| Sumario: | Among the unauthorised Glasgow editions that first published Burns's 'reserved canon', Thomas Stewart's Poems Ascribed to Robert Burns ... Not Contained in Any Edition Hitherto Published (Glasgow, 1801) has a special significance. This short article describes a previously unnoticed Edinburgh issue of Stewart's book, from 1809, and explores Walter Scott's connection with the book's reappearance, when Ballantyne and Co. bought unsold sheets of the Glasgow second issue, put copies in a further variant binding, and advertised it in their own catalogue, quoting praise from Walter Scott, the firm's unacknowledged majority shareholder, for Burns's 'contraband' poems, notably 'Holy Willie's Prayer' and 'The Jolly Beggars'. Some cheap Edinburgh editions had previously reprinted pirated poems, but Ballantyne's reissue, known only in one privately-owned copy, and Scott's comments, mark the first endorsement of the Glasgow piracies by the Edinburgh publishing establishment.
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