These feelings were intensified by the appearance in the London _Chronicle_ of a longer article, also by Thomson, which included assertions that Burns’s ‘talents were often obscured and finally impaired by excess,’ that ‘his conduct and his fate afford[ed] but too melancholy proofs’ of his possessing the failings as well as the powers of genius, and that, ‘like his predecessor Fergus[s]on, though he died at an early age, his mind was previously exhausted.’ Thomson had never been in Dumfries, and had never met Burns. The friends in Dumfries who read his article did not concur. Syme’s comment was brief and pointed. These statements were ‘d----d illiberal lies’. On that comment, by the man who knew him best in his last years, the case for the defence of Burns against the stories of his deterioration in Dumfries may be allowed to rest. IV WOMEN Burns was twenty-six before he ever entered the home of a woman sufficiently well-to-do to have carpets on her floors. Though the last ten years of his life included many friendships with ladies, his basic ideas of the other sex were the fruit of the peasant environment he was reared in. His sentiment and chivalry were literary by-products; underneath them was always the crude realism of the Ayrshire countryfolk. In moments of stress it was only too apt to come to the surface. The only subtlety the peasant women of Burns’s youth could claim was that native to every daughter of Eve. Schooling was too expensive to waste on girls. The majority, like Agnes Broun, could not write their own names; many could not even spell out the Scriptures or the Psalms of David in metre. Their fathers, their husbands, or the minister could read the Bible to them, and thus they could obtain the light of salvation at second hand. But this is not to say that they knew no literature. In fact it was only among an illiterate population that the songs and ballads of popular tradition were living realities. James Hogg’s mother spoke for her whole class when she told Sir Walter Scott that he had killed her ballads by writing them down. Learning to read destroyed both the sense of reality in the traditional literature and the retentiveness of memory which made its transmission possible. Had Betty Davidson, Agnes Broun, and Jean Armour been literate women they would not have furnished Burns with the mass of traditional literature he owed to them.