It was only Scots music that saved Burns in the end from complete subjection to the false elegance of his century. Though he was better read than most of his ‘patrons’ ever realized, he had the self-educated man’s diffidence in the face of established reputations. His ear, so quick to distinguish ‘the true tender or sublime’ from ‘affectation or fustian’ in a lyric, failed him in the reading of more pretentious works. ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ is shot full of verbal echoes of English poets; what is worse, it echoes their sentiments, in such a passage as Stanza X, to an extent which divorces the thought from all the realities of peasant life. He never acquired the degree of sophistication which would have enabled him to use the current English conventions freely and originally, yet he was too sophisticated to use old folk conventions when they were not reinforced by music. Thus he never--with the possible exception of ‘John Barleycorn’--wrote a serious ballad. His political verses, and above all such an uproarious parody as ‘The Ballad of Grizzel Grimme’, show that he had all the ballad conventions at his tongue’s end; he had collected numerous old ballad texts, of which Dr. Currie named more than a dozen to Sir Walter Scott, though without thinking it worth while to preserve them; yet he could employ the ballad only in satire or burlesque. Thanks to music, he was able in all seriousness to sing a song in the old folk style, but he could not tell a story. Even his Scottish vocabulary was more literary and derivative than his contemporaries realized. It was not so much a direct transcript of Ayrshire speech as it was a generalized vernacular pieced together from Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and the anonymous folk lyrists and ballad writers. He was genuinely interested in the variations of dialect--on his Border tour, for instance, he jotted down definitions of local words which were new to him--but his poetic use of it was chiefly due to its pithiness, its humour, and, above all, its flexibility. This was what he had in mind when he admitted to Robert Anderson ‘the advantages he enjoyed ... from the _copia verborum_, the command of phraseology, which the knowledge and use of the English and Scottish dialects afforded him’. He habitually alternated between Scottish and English spellings of the same word, as the exigencies of rime and measure required, thereby achieving a more flexible expression than was possible in either dialect by itself. His vernacular writing, in short, was nearer to Lowell’s New England speech or Kipling’s Cockney than it was to Gawain Douglas’s or William Dunbar’s single-minded expression in his native tongue. Even Robert Fergusson’s dialect, with its strong infusion of Fifeshire elements, is closer than Burns’s to being a direct transcript from life.