Burns was already conscious of something more in himself than there was in the average young peasant; as an escape from worries over his own health and the family’s future he was undertaking to leave a record of himself to edify some hypothetical future reader. Whatever tinge of humility there might be on his title-page was, like the pretence at third-person reporting, assumed. He meant to prove that a peasant youth shared the feelings of his betters and could rime and moralize to as good effect as they. But the title-page, the quotations from Shenstone, and the opening paragraph about Love all announce a programme he soon abandoned. When he began the book he was still thinking in the terms of his first letters about Pride and Courage; before he ended it he was thinking in poetry. Though he might continue to assert that he rimed for fun, the fact was that from the day in April, 1783, when he commenced the Commonplace Book he was composing for publication, though not necessarily for print. His earliest verses were either the expression of a personal emotion, social _jeux d’esprit_, or conventional exercises in versification, with no purpose beyond the momentary and personal one; the ‘Observations, Scraps of Song, &c.’, were to be his legacy to the world. Not by chance did the Commonplace Book and its successor survive the general destruction of his private papers when he supposed himself on the eve of flight to Jamaica. Even though by that time the best of his verse had escaped the hazard of manuscript and was safely enshrined in the good black print of the Kilmarnock volume, he could not bring himself to destroy these records. It was well that he saved them. The Commonplace Book remains the sole record of what Burns was doing, intellectually and poetically, between April, 1783, and October, 1785. Commencing with self-conscious commentaries on life and on his own first efforts at writing, it reveals before its close his steady growth in artistic competence.