Fortunately, too, Syme records bright passages as well as dark in the last years. There were evenings at Ryedale when they consumed more cups of tea than bottles of wine, and when ‘Robin’s confounding wit’ played as sharply as it ever did over a punchbowl. In 1793 and 1794 there were brief excursions with Burns into Kirkcudbright on which the mercurial poet displayed every facet of his nature, bursting into furious rage over a spoiled pair of boots, fulminating brilliantly satirical epigrams against the Earl of Galloway, announcing that he would dine nowhere where he could not ‘eat like a Turk, drink like a fish and swear like the Devil’, and anon proving a decorous and fascinating houseguest at St. Mary’s Isle, seat of the Earl of Selkirk, whose son Lord Daer had given Burns his first glimpse of the peerage. Burns still shrank from the ordeal of encountering such exalted folk--‘I am indeed ill at ease whenever I approach your Honorables & Right Honorables’--though now for a different reason. In 1786 the consciousness of his own rusticity had been uppermost; in 1794 he did not wish to be laid open either to a fresh snub or renewed condescension. But his last recorded intercourse with the peerage was as pleasant--and as dangerous--as his first. The Earl of Selkirk was one of the few Scottish peers who were Whigs at a time when all power belonged to the Tories; thus meeting Burns on congenial grounds he helped to draw him into the last of his ill-advised meddlings with politics by interesting him in the parliamentary campaign of Patrick Heron of Heron. So to the last the peerage influenced Burns against his own best interests. Nevertheless this visit to St. Mary’s Isle is refutation enough of the charge that in his last years Burns had sunk so low that gentlefolk shunned him. The man who so charmed the Earl’s young daughter, Lady Mary Douglas, that she lent him a volume of music and entered into correspondence about his task of fitting Scottish airs with words, can scarcely have been the social outcast some biographers have portrayed. In fact, he strikingly resembles the man who in 1787 swept the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and won the esteem of Lady Harriet Don and the Dowager Countess of Glencairn.