In September, 1792, Burns received a letter from a friend of Alexander Cunningham’s, asking aid in a poetical and musical venture. George Thomson, clerk to the Board of Trustees in Edinburgh, was two years the poet’s senior and possessed all the elegance of taste which Burns’s education had protected him from. Thomson enjoyed Scottish music in his ultra-refined way, but was irked by the crudity of the traditional songs. Baldly stated, his proposal was to collect a hundred of the best Scottish melodies, to get a professional musician to dress them in all the frills necessary for concert performance, and to provide them with tidy English lyrics which would disguise their provincial origin. In writing to Burns, however, he did not express himself so bluntly. After explaining that Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, ‘the most agreeable composer living’, had been engaged to arrange the music, he continued: ‘To render this work perfect, we are desirous to have the poetry improved wherever it seems unworthy of the music; and that it is so, in many instances, is allowed by everyone conversant with our musical collections. The editors of these seem in general to have depended on the music proving an excuse for the verses; and hence some charming melodies are united to mere nonsense and doggerel, while others are accompanied with rhymes so loose and indelicate as cannot be sung in decent company. To remove this reproach would be an easy task to the author of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”.... It is superfluous to assure you that I have no intention to displace any of the sterling old Songs: those only will be removed which appear quite silly or absolutely indecent....’ The publication, in short, was to be a sort of Golden Treasury of Scots music, and Burns’s share in the work was to be ‘writing twenty or twenty-five songs, suitable to the particular melodies’ which Thomson selected. The editor said nothing, in this first letter, about his preference for English words.