This volume of Studies in Scottish Literature, with essays about Robert Burns, his contemporaries, and his influence, was originally issued separately as a festschrift for presentation on his 88th birthday to Prof. G. Ross Roy (1924-2013), founder and for nearly fifty years editor of the series. The distinguished list of contributors to the volume have all been former W. Ormiston Roy Visiting Fellows at the University of South Carolina, home of the G. Ross Roy Collection of Robert Burns & Scottish Poetry. Following Professor Roy's death, the volume is being reissued as Studies in Scottish Literature 37, in place of the volume he had himself projected for that volume number.