Knowledge of the material side of the Irvine partnership is limited to what Burns himself told in his autobiographic letter, which is not wholly reliable evidence. Not that Burns intentionally coloured the facts. The safest rule in reading his letters is to take it for granted that if he said a thing about himself it was true; if he said a thing about someone else, he believed it to be true. But to his passionate temperament and ‘skinless sensibility’ (the phrase is his own) anyone through whom he suffered loss or humiliation became almost automatically a villain of the blackest. Hence his charges that Peacock, his Irvine partner, ‘was a scoundrel of the first water, who made money by the mystery of thieving’, need not be taken literally. Burns, a complete greenhorn at business, may possibly have been taken in by an unscrupulous rascal, but it is equally possible that Burns in retrospect blamed Peacock for a failure in which they were both at fault. In any case, the business side of these months influenced Burns’s future only as it convinced him of his unfitness for ‘the little chicaning art of bargain-making’. What really mattered were the new friends, and the new ideas of himself and his place in the world inspired by these friends and by the introspection resulting from ill-health. Chief of the new friends was the sailor, Richard Brown, whom Burns looked up to as a junior schoolboy looks to the athletic senior. Brown was about the poet’s age, but had all the worldly experience Burns lacked. He was better educated than most seamen of his day, though perhaps his story of having been patronized by a wealthy man who promised to set him up in life was only another sailor’s yarn. He had at any rate abilities of a sort. An incompetent man could not have become the master of a West Indiaman while still in his twenties. But in 1781 that promotion was still to win. Brown just then was down on his luck. His ship had recently been captured by an American privateer, and he had been put ashore on the coast of Connaught with nothing but his life and the clothes he wore. Nevertheless the friendship with Burns probably began with something of patronage on Brown’s part. The experienced, far-travelled, and distinctly hard-boiled sailor was interested in the awkward, stoop-shouldered country lad who in company alternated between sullen silence and--if he felt himself at ease--unusually vivid and copious speech. Obviously Brown realized that there was something in him; obviously also he took pleasure in enlightening him as to the ways of the world. Burns saw in Brown ‘every noble, manly virtue’ and strove to imitate him. Burns was already proud; Brown taught his pride to flow in proper channels--whatever that may mean. But Brown also was the only man the poet ever met who was a bigger fool than himself where women were concerned. The various goddesses by whom Burns’s tinder heart was continually lighted up still