docility, it is hardly surprising that he found the timid and gentle Gilbert a more promising lad than his brother. In any case, Murdoch’s service was too brief to have much permanent influence on Burns’s mind. Before the master had completed his tenure of about two years and a half at Alloway, William Burnes had removed to Mount Oliphant farm, separated from the school by two miles of sodden road which must have made regular attendance difficult, and sometimes impossible. Yet the master retained a sort of puzzled affection for the boy whom he was too prosaic to understand, and Burns reciprocated the feeling with real respect and esteem. Murdoch, in the schoolroom and in the long evenings in what he called the argillaceous fabric or mud domicile at Alloway, had at least impressed the lesson that books had meaning and that words should be used with precision. That Burns in later life never had any difficulty in saying precisely what he meant, he probably owed at root to Murdoch’s severe drill; that his style of saying it was frequently much too formal he likewise owed to the dominie and to the prose selections of Arthur Masson. The earliest stages of book education are seldom important in shaping the maturity of the learner. They only furnish him with a few tools which he may later apply in his own way to his own ends. But with Burns the whole pressure of his formal education was all his life in direct conflict with his instinctive preferences. For John Murdoch, as for Arthur Masson, Scottish vernacular literature did not exist. Scottish writers like James Thomson and John Home, who had made reputations in England by writing in standard English, were admired to the far side of idolatry, but for Scottish youths, as for English, Pope was the model for poetry; the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ for prose. Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden were the only writers earlier than 1700 who were widely read and unreservedly admired, though the beginnings of romanticism were evoking some lip-service to Spenser. If Chaucer was read at all, it was in the modernizations and imitations of Dryden, Pope, and Prior; the Elizabethan and Caroline lyrists were safe sources for newspaper poets to steal from, as Sterne stole from Burton. By modern standards, the amount of native literature needed in order to appear well-read was limited, but its very limitation intensified its pressure. Poverty kept Burns from the influence, for good or ill, of the classics; nothing could preserve anyone, who read at all, from the influence of the neo-classics. Outside the door the rich vernacular literature of Scotland was still vigorously alive, but no schoolmaster in Burns’s boyhood would have dreamed of letting it in.