But if his conflict with the Kirk had brought him humiliation it had also brought him the sense of power and the intoxication of applause. He had long known that his conversational wit and fire could dominate a knot of cronies. Now he had learned that he could write things which stirred both the laughter and the deeper emotions of educated men as well as of his social equals. The hostility of the Holy Willies was even more inebriating than the applause of Gavin Hamilton and his friends. Men do not hate unless they fear; the measure of his success and power was the measure of the antagonism he had aroused. The youth whose weakness it had always been to lack an aim had found one now. His education was complete. Intimate observation and experience of a small community had acquainted him with human nature, and had at last roused him to realization of his own capacities and his true vocation. His estimate of himself and his work, he later told John Moore, was pretty nearly as high in 1785 as it was two years later, after all the adulation of Edinburgh. All that he needed now was the opportunity to display his talents on a larger stage. III MEN Burns entered on his manhood at Irvine in 1781. Before his ill-starred venture as a flax-dresser he was an aimless and inarticulately rebellious youth; after it, though he was still aimless for a time, his rebellion against the narrow world of his origin was overt and vocal. Yet even under the stimulus of Irvine he was long in finding his proper speech. When he wrote the earliest of his extant letters, Burns, already a man in years, was still a boy in mind. His self-conscious disquisitions on such high-resounding themes as Pride and Courage mark him as less mature at twenty-one than Chatterton was at sixteen; he had passed the age at which Keats died before he began to say anything worth heeding. At twenty-two, his vague aspirations momentarily focussed on the idea of establishing himself in business as a necessary prelude to matrimony, he made his sole attempt at living according to the standards of a working-day world. Materially, the attempt was an abject failure; spiritually, it set him on the direct road to realizing himself.