In one respect at least my preparation for writing about Burns is unique. Most editors and biographers have either been bred in the rosy mists of the Burns legend or have worked their way back to the original records through a mass of secondary printed matter. Up to a dozen years ago my knowledge of Burns and his times included little beyond such reading of major works and standard criticism as one does in preparation for the doctorate. In 1925 I undertook to edit a reprint of Burns’s chief poems. Discovering in the course of that job how unsatisfactory were all editions of his correspondence, I thereupon plunged into the work of tracing and collating the original holographs. Not until after thorough immersion in these primary sources did I extend my studies to the letters and other records of Burns’s contemporaries and to the Burns tradition embalmed in the biographies and standard editions. When I started I had therefore everything to learn, but nothing to unlearn, and my basic impression of the poet and his work was founded on intimate acquaintance with his own words, and not on what other people had said about him. The large number of new documents which have turned up in recent years replaces conjecture with certainty in many once disputed episodes in Burns’s career. We need no longer depend on libellous Saunders Tait for details of William Burnes’s troubles at Lochlie; the chronology of the poet’s Edinburgh peccadillos is fairly clear; we know why Mrs. Dunlop broke off her correspondence. The verification and completion of the texts of more than three-fourths of Burns’s own letters is only a part of the fresh material. Collateral documents ranging from Elizabeth Paton’s discharge of her claim against Burns to the almost complete correspondence of two of his most intimate friends are now available, and I have used them freely. I have also drawn upon other sources not fully utilized in the past. Most biographers, for instance, have contemned the so-called ‘Train MS.’ in Edinburgh University library. This collection of notes on Lockhart’s _Life of Burns_ consists mainly of anecdotes deriving ultimately from the poet’s friend, John Richmond. It has been repudiated _in toto_ for no better reason, seemingly, than that Richmond told a story about one Mary Campbell which does not tally with the romantic account of Highland Mary, and was mistaken in the identity of a lady who once called at Burns’s lodgings in Baxter’s Close. Against these two doubtful items I set the fact that the author of the notes so accurately described unpublished letters and verses which he had seen that every one of them since published can be instantly identified. I base no major conclusions on this MS., but I can see no justification for ignoring it.