But though Burns shrank from the Caledonian Hunt he did not always avoid similar company. There were meetings at which he and Syme drank bumpers out with wild Irishmen--such meetings as led Thomas Telford the engineer jovially to warn Burns that if he went on ‘in his old way, not even a _she Devil_ will be able to meet with a Milt in him.’ There was a drunken brawl with one Captain Dods, who took hot exception to the poet’s toast, ‘May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause.’ That Burns escaped a duel only because he was not the Captain’s social equal did not lessen his humiliation. Most biographers have held that such a toast in the presence of gentlemen holding the King’s commission was a huge breach of the proprieties, and so it was--if Burns was not goaded into giving it. Nothing in the record as it stands forbids belief that Dods, or some other officer who knew that Burns was suspected of sympathy with the French, may have called for a round of loyal toasts with the deliberate intention of embarrassing the poet. In that case, nothing could have been neater than Burns’s evasion, and since nothing came of the episode it is to be presumed that Samuel Clarke succeeded in making the sobered Dods realize what his objection to the sentiment implied. But there were other similar episodes which cannot be so favourably explained, and which multiply proof that Burns had never acquired finesse, whether in toasting, flattering, or sinning. Whatever he did was done so forthrightly that it attracted attention. And the moment he attracted attention his companions recollected that after all he was a peasant received on sufferance into gentle company. The outcome might be expulsion from the house for conduct which a gentleman born need not even have apologized for, it might be a verbal attack like Captain Dods’s, or it might be merely a tacit resolve to drop him forthwith. The Edinburgh experience repeated itself in Dumfries. Burns’s ill-repute in certain quarters during his life and after his death was not owing to his being a sinner above the other Caledonians, but simply to his lack of the social standing which enabled Kames and Braxfield and Boswell to misbehave without penalty, and which would have tempered the sting of his satirical outbursts.