‘... Our Friend himself is as ingenious as ever, and Seems very happy with the Situation I have described--His Mind however now appears to me to be a great Mixture of the poet and the Excise Man--One day he sits down and Writes a Beautiful poem--and the Next he Seizes a cargo of Tobacco from some unfortunate Smuggler--or Roups out some poor Wretch for Selling liquors without a License. From his conversation he Seems to be frequently among the Great--but No Attention is paid by people of any rank to his wife....’ After such a letter--withheld from complete publication until 1938--it is plain enough why the friendship went into a swift decline. For another year or two Burns continued to write, gaily or confidentially, but got small response. Ainslie’s last letter, early in 1794, ‘was so dry, so distant, so like a card to one of his clients’, that the poet ‘could scarce bear to read it’, and never answered it. The lawyer was already on his way, via the fashionable _Werther_ melancholy, back to the orthodox piety which led him, early in the nineteenth century, to compose a couple of devotional pamphlets. But neither piety nor loyalty sufficed to make him protect the memory of the friend whose name has kept his alive. Preserving the reckless letters Burns had written him, he allowed them to pass into circulation, once at least accompanied by a formal docket certifying that Burns was the author of a letter signed with a humorous pen-name. The mutilations which so many of the manuscripts have suffered were the work of later owners.