It was not that his manners were worse than gentlemen’s. In some respects they were probably better. ‘Swearing,’ Henry Cockburn dryly records, ‘was thought the right, and the mark, of a gentleman. And, tried by this test, nobody, who had not seen them, could now be made to believe how many gentlemen there were.’ Boswell’s long-suffering wife, Margaret Montgomerie, took her husband to task for his loud and abusive manner of asserting himself in argument, and Boswell admitted to his journal that she was right. Benjamin Franklin remarked that Edinburgh was the only place he knew where violent disputatiousness was not confined to lawyers and university men. But when a mere peasant exhibited, in however mild a form, the traits of the gentry, he was forgetting his place, and should be put back in it. Moreover, Burns quickly realized that these gentry scorned the national tradition which was his life-blood. If they did not all, like Dr. John Moore, urge him henceforth to write in standard English, they at least made it plain that a Scots poet could not aspire to literary equality with Dr. Beattie and Dr. Blair. Robert Fergusson was a regrettable scamp whom Edinburgh preferred to forget; Burns erected, at his own expense, a monument to Fergusson, and insisted, in speech and writing, on praising the dead poet and heaping scorn on the gentry who had let him starve. The place where Burns, after the first few weeks, really enjoyed himself in Edinburgh and where he made most of his intimate and lasting friendships, was among the Crochallan Fencibles. This was one of the numerous clubs in which lawyers and merchants carried on the old convivial traditions of their city. Edinburgh clubs were ancient institutions which arrayed bibulous functions in ceremonials ranging from the harmless High Jinks described by Scott in _Guy Mannering_ to almost psychopathic debauchery in such an organization as the Wig Club. They were, in fact, along with the Freemasons, the ancestors both of the American fraternal orders and of the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs. In the more elaborately organized groups each officer, and sometimes every member, had a special title. Thus each member in Allan Ramsay’s Easy Club took the name of an old Scottish writer; in the Cape Club, to which Robert Fergusson belonged, each member was a Knight Companion of the Cape, with tides like Sir Cape, Sir Brimstone, Sir Precenter (Fergusson himself), Sir Nun and Abbess, and Sir Pope. The Fencibles went in for military designations. William Smellie, the gruff, slovenly, and erudite printer who was handling the Edinburgh edition of the _Poems_, as Adjutant of the corps introduced the poet. Burns’s publisher, Creech, proved a social disappointment as well as a financial disaster; his printer was a man after his own heart, an ‘old Veteran in Genius, Wit and Bawdry’. Smellie, like Burns, concealed an inward diffidence and sensitivity beneath an aggressive manner; like Burns, too, he was self-educated.