But lugubrious notes were not the only ones. It was as inevitable that a young Scot should try his hand at metrical paraphrases of the Psalms as that a young Etonian of the same century should paraphrase Horace. The results in both cases are equally negligible. Youth has to repeat the stale patterns of its predecessors before it can find its own. It was much more important that ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ was written in the same way. This is an epigrammatic song in the Restoration manner, and as English in language as in style. But it was written to a Scottish air, ‘Gillicrankie’. The innate Scottish culture of the poet was beginning, as early as 1781, to assimilate and adapt the alien materials of Restoration England. Though Burns failed to act on Richard Brown’s suggestion that he send some of his early verses to a magazine, the idea stuck. The yeasty stirrings of a still immature mind which had led him in 1780 to plague his friends with pompous discourses on Pride and Courage were slowly giving place to more personal thinking on topics which he better understood. His customary chronological vagueness in referring to his early manhood makes it uncertain whether he began his Commonplace Book before he discovered the poems of Robert Fergusson, or after. The internal evidence indicates the former. So does the elaborate title-page: ‘Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry, &c., by Robt. Burness; a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and unbounded good-will to every creature--rational or irrational. As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life; but, as I believe they are really _his own_, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of human-nature to see how a ploughman thinks and feels under the pressure of Love, Ambition, Anxiety, Grief, with the like cares and passions, which, however diversified by the modes and manners of life, operate pretty much alike, I believe, in all the Species. “There are numbers in the world who do not want sense to make a figure, so much as an opinion of their own abilities, to put them upon recording their observations, and allowing them the same importance which they do to those which appear in print.”--Shenstone. “Pleasing when youth is long expir’d to trace, The forms our pencil, or our pen design’d. Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face! Such the soft image of our youthful mind.” Ibidem.’