‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is not only Burns’s greatest single poem but one of the finest short poetic narratives in all literature. It is the only one of Burns’s works of which it may truly be asserted that he opened a new field wherein he never had the chance to reveal the full range of his powers. In the satire and the epistle, as in the lyric, he had abundantly displayed both his strength and his limitations. In the versified folk-tale ‘Tam’ stands alone; it is, as he said, his ‘standard performance in the Poetical line’. Though he was doubtless right in concluding that it showed ‘a force of genius & a finishing polish that I despair of ever excelling’, he might in happier circumstances have equalled it. But here, as in the satires and epistles, his inspiration came from without, and the stimulus was never repeated. The story of its composition is too familiar to need rehearsing in detail. In 1789 Francis Grose the antiquary arrived at Friars Carse in the course of a collecting tour. He had successfully published an elaborately illustrated work on the antiquities of England and Wales, and was now gathering material for a companion volume on Scotland. The fat and jovial captain, whose encyclopædic knowledge ranged from ancient arms and armour, costume, and ecclesiastical and military architecture, to the ribald slang of his day, was as unlike Sir Walter Scott’s bookish Jonathan Oldbuck as any man could well be. Beside his vast erudition and ardent spirit the amateurish antiquarianism of Robert Riddell faded away. Grose was one of the most stimulating men Burns ever met, and the friendship which sprang up between them had the double basis of community of interest and congeniality of spirit. Burns saw in Grose’s projected book an opportunity to glorify his own birthplace, and suggested that the ruins of Alloway Kirk were a good subject for an illustration. Grose, no doubt mentally comparing the scrubby little church with the glories of Melrose and Arbroath, hesitated. Alloway had neither grandeur of architecture nor richness of historical association. The latter, however, might be supplied. Burns had been telling some of the tales of the supernatural which he had heard in his boyhood, and Grose agreed to include the picture of Alloway if Burns would furnish a witch-legend to accompany it. Thus casually his greatest poem was born.