The association with Hamilton fared worse. Poetry, except in the form of humour and satire, did not, it would seem, appeal to Hamilton as it did to Aiken, and between him and Burns was always the barrier of their business relation as landlord and tenant. Ultimately, indeed, a matter of business estranged them. In the spring of 1788, nearly two years after Gilbert Burns had become the sole lessee of Mossgiel, Hamilton apparently asked Burns to become his brother’s surety. The poet, who was lending Gilbert nearly half the proceeds of the Edinburgh _Poems_, declined to commit himself any further: ‘The language of refusal is to me the most difficult language on earth, and you are the man of the world, excepting One of R^t Hon^{ble} designation [i. e., Lord Glencairn], to whom it gives me the greatest pain to hold such language.... I never wrote a letter which gave me so much pain in my life, as I know the unhappy consequences: I shall incur the displeasure of a Gentleman for whom I have the highest respect, and to whom I am deeply oblidged.’ The foreboding was justified. After that reluctant refusal, Burns’s relations with his former landlord never regained their old cordiality. In his contacts with Aiken, Ballantine, Hamilton, and certain of the New Light clergy Burns had, by the spring of 1786, taken a further step in the realization of his own capacities. He found himself quite at ease, at least in male company, among members of the professional class to whom as a lad he had looked up with awe. He was discovering, moreover, that he was not their inferior in native ability. Though he did not know it then, he had in fact reached as high a level as he was ever to maintain in Scottish society. These lesser gentry not only received him, but treated him as an equal. The higher gentry--people of estates and pedigrees--the higher professional classes, and the nobility, might receive him for a time, but always with a latent condescension. Sooner or later, even with Mrs. Dunlop, even with Robert Riddell, some incident would reveal that their feeling toward him was after all _de haut en bas_. The friends whom he kept among men of social and professional standing, from Aiken and Ballantine at the beginning of his career to Alexander Findlater and John Syme at its close, were gentlemen, were men of education, but they were not, in Burns’s favourite capitalized phrase, Great People.