This poem was written in response to the death of an Edinburgh prostitute, Margaret Burns (d. 1792). While there is no manuscript evidence to attribute the poem to Robert Burns, it certainly ...

This epistle was composed by Elizabeth Scott (1729 - 1789), an Edinburgh poetess, and sent to Robert Burns in admiration of the poet's Kilmarnock edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scots Dialect (1787).