31 July – Robert Burns' Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect is published by John Wilson in Kilmarnock (the text having been submitted to him on 13 July). The volume proves so popular that Burns abandons his plans to emigrate to Jamaica on 1 September for a post as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation and on 27–28 November journeys on a borrowed pony from Mossgiel Farm for his first visit to Edinburgh. Two weeks later he extemporises his "Address to a Haggis" which is first published on 19 December in the Caledonian Mercury.[1]