No literary salesman ever received more enthusiastic response than Thomson got from Burns. The poet promised whole-hearted co-operation, but he had detected enough of Thomson’s temperament to make certain reservations. In order of importance they were these. His share in the work was to be a patriotic labour of love, and he would accept no compensation. For the time being at least his participation was to be anonymous--perhaps because he did not wish his official superiors to think he was neglecting his Excise duties; perhaps because he feared that Johnson might conclude that he was deserting the _Museum_. He was not to be asked to compose unless he could do so spontaneously, and Thomson was to have free editorial authority to take or reject his contributions. Finally, ‘If you are for _English_ verses, there is, on my part, an end of the matter.--Whether in the simplicity of _the Ballad_, or the pathos of _the Song_, I can only hope to please myself in being allowed at least a sprinkling of our native tongue.’ English verses were precisely what Thomson _was_ for, ‘because the English becomes every year more and more the language of Scotland,’ but he hastened to disavow any wish to confine the poet to English--preferring to wait and argue it out later, poem by poem. Greater enthusiasm, knowledge, and art were never enlisted under more incompetent leadership than in Burns’s alliance with Thomson. It did not take the poet long to discover that the elaborate plan which Thomson had outlined in his first letters was really as vague as an Edinburgh fog. The editor had not yet decided on the list of airs he intended to include; he had not succeeded in getting the co-operation of the English poetaster, John Wolcot (‘Peter Pindar’), to write English songs; Pleyel, who was supposed to be handling the music, soon departed on a visit to Germany and found his return route to Britain closed by the armies of the French and the Allies. James Beattie was to have been asked to furnish an introductory essay on Scottish song, but Beattie was old and ill and not really interested in the subject. In consequence of all this, Burns, who had begun on the understanding that he was to furnish only a few lyrics, shortly found himself saddled with the entire burden of the literary end of the work. Even so his position, though laborious, would not have been difficult had Thomson been merely muddle-headed. But as soon as the editor had furnished the list of the twenty-five airs he meant to include in the first number of his collection, and Burns had sent in his first group of lyrics, Thomson revealed himself as a literary tinker. He was constantly proposing amendments in phraseology--which always meant substituting banal English expressions for racy Scots ones. At times his niggling criticism was too much even for Burns’s enthusiasm and good nature. One letter, for instance, began with the abrupt outburst, ‘That unlucky song “O poortith cauld,” &c.