These are Scots poems and songs from the eighteenth century which created a literary tradition of vernacular directness which Burns drew upon and shared. Before Burns includes a substantial selection from the work of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson (Burns’s ‘elder brother in the muse’), as well as a wider selection from the men and women writers whose good humoured accessibility so characterised the poetry of their time. Christopher MacLachlan’s introduction puts these works in perspective and makes a case for a linguistic confidence, rather than an insecurity, in their vigorous use of both English and Scots.