Riddell was a country gentleman turned amateur antiquarian. He had embellished his grounds with a ‘Druid Circle’ and a ‘Hermitage’; he dabbled in numismatics and church architecture. These would scarcely have interested Burns--though he remained in the hermitage long enough to inscribe some verses on the window with Glencairn’s diamond-pointed pencil--but Riddell was also a musician in a small way. Besides composing a few commonplace airs of his own he professed great interest in the traditional music of his country. Here Burns shared his enthusiasm and far excelled his knowledge. The laird, perhaps at Burns’s suggestion, subscribed for Johnson’s _Museum_ and had his set bound with blank interleaves for notes on the songs, their authors, and their history. The number of his annotations gives the measure of his knowledge. Out of four hundred songs, one hundred and seventy have notes. Of these, one hundred and fifty-two were written by Burns, who must have spent many evenings at the task in his friend’s library; eighteen were by Riddell himself or an amanuensis. Sir Walter Scott summed up the laird’s prose writings as ‘truly the most extravagant compositions that ever a poor Man abandoned by providence to the imaginations of his own heart had the misfortune to devise.’ The company which sometimes came to Carse, including as it did men like Joseph Farington the painter--who noted that ‘Mr. Burns the Scottish Poet’ was ‘a middle-sized man, ... black complexioned, and his general appearance that of a tradesman or mechanick’, had ‘a strong expressive manner of delivering himself in conversation’, and knew no Latin--and Francis Grose, the antiquary whose inspiring enthusiasm was the real source of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, was more important than Riddell himself. The laird’s real tastes and aptitudes were convivial. A man of powerful physique and a rather overwhelming robustiousness of manner--William Smellie spoke of ‘his immense fist and stentorian voice’--he succeeded, like so many gentlemen of his day, in wrecking his health at an early age. The notorious ‘Whistle’ contest, in which Riddell and his kinsmen Sir Robert Laurie and Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch undertook to drink each other under the table for the possession of a family heirloom, was probably more typical of the laird’s true aptitudes than the annotations were. Even at that, though, he was outdone by Craigdarroch, who won the whistle by drinking ‘upds. of 5 Bottles of Claret’. Burns, like most of the friends of the contestants, found the incident vastly amusing; Burns’s biographers have argued the question of his real presence at Friars Carse with an almost theological fervour; nevertheless its only interest or value for posterity lies in the light it sheds on Robert Riddell’s character. According to biographical tradition, Robert Riddell was the staid member of the family and his brother Walter the wild one; actually such distinction