‘Until I am compleat master of a tune, in my own singing (such as it is) I never can compose for it.--My way is: I consider the poetic Sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression; then chuse my theme; begin one stanza; when that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now & then, look out for objects in Nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy & workings of my bosom; humming every now & then the air with the verses I have framed: when I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, & there commit my effusions to paper; swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes on.-- Seriously, this, at home, is almost invariably my way.--What damn’d Egotism!’ Though it would probably be impossible to overstress Robert Fergusson’s influence on Burns’s development, the elder poet’s primary service was to clarify and confirm ideas already present but as yet inarticulate in Burns’s mind. He knew what he liked, and what his own poetic impulses were; the discovery of Fergusson enabled him to define both his method and his objective. To realize how much he matured intellectually between the beginning of the Commonplace Book in 1783 and its conclusion in 1785, one need merely read the strutting, self-conscious, and essentially empty criticism of ‘expletive phrases’ of ‘too serious sentiment’, and ‘flimsy strain’ which he appended to ‘Handsome Nell’, or the pseudo-devotional passage about the grand end of human life being ‘to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to whom we owe life’. These things of 1783 are juvenilia. The following, written in September, 1785, is adult: