Burns Reads Dryden's Virgil

Robert Burns (1759–96) early became familiar with Dryden’s original poems; the Virgil was lent to him by his friend Mrs Dunlop in April 1788, together with Pope’s Homer and Hoole’s Tasso, as a kind of crash course in epic poetry (Robert Burns and Mrs Dunlop (1898), ed. W. Wallace, p. 52). Extracts from Burns’s letters to Mrs Dunlop, (a) 28 April and (b) 4 May 1788; Works, ed. Currie (2nd. edn., 1801), ii. 134 and 143–4.