Burns goes the same way to work; scarcely a page of his but shows traces of some original in the Scottish vernacular school.

The elegy, the verse epistle, the satirical form of _Holy Willie's Prayer_, the song and recitative of _The Jolly Beggars_, are all to be found in his predecessors, in Fergusson, Ramsay, and the local poets of the south-west of Scotland.

In the songs often whole verses, nearly always the refrains, are from older folk poetry.

What he did was to pour into these forms the incomparable richness of a personality whose fire and brilliance and humour transcended all locality and all tradition, a personality which strode like a colossus over the formalism and correctness of his time.

His use of familiar forms explains, more than anything else, his immediate fame.