Burns was probably right in saying that he came home considerably improved. But he was also discontented. Mount Oliphant seemed narrower and drabber than ever after the colour of the smuggling village, and he had become acutely conscious--thanks equally to Peggy Thomson and to his tavern companions--of his own awkwardness. This consciousness led him to his first overt act of rebellion. In ‘absolute defiance’ of his father’s commands, he attended a country dancing school, to improve his manners. William Burnes’s ‘Manual of Religious Belief’ indicates a willingness to mitigate some of the sterner points of Presbyterian theology, but he was in full agreement with the Kirk’s condemnation of worldly amusements. Gilbert Burns, as well as some of his brother’s biographers, tried to explain away the remark about defiance, and the father may not have pressed the point too far when he saw that Robert’s mind was made up. Undoubtedly, however, Burns was correctly describing his own feelings at the time, and though the father sensibly accepted the accomplished fact and later allowed his other children to learn dancing he thenceforth regarded his eldest son’s conduct with suspicion and concern. On leaving Kirkoswald Burns had undertaken to carry on a literary correspondence with some of his schoolfellows. He was bent on improving his powers of expression and acquiring a literary style. But the medium he selected was prose. Probably in retrospect he exaggerated the actual extent of this correspondence--it is hard to believe that ‘every post’ brought him as many letters as if he had been a merchant, or that he could have paid the postage if it had. The few surviving specimens are quite enough. The poet’s uncle had once set out to buy one of the manuals of letter-writing which supply models for most of the imaginable contingencies of human life; he brought home instead ‘a collection of letters by the Wits of Queen Ann’s reign’. The exact volume has never been identified, though Burns’s subsequent quotations show that it included letters of Pope, Bolingbroke, and Swift. But the eighteenth century, until Boswell taught it better, did not publish really familiar letters. Such collections as Pope helped to bring out were really composed of brief essays. Personal opinion was subdued; personal news was deleted. The ‘unbridled effusions’ which make the charm of familiar letters were suppressed. On such unfortunate models, almost as stiff as Elizabeth Rowe’s ‘Letters Moral and Entertaining’ which he had found in his Masson, Burns set to work. The result was the same as when he encountered _The Man of Feeling_. A youth bred among literate people would have realized intuitively that these models showed only one side of letter-writing. Burns, with no other standards to measure them by, took them as the whole of the law and prophets, and shaped his epistolary style accordingly. His ear, attuned to the subtlest modulations of poetry, remained always deaf to the quieter