is to me a piece of charming native humour.--What pleases me, as simple & naive, disgusts you as ludicrous & low.--’ So said Burns in one of the passages which Thomson tried to obliterate. But Thomson’s opinions were shared by most of his educated countrymen, including some of Burns’s most intimate friends. Where earlier criticism of the poet’s vernacular work had failed to break down his Scotticism by the very absurdity of such suggestions as imitating Virgil, Thomson tried to accomplish it by the more insidious means of minor verbal changes which individually seemed to amount to little but which in their cumulative effect would emasculate the poetry. It is generally recognized that Burns’s contributions to the _Select Collection_ include a much larger percentage of the conventional and the commonplace than does his work for the _Museum_; the marvel is that in the circumstances he achieved so much that was not second-rate. He was composing to order, frequently sending off by return of post the lines to a particular tune which Thomson had asked for, and his efforts were constantly hampered by his consciousness that certain themes and methods would never please the silly editor’s taste. It was no wonder that many times he had to induce a synthetic emotional thrill in himself--either by putting himself through a course of admiration for a handsome woman, or by the help of a bowl of punch--in order to be able to compose at all. His power of poetic response to music and emotion nevertheless did not fail with his failing health. A few weeks before his death he asked Jessie Lewars, sister of one of his best friends among the Excise officers of Dumfries, to play him her favourite tune. She responded with the roguish little air, ‘The robin cam to the wren’s nest, and keekit in, and keekit in’. Burns, humming the tune to himself and altering the tempo, produced almost extemporaneously the beautiful ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast’. From his earliest lyric to his latest, music was the catalyst which transformed emotion into poetry. Yet for more than a century after his death the dominating influence of music on his art went almost unrecognized; and George Thomson, the man who of all others among Burns’s contemporaries had had the best opportunity to realize the nature and the power of his lyric expression, wrote an obituary which, besides inaugurating the legend of mental and moral deterioration in the last years at Dumfries, summed up its author’s appreciation of the wit, critical acumen, and real erudition of Burns’s letters by saying that probably the poet ‘was not qualified to fill a superior station’ to the humble one he held in the Excise. Of all the Holy Willies who eyed Burns askance during his life and after his death, he would probably, had he realized his true character, have despised Thomson most. The others were merely trying to blacken Burns’s own character. Thomson was trying to destroy the vitality of Scottish song. VII THE SCOT