Among the lawyer Fencibles the most congenial to Burns was Alexander Cunningham, a distant and impoverished relative of Lord Glencairn. Though Burns described him to his face as dissipated but not debauched--a subtle distinction of which the exact import is probably forever lost--Cunningham was diffident and retiring. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps also because of his kinship to Glencairn, Burns never sent him on such ticklish errands as he entrusted to Bob Ainslie, but their literary and intellectual fellowship was sincere. Unlike Hay and Ainslie, Cunningham had real fondness for the higher types of poetry, though to offset this he had the anglicized Scotsman’s inability to see anything but the ludicrous and the low in folk literature. Burns felt that in offering ‘My Love is like a red red rose’ to Cunningham he had to apologize for its simplicity; Popean imitations would have been more in his line. The young lawyer, in short, belonged to the generation which was trying to live down the national characteristics that meant most to Burns. In Edinburgh the legal profession was the last stronghold of the rich old gusto of Scottish life, the last group of men unashamed of being ‘characters’. But even there such traits belonged mainly to the generation passing or past which included men like Braxfield, Monboddo, and Kames, or to the already mature generation of Charles Hay and Henry Erskine. Cunningham belonged more nearly to the generation of Henry Cockburn, without Cockburn’s relish for the memories of traits which he did not share.