Indecorum of language was likewise barred, and clerical biographers in discussing these rules have left the impression that the Club was a kind of Y.M.C.A. From what we know of peasant life in Scotland and of the adolescent male everywhere, it is possible that the biographers were mistaken. Whatever his conduct in 1780, Burns was soon applying the tenth rule in no platonic or idealistic sense. Nevertheless the Club played an important part in developing his powers. Besides giving him an audience for his ideas it showed him that he could dominate his audience. Thenceforward Burns took the lead in any social group where he was intimate; his companions, re-echoing his wit, believed that they shared it and even convinced him that they did. The roster of his friends includes many wholly commonplace people like John Richmond and Robert Ainslie who shone only by reflected light, but whose satellite nature Burns was quite unaware of at the time. Moreover, the Club gave him almost his first experience of the wine of applause, and he found it a heady vintage. Among the Tarbolton Bachelors was David Sillar--not a charter member of the Club, but admitted to it early in 1781. A year younger than Burns, Sillar, under his friend’s inspiration, produced a few commonplace poems which gave Burns the excuse for hailing him as brother poet. Sillar had a certain gift for characterization in prose; he described Tarbolton townsfolk as ‘uncontaminated by reading, conversation, or reflection’, and left the most vivid extant picture of Burns on the threshold of manhood. Burns was beginning to reveal the playboy elements in his nature--that desire above all things to be conspicuous which he shared with such very different geniuses as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Bernard Shaw. In a day when strict Presbyterians still cropped their hair, after the fashion which in the previous century had earned them the name of Roundheads, Burns let his grow long and wore it in a queue--‘the only tied hair in the parish’. When everyone else was wearing plaids of ordinary shepherd’s gray, Burns sported one of dead-leaf colour. And since the uncontaminated parishioners of Tarbolton were orthodox Old Lights Burns acquired easy notoriety by setting up as a heretic.