His one exception to the rule of publishing authors’ names was his own contributions. He told Mrs. Dunlop that the songs signed ‘R’, ‘B’, or ‘X’ were his own, and those signed ‘Z’ were old songs he had altered or enlarged. But no one can go through the volumes with this simple key and identify all of Burns’s contributions. His own negligence and Johnson’s omitted his initials from numerous songs unquestionably his own, and the verses signed ‘Z’ have puzzled the ingenuity of editors ever since. Burns admitted that ‘of a good many of them, little more than the Chorus is ancient; tho’ there is no reason for telling every body this piece of intelligence.’ Sometimes his own annotations or the survival of earlier texts show the extent of his contributions, ranging from eking out a too-brief song with an extra stanza of his own to composing a whole lyric to fit a fragment of traditional chorus. Public opinion unanimously credits Burns with ‘Auld Lang Syne’, yet he never claimed it. He declared that it ‘had never been in print, nor even in manuscript’, until he took it down from an old man’s singing. Three different times, for people as unlike as Mrs. Dunlop, Robert Riddell, and George Thomson, he wrote out the words without even an indirect claim to their authorship. Nevertheless, no trace of the song in anything like Burns’s form has ever been found in earlier records, and the public has refused to believe that a poem of such appeal could have been current without being noticed. On the other hand, every stanza of ‘A Red Red Rose’ has been traced to some older poem; yet Burns’s skill in selecting the one good image in a mass of commonplace and weaving his cento of borrowings into a single compact and vivid lyric makes the song his own, as _Macbeth_ is Shakespeare’s and not Holinshed’s.