But in the summer and autumn of 1786 it seemed there might be no limit to Burns’s social advancement. As he went about the country during August and September, collecting the subscriptions for his poems, the parish outcast of a few months earlier found himself everywhere courted and applauded. New acquaintances and old united to draw him out, and the bolder his remarks the better they liked them. But he was still capable of awe. In October came an invitation to dine on the 23rd at Catrine House, country home of Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh University. The company included Basil William, Lord Daer, the flighty and consumptive but liberal-minded son and heir of the Earl of Selkirk. In an amusing set of verses Burns described how, at the prospect of meeting a peer for the first time, his knees shook as he sidled into the Professor’s drawing-room, and he reverted to his old trick of watching from a corner until he had taken the measure of the company. The incident is worth mentioning because it was probably the last time Burns was ever unsure of himself in society. In later months and years he was often irritated and uncomfortable when members of the upper classes emphasized their elevation, but such feelings were the reverse of awe. Two months after the dinner at Catrine he was meeting professors and peers by the dozen instead of the brace, and was maintaining not merely self-possession but critical appraisal. Burns’s standards of social intercourse, as of so many other things, were firmly established before the surviving records become full enough for detailed study. They were as honest and straight-forward as the rest of his dealings. Except for the brief embarrassment of a first meeting, rank as such meant nothing to him. What he demanded, and all he demanded, of any man was, in his own phrase, that he have something to him. That something must be native; a matter of mind and personality, not of social place. A Souter Johnie was better company than a Hugh Blair, because the cobbler’s wit and wisdom were the product of native shrewdness dealing with first-hand experience; the professor’s attainments were ‘meerly an astonishing proof what industry and application can do’. To his cultured friends, Burns seemed to have a perverse taste for low company, whereas his real quest was genuine company. His own unbridled wit and tempestuous emotions naturally made him gravitate towards other similarly endowed people, who too often were not pillars of society, but this was not his reason for choosing them. When a pillar of society bore himself ‘to all the Actors, high and low, in the drama of Life, simply as they merited in playing their parts’, and excelled in telling a story--in other words, when the pillar was Dugald Stewart--Burns enjoyed his company as much as John Rankine’s or Willie Nicol’s. Nor was wit or waggishness necessarily demanded. Grave wisdom Burns could relish as well as gay, though not