in every mood; what he could never endure was dullness, pomposity, or conceit. As the autumn of 1786 wore on, new friends and old agreed that the success of the Kilmarnock _Poems_ should make Burns abandon his flight to Jamaica. He ought to publish a second edition in Edinburgh and then settle down, either on a farm of his own, or--as Aiken suggested--in the Excise service. The poet would find plenty of friends to help him win a hearing, and publishing in the capital would give him a national instead of a local audience. Burns must have made up his mind immediately after his dinner with Dugald Stewart. Among his new friends was Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Renfrewshire estates of the Earl of Glencairn. On November 1 Dalziel wrote to congratulate Burns on abandoning the West Indian venture and to tell him that he had showed the _Poems_ to the Earl himself. The Earl bought a copy, which he had richly bound, and expressed warm interest in the poems and their author. Thus began Burns’s most successful acquaintance with a peer--the only association of the sort which did not sooner or later end in apathy on one side and humiliation on the other. Though the circumstances of Burns’s earliest introduction to Edinburgh society are obscure, the obscurity is lightened if we take at face value the poet’s repeated statements that he owed everything to Glencairn--that the Earl, as he put it, took him by the hand and led him up to fame. Burns afterwards said that he went to the city without letters of introduction, but that can have been true only in the narrowest sense. Dalziel certainly apprised Glencairn of Burns’s plans, as Dr. Mackenzie apprised Sir John Whitefoord and Andrew Erskine, and as the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun apprised the blind poet, Thomas Blacklock. Dugald Stewart also must have known of the decision. Within a week of his arrival, Burns was the lion of the Edinburgh season. Many new friends must have contributed to such immediate success, but the poet’s emphasis on Glencairn’s kindness marks the Earl as the man who secured the patronage of the fashionable Caledonian Hunt, and probably also as his sponsor in Masonic society.