Throughout the trip Nicol’s conduct was the same; he even snatched Burns away before breakfast from the home of his cousin, James Burness of Montrose. The Highland tour, though he did not then realize it, was Burns’s last opportunity to enlist the active friendship of people whose influence might have changed his life. His failure was largely Nicol’s fault. Reports of his abrupt and ungracious conduct undoubtedly came back to Edinburgh and contributed to the comparative neglect he suffered during his second winter in the city. Edinburgh was too small a place for misconduct to hide in; every lawyer in the old Parliament House would have heard that a servant girl had brought suit against the Ayrshire Bard; the stories from the Highlands, losing nothing in the telling, would add to the swelling tide of hostile gossip. The talk, indeed, reached so far, and was believed so implicitly, that not even death could alter Edinburgh opinion. Cunningham’s efforts to interest prominent citizens in the subscription for Burns’s widow and children met repeated snubs and refusals; to this day, despite the monument on the Calton Hill, the city pays only a half-hearted tribute to his memory. Of course all blame for the hostile talk cannot be shifted to Nicol, or even to Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow. Burns was indiscreet enough to start plenty of tales without help. But his too long stay unfortunately predisposed many people to believe the worst not only of his conduct in the city but afterwards. Henry Mackenzie and Dugald Stewart, for instance, both accepted at face value the second-hand reports of Burns’s alleged misdoings in Dumfries, and wrote him off their books. For years anecdotes showing Burns in an absurd or discreditable light circulated in Edinburgh. Some may have been true; others were malicious distortions which point the direction taken by city opinion. Thus Lockhart told how Hugh Blair had suggested, when a party of gentlemen were discussing possible changes in the Kilmarnock _Poems_, that ‘tidings of salvation’ might advantageously be emended to ‘tidings of damnation’. Thereupon the poet, according to Lockhart, embarrassed the professor by asking permission to acknowledge his improvement in a footnote. The basis of the story is truth; its details are not. Blair did suggest the change; Burns did, in conversation with other people, acknowledge his help. But Blair’s suggestion came in writing, as a carefully veiled hint amid other criticisms of the poems. The episode as Lockhart told it is city gossip intended to display Blair as the urbane professor and patron and Burns as a clumsy rustic. Of no importance in itself, the story is symptomatic of the attitude of cultured Edinburgh after the first enthusiasm over Burns had waned.