Archibald Alison, son of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, was to become the life-long friend of Dugald Stewart. Starting in 1771, for a year, they shared lodgings in Glasgow when both were students at the University. Archibald was three years younger than Stewart and was just beginning his course. In 1784, Alison, now a clergyman of the Church of England, married Dorothea, the daughter of the late John Gregory, formerly Professor of Medicine at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and the sister of Dr James Gregory who, in 1776, had become Professor of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and become famous for his cure-all medicine, Gregory's Mixture. Burns's reaction to Alison's Essays might at first seem surprising, but a partial explanation is revealed when his relationship with one of the Edinburgh literati, the Reverend William Greenfield, is examined.