roused a hobbledehoy calf-love, as adolescent as his hero-worship of the sailor. Brown taught him that direct action might usually be counted on to bring results, and here, as Burns later admitted, the friendship did him a mischief. Yet Brown was something more than a hard-boiled sailor initiating a green youngster. One Sunday afternoon the pair took a walking trip to Eglinton Wood, where under the inspiring influence of a spot associated with the memory of Sir William Wallace Burns confided to his mentor that he occasionally tried to write poetry. He was already poet enough to have a copy in his pocket. Brown listened, and declared that verses of such merit ought to be sent to a magazine. It was actually this, Burns recorded long afterwards, that first gave him the idea that he might amount to something as a poet. It was one thing to have one’s verses praised by a rural maiden like Nellie Kilpatrick or by one’s own admiring family; it was quite another to have them endorsed by a man of the world. Unfortunately Burns failed to name the poem Brown commended. At a guess it may well have been the two somewhat bawdy stanzas beginning ‘I murder hate by field or flood’, Andrew Dunlop’s manuscript of which was headed, ‘On the great Recruiting in the year 17-- during the American war’. Burns had no motive for mystifying Dunlop; hence the date of these stanzas can scarcely be later than 1781, and Brown would have been more likely to applaud such lines than the conventional religious pieces more or less contemporary with them.