But if his satires made the village too hot for him they were also the direct means of enabling him to escape both from the village and from the ranks of the peasantry. One of the first friends to whom Hamilton showed ‘The Twa Herds’ was another lawyer, Robert Aiken of Ayr, who conducted and won Hamilton’s case before the Presbytery. Hamilton, apart from the conviviality almost inseparable from a man of his profession in eighteenth-century Scotland, was cool and businesslike. Aiken was emotional and enthusiastic, a good forensic reader and speaker, and an easy prey to sentiment. Pathos, in life or in a poem, suffused his eyes with tears and set the buttons popping on his tight waistcoat. But, like the more famous Man of Feeling, Henry Mackenzie, Aiken seldom in daily life permitted sentiment to overcloud common sense. Along with his fellow townsman, John Ballantine the banker, the lawyer soon became the poet’s confidant and chief literary adviser. ‘Orator Bob’ lost no opportunity of reading his young friend’s verses aloud, with such expression that Burns later declared he had never fully appreciated his own work until he heard Aiken read it. As the poet’s troubles thickened in the early months of 1786 it was with Aiken and Ballantine that he discussed both his plans for emigration and his arrangements for publishing his poems, their decision as to what ought to be included in the Kilmarnock volume apparently being final. Though Aiken’s action, as James Armour’s legal adviser, in cancelling whatever ‘lines’ Burns had given Jean, caused a momentary chill, the lawyer soon proved that his professional conduct did not interfere with his private friendships. He obtained 145 subscriptions for the Kilmarnock _Poems_--nearly one-fourth of the entire edition. Even amid the excitement of his first dazzling fame in Edinburgh Burns recalled with a glow of affection the kindly patronage of Aiken and Ballantine, and long after he had quitted Ayrshire forever he continued from time to time to send them new poems which he thought they might like. As late as 1791 he was still gratefully remembering Ballantine’s part in handing him ‘up to the “Court of the Gentiles” in the temple of Fame’--a figure of speech which combined neatness and literal accuracy. It was only to the outer court--that of the bourgeoisie and minor gentry--that Aiken and Ballantine were able to conduct him.