Burns’s qualifications for writing this tale of witchcraft were analogous to his qualifications for writing folk-songs. In each instance he belonged by education to a world where such things were no longer alive. But his childhood and youth had been spent among people to whom they were still real. Intellectually he had no more belief in witchcraft than Benjamin Franklin had, but he knew the minds of the people who did believe. Hence the blend of broad humour and real terror which makes the poem unique. To an Elizabethan audience there was nothing humorous about the witches in _Macbeth_; they were real beings inspiring fear and hatred. To Washington Irving or Charles Dickens a tale of the supernatural was purely an excursion into the Land of Make-Believe. It is only when a belief is fading but not yet dead that it can be handled with the mixture of humour and conviction which Burns used. Ghost stories suffered the same fate about a century later, as scepticism regarding personal immortality became more widely prevalent. And ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is as perfect in structure as it is unique in tone. Custom cannot stale it. To read it or hear it read for the hundredth time is still to be swept along by the rush of the narrative and to realize more clearly the artistry which balances each increasingly wild episode with its introductory paragraph of humorous philosophizing. A few of its early readers, Mrs. Dunlop among them, thought the poem scandalously indecent; to the rest it was an artless effusion of the Heaven-taught ploughman. If any early reader realized that besides being a merry tale it was a consummate work of art the opinion was not committed to print. In 1791 literary art still connoted eighteenth-century ‘elegance’. Could Burns have had more of the society of a man like Grose, had even young Walter Scott of Edinburgh, who in the intervals of his legal studies was already steeping himself in the ballads and legends of the Border, thought it worth while occasionally to ride as far as Dumfries to visit the man whom he had once seen in an Edinburgh drawing-room, the world might have more poems like ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. But there was no one in Dumfries to provide the necessary stimulus. Robert Riddell took much but had little to give; his sister-in-law Maria belonged too much to the world of fashion to have any enthusiasm for folk-tales; John Syme’s taste ran more to satirical epigrams than to narrative poetry. And these three represented the best intellectual companionship Dumfries had to offer. As for Edinburgh, the influences dominating the literary life of Scotland at the end of the century were better represented by George Thomson than by Francis Grose.