By the time he was twenty-six Burns’s status among people of his own rank was firmly established. He was the unquestioned leader of the reckless young; the welcome companion of ribald and unorthodox elders. The attitude toward him of the staid and sober ranged from sad head-shaking to violent denunciation. With people of rank above his own, however, he was still uneasy. Hamilton was probably the first man of the professional class with whom he formed a genuine friendship. John Mackenzie, the Mauchline surgeon who attended William Burnes in his last illness, remembered that on first visiting Lochlie he found Gilbert frank, modest, well-informed, and communicative, the father revealing the remains of an able mind beneath the cloud of illness and distress, and the mother quiet, sagacious, and self-possessed. But Burns sat glowering in a dark corner, ‘distant, suspicious, and without any wish to interest or please’; scrutinizing Mackenzie and obviously prepared to resent any display of superiority or patronage. As the doctor showed himself affable Burns gradually thawed. Though the written records of the friendship are meagre, Burns plainly liked and trusted Mackenzie, and Mackenzie reciprocated. From the time of their first meeting, the doctor declared, ‘I took a lively interest in Robert Burns, and, before I was acquainted with his poetical power, I perceived that he possessed very great mental abilities, an uncommon, fertile and lively imagination, a thorough acquaintance with many of our Scottish poets, and an enthusiastic admiration of Ramsay and Fergusson. I have always thought that no person could have a just idea of the extent of Burns’s talents who had not an opportunity to hear him converse. His discrimination of character was great beyond that of any person I ever knew....’ The surgeon introduced Burns as a poet to his own friend and patron, Sir John Whitefoord, who had previously known of the young farmer only as an earnest member of St. James’s Lodge; he also gave an introduction to Captain Andrew Erskine of Edinburgh, Boswell’s friend, and claimed to have been the first to bring the Kilmarnock _Poems_ to the attention of Hugh Blair. It was to Mackenzie and not to Gavin Hamilton that Burns turned for very practical help in the stormy weeks preceding his final acknowledgement of his marriage to Jean Armour, and when Mackenzie provided Jean and her lover with quarters in his own house he must have faced a weight of criticism from the embattled saints and gossips of the village that would have daunted many a man with a professional status to maintain.