Crude humanity, however, was not the only thing Burns studied at Kirkoswald. He encountered some new books as well. Thomson’s _Seasons_ introduced him to the chief Scottish poet of the century who had made his reputation by writing in standard English; Shenstone’s ‘Elegies’ and ‘The Schoolmistress’ initiated him into the poetry of sentiment, and the Spenserian stanza of the latter gave him the verse-form for ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’. In reading these poets, however, he was merely extending an acquaintance already made through the specimens in Arthur Masson. His prose reading opened a different world. Novels were not to be found in the stricter Presbyterian homes, so _Pamela_, an odd volume of _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, and above all Mackenzie’s _The Man of Feeling_, were a vivid experience. Nothing in his previous training had inoculated him against the virus of sentimentality; exposed to its most extreme form, he was infected for life. This, the lad no doubt said to himself, was the way persons of superior sensitivity looked upon life; very well, he could prove that his sensibility was equal to theirs. At the first opportunity he bought a copy of _The Man of Feeling_ and carried it with him everywhere until he wore it out. Had Burns known more of literature and of the world he would have been able to take Mackenzie’s sentiment at the proper discount. Then the book’s influence might have been good. It might gently have corrected the harshness of his peasant background, as the literature of sentiment in general ameliorated the brutality of the eighteenth-century world. As it was, the book set up a preposterous ideal which divided Burns’s energies and sometimes vitiated his work. The crudities of peasant life needed softening and elevating, but sentimentalism made many of his efforts in this direction mawkish instead of humane. The poet who portrayed an old farmer’s affection for a faithful mare was revealing sentiment in the best sense of that much-abused word; the poet who moralized over a ploughed-under weed was pumping up emotions such as no real farmer ever felt. Hence it is no exaggeration to say that the foundations for the weakest elements in his work, as well as for the magnificent zest of ‘The Jolly Beggars’ and ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, were laid at Kirkoswald.