Another time Burns found himself haunted by the old lilt of ‘Hey tutti taitie’, which a wholly unreliable tradition declared to have been Bruce’s march to Bannockburn. At the end of August, 1793, his impotent fury over the Edinburgh sedition trials, combined with his enthusiasm at the news of the French levy _en masse_ for the repulse of the Allied invasion, found an outlet in composing ‘Scots wha hae’ to this air. Historically the song is an anachronism. The ideas underlying it are those of Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson and not of the feudal Middle Ages; its very language is Scoticized English rather than the true vernacular--Sir James Murray pointed out, for instance, that in real Scots the opening phrase would be ‘Scots that has’. The song owes its enduring popularity largely to the perfect union of the words with the music they were composed to. But when Burns sent it to Thomson, that worthy thought the music vulgar, and suggested that lengthening the fourth line of each stanza would fit the words to another tune, ‘Lewis Gordon’, which he liked better. This time Burns yielded, accepted the silly changes, and thereafter circulated the song always in the weakened version. Thomson published it in this form after the poet’s death, but the appearance of the original version in Currie’s edition showed the music-loving public the immense superiority of Burns’s first thought. Thomson bowed to public opinion, and consigned his ‘improvements’ to the oblivion they deserved. In most instances, however, the public had no chance of checking up on Thomson’s disregard of Burns’s wishes, and by destroying his own end of the correspondence, after furnishing Dr. Currie with some carefully edited extracts from it, the editor sought to cover up the extent of his nagging criticisms. Inasmuch as his vandalism stopped short of destroying Burns’s letters the ultimate publication of their complete texts exposed the nature of his fault-finding almost as clearly as if he had preserved his own originals. He nevertheless inked out a number of passages in which Burns was too outspoken in comment on his taste, or seemed to deny his claim to the copyright of the poet’s contributions. Thomson was intensely jealous of Johnson’s _Museum_, disliked Johnson personally, and resented Burns’s continuing to help the rival work. Again and again in the letters Burns would say that if a song did not suit, Thomson was to return it, and Burns would send it to the _Museum_. To keep the material out of Johnson’s hands, Thomson never definitely rejected anything. He carefully docketed the letter in which Burns said that he had given Johnson no permanent copyright in his songs, but inked over passages which indicated that Burns was contributing to the _Select Collection_ on precisely the same terms as to the _Museum_.