I need not enumerate the volumes of biography, history, and memoirs which have contributed background materials. They are listed in all the standard bibliographies. The one great addition to the older lists is the _Journals_ of James Boswell, which have furnished graphic details of Scottish life. I hasten to add, however, that Chapter I is not intended as a complete survey of eighteenth-century Scotland. Even had completeness been possible in the space at my disposal, it would have been useless to attempt to repeat what Professor H. W. Thompson has so superbly done in _A Scottish Man of Feeling_. Hence I have limited myself to those aspects of national life which bore directly upon Burns, as I have also done in considering the influence of contemporary literature. The eighteenth century was not all ‘elegance’, but it was the elegant authors, and not Swift, Fielding, and Johnson, who appealed to Burns. Lest British readers charitably assume that I sin through ignorance, I ought perhaps also to add that in writing of Burns’s world I have not hesitated to equate some of its social and political aspects with their twentieth-century American analogues. To describe a dead world in dead terms seems a poor way of revivifying it. My omission of footnotes is likewise deliberate. In a score of articles in various journals during the past decade I have presented, and fully documented, the evidence on many controversial points. The articles evoked an almost passionate apathy; nevertheless they, and their footnotes, are there if anyone cares to look them up. Furthermore, nearly all the source documents I have used are now in print, despite the efforts of Burns’s self-appointed literary executors to suppress certain of them. On two points I recant some of my earlier statements: I know now that the circumstances of Burns’s quarrel with the Riddells are not so clear as I once thought them, and Mr. Stanley Cursiter of the Scottish National Gallery has given me reason to doubt my identification of the miniature portrait belonging to Mr. Oliver R. Barrett.