From October, 1787, onwards Burns was in fact though not in name the chief editor of the _Museum_. He collected words and music, wrote prefaces for the successive volumes, and helped to enlist the aid of a competent musician, Stephen Clarke, organist of the Episcopal chapel in Edinburgh, in harmonizing the airs. Johnson willingly submitted to the poet’s leadership, which he needed. The surviving correspondence shows Burns carrying on a struggle which nothing except his enthusiasm for the work could at times have made endurable. Johnson required constant supervision even in such elementary matters as spelling; Clarke’s carelessness and indolence were maddening. The work sold slowly and Johnson, under the pressure of other affairs, inclined to procrastinate. ‘Why,’ Burns asked in 1793, and the passage is typical of many, ‘did you not send me those tunes & verses that Clarke & you cannot make out? Let me have them as soon as possible, that, while he is at hand, I may settle the matter with him.’ Clarke, ‘with his usual indolence’, was worse. More than once he mislaid or lost whole sheafs of songs which had been entrusted to him. ‘“The Lochmaben harper”’, said the poet in 1795, ‘I fear I shall never recover; & it is a famous old song.--The rest are, I doubt, irrecoverable.--I think it hard that, after so much trouble in gathering these tunes, they should be lost in this trifling way.--Clarke has been shamefully careless.’ Yet Burns’s enthusiasm kept him going, however negligent or incompetent the partners on whom he had to depend. The time-table of the work is sufficient proof of his influence. Volume II, prepared while he was in Edinburgh, was ready six months after Volume I; the next two volumes, for which the poet’s contributions had to be made by correspondence, took two years each. Volume V was prepared while Burns was working also for George Thomson; it was four years on the stocks. The final volume, prepared by Johnson’s unaided efforts, took six years, even though he had still on hand a considerable quantity of Burns’s verse for which space had been lacking in the earlier numbers.