Frances Anna Wallace Dunlop belonged by both birth and marriage to the old landed gentry of Scotland, and claimed collateral descent from Sir William Wallace. In the autumn of 1786 her mind was ‘in a state which, had it long continued my only refuge would inevitably have been a mad-house or a grave; nothing interested or amused me; all around me served to probe a wound whose recent stab was mortal to my peace, and had already ruined my health and benumbed my senses.’ Grief at her husband’s recent death had something to do with it, but the chief wound was her eldest son’s extravagance and marital scandals. About the beginning of November a copy of the Kilmarnock _Poems_ reached her and her reading of them--significantly enough it was ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and other poems based on the genteel tradition of eighteenth-century poetry that won her admiration--roused her to fresh interest in life. ‘The poignancy of your expression’, as she put it, ‘soothed my soul.’ To one reading her letters without reference to her age she often sounds like a decrepit and almost dying woman. Actually when she began writing to Burns she was only fifty-six, and she outlived him by nineteen years. She opened the correspondence with an order for six copies of the poems; the flattered poet could scrape together only five, which he dispatched with a complimentary letter that included the news that he was planning a second edition in Edinburgh. Mrs. Dunlop immediately elected herself one of his chief advisers, and among other things suggested that in revising his poems he should avoid describing her great ancestor as ‘unhappy Wallace’ and should make the Twa Dogs sit down more decorously. Later she offered the two most inept of all the recorded plans for the poet’s future. In February, 1787, she proposed that he should use the proceeds of his Edinburgh subscription to buy a commission in the army. The man who wrote ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ and whose dislike for ‘the lobster-coated puppies’ of the army more than once got him into hot water would have cut a strange figure in any officers’ mess. On April 1, 1789, she suggested his applying for the newly established Professorship of Agriculture at Edinburgh University. The self-taught peasant would have cut a still stranger figure as the colleague of Robertson, Cullen, and Blair.