But the names of three other friends are associated with much more damage to Burns’s reputation during his life and after his death. Only one of the three was a Fencible--Robert Cleghorn, a jolly gentleman farmer from Corstorphine. Cleghorn had what Cunningham lacked, a strong relish for vernacular literature, publishable or unpublishable. Thus he became the recipient of many choice bits of verse, sometimes traditional and sometimes original, for his own and his friends’ edification. The correspondence harmed Burns’s reputation not through its publication but through its long suppression. That remarkable moralist, Lord Byron, read the Cleghorn letters in manuscript and set down in his journal a highly-coloured summary of them as ‘full of oaths and obscene songs’ which stimulated the imaginations of several generations of readers. Now that the surviving letters can be read in full, they produce no such revulsion as do some of the things Burns wrote about Jean Armour and Maria Riddell. For readers who do not relish broad humour they may be distasteful, but beneath their coarseness is the record of a genuine friendship with an honest, hearty, and generous man. One suspects that had Cunningham, for instance, visited Burns at Ellisland or Dumfries, he would have felt the same disillusionment at sight of the poet’s narrow and primitive domestic life which the pettier Robert Ainslie recorded. Cleghorn made such a visit in 1795, when Burns’s health and spirits were already declining, and left behind him a warm glow of renewed and strengthened friendship. It is regrettable that Cleghorn’s name should be, for most readers of Burns, associated with the poet’s collection of ‘cloaciniad’ verse. In fact, Cleghorn received no more of such work than did a dozen other friends, but John Allen, his stepson and heir, had ideas about the treatment of a great poet’s manuscripts which differed from those of William Smellie’s executors. Allen did not feel free, by mutilating some of his most characteristic letters, to ‘protect the memory’ of a poet who had never tried to disguise any side of his own nature. And Cleghorn’s tastes were as catholic as David Herd’s, or as Burns’s own. He measured the merit of a song by its singing quality, and not by its suitability for use in a young ladies’ seminary. Burns sent him the charming ‘O wat ye wha that lo’es me’ with the certainty that it would please him as much as the broadest ribaldry. The male who in male company does not occasionally relish crude humour is a scarce creature in any age or nation; was perhaps unusually scarce in eighteenth-century Scotland. The songs which went to Cleghorn went also to Graham of Fintry and Provost Maxwell, to Collector Mitchell and John M’Murdo and John Syme--in other words, to some of the best and most loyal characters in Burns’s circle. Boswell’s journals are crammed with proof that similar tastes prevailed in still higher ranks of society.