Burns observed the rest of the Edinburgh gentry and literati as closely as he did Glencairn and Buchan. He was measuring himself and his native ability against them, and was not inclined to award himself second place. But he was not comfortable with most of them. Even if they did not offend him by overt condescension he was fully aware that they received him only because he was the fad of the moment. When the novelty staled he could not hope to continue many friendships in exalted quarters. The tide of popularity had swept him higher than he could expect to remain; its ebb might leave him stranded far lower than he deserved. It was not long, indeed, before his hosts began to find things to criticize. Burns not only said what he thought, he said it with an emphasis they found unbecoming in a man of peasant birth. The great Doctor Johnson could be as gruff as he pleased with his Scottish hosts because he was Johnson; Lord Braxfield could roar and Lord Kames rave, both bawdy, in a gentleman’s home because they were Lords of Session; for Burns to express emphatic opinions argued a lack of the humility which beseemed a ploughman entertained by his betters. The fact was that Burns lacked both the finesse which would have enabled him neatly and inoffensively to deal with snubs, and the insensitive egotism which could have ignored them. No one could snub the Ettrick Shepherd, because his magnificent self-esteem made it impossible for him to see any remark in anything but a complimentary light. One did not safely snub Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, because that wasp could sting. Burns’s pride, unfortunately, not only made him sensitive; it made him aggressive and heavy-handed. When he flaunted the blue-and-buff of the Whigs he was going out of his way to assert his independence among people who were mostly Tories; when he told a lady, who had not waited an introduction before inviting him to her party, that he would come if she would also invite the learned pig from the Grassmarket, he was making a show of himself in one way in the very act of resenting being made a show in another. The consciousness that he was acting a part--whether behaving like a country bumpkin in Smellie’s printing-house, or posing as the Bard of Nature in drawing-rooms--no doubt partly explains some of his more violent outbursts. Thus when he demolished a clergyman, whose niggling criticisms of Gray had goaded him beyond endurance, with the Johnsonian thunderbolt, ‘Sir, I now perceive a man may be an excellent judge of poetry by square and rule, and after all be a damned blockhead!’ the victim was probably drawing all the electric tension which had been accumulating in the poet’s nerves through a long series of irritations and repressions. But such things did him no good in Edinburgh society.