In January of 1783 a very young sounding 24-year-old Robert Burns wrote to his former schoolmaster, John Murdoch, with the intention of telling him what had become of a prize pupil. As the measure of biography and the world goes, what had happened to Burns was pretty much nothing; but though he has no aims, he wants to have them; and though he has no accomplishments, he feels he should have. That is, he has no compelling story to narrate, since he has been living the life of a young Scottish man with small income and moderate station, and the events of his life simply do not dramatize well. He has been reading, though, and he tells Murdoch what:

In the matter of books, indeed, I am very profuse. – My favorite authors are of the sentimental kind, such as Shenstone, particularly his Elegies, Thomson, Man of Feeling, a book I prize next to the Bible, Man of the World, Sterne, especially his Sentimental journey, McPherson's Ossian, &c …

To the modern reader, who most likely thinks of Burns as a poet of the folk tradition, this list of the ultra-refined might be surprising; but Burns was a well-educated man, and most of his earlier poetry is anything but folk poetry. When Burns says he has been reading Shenstone's Elegies, it means he has been savoring such tidbits as this one, from the first Elegy:

• Ye loveless Bards! intent with artful pains

• To form a sigh, or contrive a tear!

• Forego your Pindus, and on — plains

• Survey Camilla's charms, and grow sincere.