The ploughman-poet from Ayr is an engaging character, in spite of the efforts of 19th-century biographers to whitewash him into a versifying prig, or the more sensational school of commentators who turned him posthumously into a drunkard and debauchee (both schools of thought underplayed his political radicalism). Burns was intelligent and articulate, with a strong satiric side and an ability to see through pretence and humbug without effort; though he could hold his own easily in the intellectual salons of Edinburgh, he was probably happier with boon companions in a tavern. From the first he possessed the rare, demotic ability to reach the ear of the ordinary man, without vulgarity or writing down, and his celebrity in Scotland dated from well before his early death. The last chapters, however, are sad as we watch Burns, a minor excise officer, worry miserably about debt and the future of his wife and children while he slowly sinks under what was then called rheumatism, but may have been some rarer disease.