If Robert Riddell was the host, who, by compelling Burns to drink more than he wished to, reduced the poet to a state in which he insulted his hostess, the laird’s conduct admits of small excuse; if, as report has it, the scene occurred at Woodley Park and Robert Riddell subsequently took up the quarrel, he is even less excusable. Whichever version one accepts, Riddell was displaying innate snobbishness towards a man he considered, after all, a social inferior. If he was the host, realization of his own share in the matter should have made him charitable; if his brother was the host, Glenriddell was indulging in violent and uncalled-for partisanship. He held, it would seem, the same theory of a gentleman’s privileges as was enunciated a few years later by Sir John Graham Dalyell: ‘I am a gentleman, and I will be treated as such; and if any person presumes to pervert my meaning in any way whatever, if his rank is not equal to mine I will kick him; and if it is equal I will shoot him.’ Burns, as a plebeian, was kicked. There is a little satisfaction in knowing that the poet held to his resolution not to apologize to his host. The ‘Remorseful Apology’ supposed to have been addressed to a Riddell was really sent, early in 1796, to a Mr. S. Mackenzie. Four months after the quarrel Glenriddell was dead, still unreconciled to the poet who had done more for him than he could ever have done for the poet. A loud blustering squire, a hollow and unsubstantial mind; that was Robert Riddell. For the last five years of his life Burns’s social world centred in Dumfries. About it cluster dark stories and darker hints, in the effort to refute which the poet’s defenders have sometimes been led to dangerous extremities of special pleading. The truth is that Burns in Dumfries was neither better nor worse than Burns in Tarbolton and Mauchline. Such a report as James Gray’s of finding Burns reading poetry with his children and hearing the older boys recite their lessons does not refute the tales of boisterous revelry in taverns; both are true. The sole difference is that Burns in Tarbolton was an unimportant young man amid a group of other youths; in Edinburgh he was partly lost in the crowds; in Dumfries he was a prominent figure whose every action was noted. He did not degenerate in Dumfries, but neither did he become a chocolate seraph.