Before he went to Edinburgh Burns had explored his own capacities, but had not yet realized more than half of them. Fergusson had shown him how to write satires and descriptions in the vernacular; Ramsay had revealed the possibilities of the poetic epistle. But his interest in the folk-songs of which the words and melodies haunted him, still seemed a rustic or even childish survival. So far as he knew, it was like taking nursery rimes seriously as poetry. Though he must have been aware that scholars of repute were beginning to collect old ballads, he had not yet discovered that they were turning also to the words and music of folk-songs. In this respect at least, his Edinburgh sojourn was of incalculable benefit. Apparently he never met David Herd, the greatest collector among his contemporaries, but he soon became acquainted with Herd’s published work and learned that even some university professors esteemed such things. Sending a couple of songs, ‘the composition of two Ayrshire Mechanics’, to the Rev. William Greenfield a few weeks after arriving in the city, he hailed that eloquent but incontinent clergyman as ‘Professor of the Belles lettres de la Nature’; in the following summer he told William Tytler that he had once a great many fragments of traditional literature, but as he had no idea that anybody cared for them, he had forgotten them. And his next remark showed that he already possessed the essential qualification of the collector: ‘I invariably hold it sacriledge to add anything of my own to help out with the shatter’d wrecks of these venerable old compositions; but they have many various readings.’ Yet not even then, not even though the singing of old melodies was one of the commonest amusements both in Edinburgh drawing rooms and at convivial meetings at taverns, did he realize immediately the task and the opportunity before him. The convivial meetings at first meant much more to him than the drawing-rooms. The jolly gentlemen who made up the Crochallan Fencibles had probably as a group little interest in pure poetry, but they had a very lively interest in brisk songs. If the songs happened to be improper, that was no handicap among a club which included Charles Hay and William Smellie and Robert Cleghorn, and to whom Alexander Cunningham used to sing ‘charmingly’ one of the most indecent of Irish ditties. Burns’s memory was already well stored with such gems, and in this congenial company he added to his stock, enriched old songs with new stanzas of his own, and occasionally composed original verses of the same type, as he had often done at Mauchline. As a means of enhancing the pleasures of male company over a bowl of punch such song-writing amused him and delighted the Fencibles.