The pride which Richard Brown had taught to flow in proper channels was becoming all the more touchy as Burns’s confidence in himself increased. Sure of himself now among his equals, he was still resentfully helpless when superiors rubbed in their superiority. He had come as far as he could in his merely social capacity; what carried him the rest of the way was his poetry. Here Gavin Hamilton more or less unwittingly took the lead in introducing Burns to a new world. The Kirk Session of Mauchline, seeking to re-establish the old-time rigours of the Scottish Sabbath, had decided for once to make an example of a prominent citizen instead of an obscure one. Accordingly in the summer of 1784 Hamilton was summoned to stand trial for various ecclesiastical crimes such as absenting himself from church, habitually neglecting family worship, and causing a servant to dig new potatoes on a Sunday. On being convicted, Hamilton promptly appealed his case to the Presbytery of Ayr, and ultimately won it. How Burns intervened with ‘The Twa Herds’ has already been told. His authorship of that poem and its successors was soon avowed as the manuscripts passed from hand to New Light hand amid roars of Homeric laughter. People and institutions accustomed to taking themselves and being taken by others with the most intense seriousness are helpless in the face of mirth. Burns had found the one weapon which the orthodox could not withstand, though they could, and did, revenge themselves on the author of their humiliation. The fury generated by his satires did as much as, or more than, the odium of his personal sins to make Mauchline so unbearable that by 1786 Burns was ready to flee to Jamaica.