All this the Earl succeeded in doing without offending the touchy poet by condescension, though Burns’s pride sometimes suffered because of Glencairn’s deference to people of superior rank. Once, indeed, Burns was ‘within half a point’ of throwing down his ‘gage of contemptuous defiance’ because the Earl was giving too much attention to a wealthy dunderpate, but even then he was quickly reassured as to Glencairn’s sincere good wishes. Touchiness aside, Burns’s position in Edinburgh recalls Benjamin Franklin’s at Versailles a decade before. In each place the fashionable world thought it had discovered a child of nature; in each place the newcomer had really a shrewder mind and a quicker penetration of character and motive than most of the _élite_ who patronized him. The contrast between Burns’s attitude toward Glencairn and toward his fellow peer, the Earl of Buchan, shows how thoroughly the poet had learned to take men’s measure regardless of rank. Buchan also had professed great interest in Burns and was lavish with advice, but Burns recognized the man as an egotistical windbag and received his advice with an elaborate irony of compliment which would have betrayed itself to anyone less conceited than the busybody who once, when Sir Walter Scott lay ill, volunteered to arrange his funeral, and who, when he himself had written some amazingly bad verses, accepted as a tribute John Taylor’s publication of them in a part of _The Scots Magazine_ ‘distinct from the mass of vulgar poetry’. Nevertheless, Burns’s deference to Glencairn had unfortunate results. In securing William Creech, his brother’s former tutor, as Burns’s publisher, Glencairn thought he was doing the best possible good turn. Yet the outcome was months of vexation and delay for the poet, and the loss of all profits from later editions of his poems. Moreover, the poet had soberly decided that his best hope for a livelihood lay in securing an Excise post which would support him while he banked his profits as a reserve fund for his children. But Glencairn, like Mrs. Dunlop and other gentry whose knowledge of the lives of tenant farmers was limited to the quarterly receipt of their rents, was all for the poet’s investing his capital in a farm of his own. Disapproving of the Excise scheme, Glencairn would do nothing to forward it, though a word from him in the right place--that is, in the ears of Henry Dundas--would have procured Burns the appointment he sought. As it was, all hints fell dead, while meantime Patrick Miller dangled the bait of Ellisland. When at last Burns interested a man willing to help the Excise plan, the mischief was already done; he was committed to the undertaking which swallowed all his little capital. The best intentions of his would-be patrons kept turning to evil for Burns; even Glencairn’s gift of a diamond-pointed pencil made trouble by supplying the poet with the means of inscribing blazing indiscretions on window-panes.