The good as well as the ill of Brown’s friendship belongs to the six or eight months at Irvine. If the friends met during the next four or five years, no references to their intercourse survive. When the Kilmarnock _Poems_ were published, Brown received the only inscribed presentation copy on record, and in December, 1787, the two began a correspondence which lasted for a couple of years in the intervals of Brown’s voyages. Their only recorded meeting, however, was in Glasgow in February, 1788, when the poet told Brown all about Jean Armour. Burns’s last letter, in November, 1789, in reply to a complaint about his silence, is as cordial as ever, yet the friendship ended. According to tradition, Burns’s charge about Brown’s moral influence had reached the sailor, now a married man with a steadily improving position to maintain and far from eager to be reminded that he had heard the chimes at midnight. After Brown’s death, the presentation copy was found hidden away in the back of an old sideboard. The sailor was not the only friend who in later years wanted to live down his associations with the poet. The descendants of John Wilson concealed for more than a century the fact that instead of resenting ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’ he appealed to Burns for help when his position as schoolmaster at Tarbolton became intolerable. On the other hand, James Humphry of Mauchline continued till his dying day to boast that he was ‘Burns’s bletherin’ bitch’. During the same months in which Brown was stirring Burns to a new self-confidence his health was producing opposite effects. Throughout his life his diseased heart reacted unfavourably to nervous stress; the Irvine experience was the first of many. Realization of his bad bargain with Peacock combined with the unaccustomed strain of dusty indoor labour to bring on a period of ‘hypochondria’--in other words, nervous depression resulting from defective heart-action. Its tangible results were such lachrymose verses as the ‘Prayer in the Prospect of Death’ and the letter to his father in which he announces that he is ‘quite transported at the thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adiew to all the pains, and uneasiness, and disquietudes of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it.’ The letter is not merely morbid, it is adolescent; and Mrs. Carswell has noted that the solemn announcement that ‘I am not formed for the bustle of the busy nor the flutter of the Gay’ is cribbed verbatim from _The Man of Feeling_. William Burnes, however, probably regarded it as admirable proof that his son was beginning to take serious views of religion and life. In any case it represents only a passing mood of ill-health. The important fact about the Irvine days is that Burns was considering seriously his own abilities and his future position.