‘There is a certain irregularity in the Old Scotch Songs, a redundancy of syllables with respect to that exactness of accent and measure that the English Poetry requires, but which glides in, most melodiously with the respective tunes to which they are set. For instance, the fine old song of “The Mill Mill O,” to give it a plain prosaic reading, it halts prodigiously out of measure; on the other hand, the song set to the same tune in Bremner’s collection of Scotch Songs which begins “To Fanny fair could I impart,” &c., it is most exact measure, and yet, let them both be sung before a real critic, one above the biasses of prejudice, but a thorough Judge of Nature, how flat and spiritless will the last appear, how trite, and lamely methodical, compared with the wild-warbling cadence, the heart-moving melody of the first. This particularly is the case with all those airs which end with a hypermetrical syllable. There is a degree of wild irregularity in many of the compositions and fragments which are daily sung to them by my compeers, the common people--a certain happy arrangement of Old Scotch syllables, and yet, very frequently, nothing, not even _like_ rhyme, or sameness of jingle at the ends of the lines. This has made me sometimes imagine that perhaps, it might be possible for a Scotch Poet, with a nice, judicious ear, to set compositions to many of our most favorite airs ... independent of rhyme altogether....’ With nothing except mother-wit and a sure ear to guide him, Burns had reached conclusions regarding poetic rhythm at complete variance with the critical theories of his century and beyond the practice of even nineteenth-century orthodoxy. He had recognized that the real charm of folk-poetry lies in the fact that it is musical rather than regular. In an age when the essence of poetry was thought to abide in the accurately counted syllables of the heroic couplet such an opinion would have seemed not merely heresy but sheer insanity. Compared with it, Coleridge’s supposed innovation of hypermetrical syllables in _Christabel_ is timid conventionality. Blake alone among Burns’s contemporaries had bolder theories of rhythm, and his work, which the Scotsman never saw, had to wait more than half a century for recognition. Burns later expended much time and ink in trying to persuade George Thomson that a song could be poetry even if all its lines did not count up the same number of syllables, but he was never optimistic enough to offer that silly body a lyric which dispensed with rime.