Unpropitious though such beginnings were for a career as a tenant farmer, they were relatively unimportant compared with the inner compulsions arising from his discovery of his poetic vocation. Many another young farmer had sowed his wild oats and then settled down to rear a legitimate family and become an elder in the Kirk. For Burns such a future had really ceased to be possible even before he left Lochlie. In April, 1783, under the melancholy influence of his own ill-health and his father’s dark prospects, he had begun to keep a commonplace book with the avowed intention of some day showing the world that a young ploughman, little indebted to scholastic education, was nevertheless capable of rime and reason. When he started the book his literary models were Shenstone, Mackenzie, and the folk-songs of his country. At some time during the next year, however, the poems of Robert Fergusson came into his hands. They roused him as Chapman’s Homer roused Keats. For the first time he realized that the Scottish dialect might be something more than a dying relic of the past. He had been long acquainted with Allan Ramsay, but Ramsay belonged to the primitive age before Scottish letters had been ennobled by such geniuses as Henry Mackenzie, James Beattie, and John Home. Now he found that Fergusson, only ten years older than himself, had returned to the speech and the verse-forms of Ramsay. And Fergusson was no country boy but an educated lawyer’s clerk bred in the Athens of the North. Reading these poems Burns realized their vivid descriptions and their wit--realized also that what Fergusson had done he could do as well, or better. Mauchline parish offered as many themes for homely satire as Edinburgh did. The theme ready to hand was ecclesiastical controversy. The neighbourhood was ululating with disputes between Old Lights and New Lights, and the leaders on both sides were behaving with the lack of charity peculiar to Christians on the war-path. Moreover, Burns’s landlord and friend, Gavin Hamilton, was in the thick of it, standing trial before the Kirk Session on a charge of Sabbath-breaking. Two neighbouring Old Light ministers--John Russell of Kilmarnock and Alexander Moodie of Riccarton--chose this time for a quarrel over parish boundaries, and conducted their holy row with the heat and personal invective of a heresy-hunt. Burns improved the occasion by composing ‘The Twa Herds’. Copying the poem in a disguised hand he showed it to Hamilton, remarking with studied gravity that he had no idea who the author was, but that he thought it pretty clever. Hamilton thought so too. Copies were passed from hand to hand; the New Lights, clergy as well as laity, received it with roars of applause; the Old Lights were correspondingly furious.