In such lyrics as these and scores of others Burns had achieved a sort of dramatic impersonation which far surpassed even the best of his earlier monologues and dramatic lyrics. Guided always by the spirit of the music, he had so identified himself with the thoughts and feelings of the anonymous and half-articulate folk poets whose songs he was rescuing from oblivion that the most critical eye cannot be certain where their work ends and Burns’s begins. Again and again he took fragments of old work and not only reunited them into coherent wholes but gave the restored poem the lyric elevation its original author had felt but could not express. Emerson said that an institution was the lengthened shadow of a single man: Scottish song as the world knows it today is the lengthened shadow of Robert Burns. What he did not actually write is so coloured by his influence that it could not exist without him. With the exception of Lady Nairne’s, his was the last poetry written in the old folk tradition. The romantic sentimentality which tinges Burns’s songs at their weakest, overspreads many of Lady Nairne’s; Scott’s masterpiece, ‘Bonnie Dundee’, is glorious, but it is not a folk-song. Most of what has been written since 1800 is merely imitation Burns. The _Museum_ was Burns’s opportunity to combine his poetic inclinations with his fervent patriotism. But it was more than that. By enlisting the poet’s help in his enterprise, Johnson unwittingly furnished him the means of sustaining his creative life amid his toil as farmer and Exciseman. After 1788 extended composition was probably impossible for Burns. He could scarcely hope to be revisited by the almost continuous excitement under which he wrote the greater part of his first volume, and without emotional excitement he could not create. He had plenty of leisure for writing during his Edinburgh days, but the urge was lacking. His whole sojourn there produced less poetry than a single month at the beginning of 1786. Removal to Ellisland, with all the strain of its ‘uncouth cares and anxieties’, brought his creativeness to a still lower ebb. Repeatedly he complained that the Muses had deserted him; during his first two years on the farm the ‘Lines in Friars Carse Hermitage’ were almost his only serious attempt at non-musical composition, and in the revision of the poem he wavered between versions in a manner wholly unlike the vigour of 1786. The frequency, indeed, with which he circulated both versions among his friends suggests at times a bankrupt’s clinging to the last relic of his prosperity. But thanks to the _Museum_ he had work to do which could be shaped to music as he followed his business, and be committed to paper in his snatches of free time.