To avoid misunderstanding both Burns and his friends, a brief digression is necessary regarding the book entitled _The Merry Muses of Caledonia_. Burns was well aware that his own work, like the folk-songs he collected, was divided into the publishable and the unpublishable. But he did not draw the line where his later editors did. To him, ‘The Jolly Beggars’, ‘A Poet’s Welcome’, and ‘Holy Willie’ were no fitter for general circulation than were ‘When Princes and Prelates’ and ‘The Court of Equity’. They were _jeux d’esprit_ intended for private circulation among a few intimates. His riotous imagination respected no boundaries when it began to play; what distinguishes most of his bawdry from the common sort is its wit. And this wit as frequently saw how an improper folk-song could be made more brilliantly improper as it saw how a halting one could be made lyric. Much of his folk collection, together with ‘a very few’ of his own composition, was written into a manuscript volume which he sometimes lent about, with strict injunctions as to secrecy. According to tradition, that volume fell after his death into unscrupulous hands and formed the basis of the earliest of the various collections called _The Merry Muses_. The tradition is almost certainly wrong. The ultimate source may have been Burns, but not the immediate one. In all the editions the authentic Burns verses are too garbled to have been printed from his own copies. They bear every sign of oral transmission or hasty transcription at several removes from the original. The real manuscript was probably destroyed after Burns’s death; certainly it was never printed. It would have been better for his reputation if it had, for he now stands father or godfather to a garbled mass of Scottish, English, and Irish filth, little of which he wrote, and some of which he never even saw. Neither Robert Ainslie nor William Nicol needed the chance association of their names with fescennine verse to bring discredit on Burns. Their own conduct sufficed. Ainslie, like Cunningham, was a young lawyer, but the two moved in different orbits, and were never brought together even by their friendship for Burns. They appealed to different facets of the poet’s nature, Ainslie’s relation to him being that of Smith and Richmond in the days of the Fornicators’ Court. The son of a good family in the Border village of Dunse, Ainslie was celebrating his recent emancipation from parental government by sowing a plentiful crop of wild oats. Full of the high spirits of twenty-one, he furnished the same ready chorus of laughter the Mauchline cronies had provided, and was rapidly qualifying himself to discuss with Burns the pleasing topic of comparative bastardy. The most enjoyable part of the poet’s Border tour in May, 1787, was his visit to Dunse; after Ainslie left him he complained that he never had a mouthful of really hearty laughter on the trip.