Burns’s preface to the second volume, published in February, 1788, in the very midst of the Clarinda imbroglio, shows how completely, in the fifteen months since his first arrival in Edinburgh, the poet had awakened to the literary importance of folk-song. ‘Ignorance and Prejudice’, he wrote, ‘may perhaps affect to sneer at the simplicity of the poetry or music of some of these pieces; but their having been for ages the favourites of Nature’s Judges--the Common People, was to the Editor a sufficient test of their merit....’ He was no longer apologetic for his interest in popular literature. If the highbrows could not appreciate it, so much the worse for the highbrows. He was determined, moreover, that no poet of the people should lack recognition if it were possible to give it. ‘Wherever the old words could be recovered, they have been preserved; both as generally suiting better the genius of the tunes, and to preserve the productions of those earlier Sons of the Scottish Muses, some of whose names deserved a better fate than has befallen them--“Buried ’mong the wreck of things which were.” Of our more modern Songs, the Editor has inserted the Authors’ names as far as he could ascertain them.’ The passage is almost a direct transcript, even to the hackneyed quotation from Blair’s _Grave_, of what Burns had written in the Commonplace Book two and a half years before, when he added that it had given him ‘many a heart-ake’ to reflect that the names of such glorious old Bards were clean forgotten. No more of them should be forgotten if he could do anything to prevent it. The ‘communal’ theory of ballad-composition still slumbered in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land; Burns was sure that somewhere at the source of every old song was an individual poet of like passions with himself, and such as he himself might still be but for the accident of print.