It is impossible to exaggerate the unpromising nature of the theme.
The place is a den of corruption, the characters are the dregs of
society. A group of tramps and criminals have gathered at the end of
their day's wanderings to drink the very rags from their backs and
wallow in shameless incontinence. An old soldier and a quondam
"daughter of the regiment," a mountebank and his tinker sweetheart, a
female pickpocket whose Highland bandit lover has been hanged, a
fiddler at fairs who aspires to comfort her but is outdone by a
tinker, a lame ballad-singer and his three wives, one of whom consoles
the fiddler in the face of her husband--such is the choice company.
The action is mere by-play, drunken love making; the main point is the
songs. They are mostly frank autobiography, all pervaded with the
gaiety that comes from the conviction that being at the bottom, they
need not be anxious about falling. Wine, women, and song are their
enthusiasms, and only the song is above the lowest possible level.

Such is the sordid material out of which Burns wrought his greatest
imaginative triumph. To take the reader into such a haunt and have him
pass the evening in such company, not with disgust and nausea but with
relish and joy, is an achievement that stands beside the creation of
the scenes in the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. It is accomplished
by virtue of the intensity of the poet's imaginative sympathy with
human nature even in its most degraded forms, and by his power of
finding utterance for the moods of the characters he conceives. The
dramatic power which we have noted in a certain group of the songs
here reaches its height, and in making the reader respond to it he
avails himself of all his literary faculties. Pungent phrasing, a
sense of the squalid picturesque, a humorous appreciation of human
weakness, and a superb command of rollicking rhythms--these elements
of his equipment are particularly notable. But the whole thing is