Meanwhile, under Burns’s leadership, the whole plan of the _Museum_ had been altered. The original scheme had been merely to collect the existing songs. For this task--at least for all the songs that were printable--Johnson’s first estimate of two volumes was not a serious understatement. Burns, ransacking the collections of instrumental music, and stealing time from his farm work to listen to a fiddler playing over the pieces that had interested him, discovered, however, that Scottish music was teeming with good tunes to which no words had ever been set. The reels and strathspeys which fiddlers and pipers played as dance tunes had just as much lilting charm as the airs of traditional songs. His plan now was nothing more nor less than supplying words to every cottage melody which was capable of vocal interpretation. He was also making musical experiments in tempo, finding that gay tunes played in slow time might be transformed into ‘the very language of pathos’. The name ‘Museum’ was growing steadily more inappropriate; the work was becoming an experimental laboratory in both poetry and music. Probably Burns never fully defined, even to himself, the scope of the ambitious project he did not live to achieve, but the more than three hundred songs he left are evidence that if anyone could have achieved it, he could. Not that all these songs are masterpieces. Burns had no illusions on that score. His contention was always that the music was the important thing, and that a good air might better have mediocre words than none at all. Nevertheless when he was composing Scottish words to tunes of his own choice the percentage of the commonplace was small and the range of themes extraordinarily large. The critics who read autobiography into every love poem pass lightly over the fact that in some of the best love lyrics, such as ‘Tam Glen’, ‘An’ O for ane-and-twenty, Tam’, and ‘Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad’, the speaker is a woman, and that such wholly dramatic lyrics as ‘M’Pherson’s Farewell’ and ‘John Anderson’ have a more sustained intensity of emotion than the admittedly autobiographic ‘Ae fond kiss’. When Burns’s lyrics were commonplace it was usually because he was composing them to tunes not of his own choice; above all when such assigned composition demanded English words. Music which worked downward from the intellectual to the emotional centres could never give the same creative release as when the engagement of the emotions came first. Such was the case with the last of his major poetic projects--supplying lyrics for George Thomson’s _Select Collection of Scotish Airs_--but before turning to that work something must be said of the last and finest of the poems which he did not write to music.