And never thought upon,
The Flames of Love extinguishèd
And freely past and gone?
Is thy kind Heart now grown so cold
In that Loving Breast of thine,
That thou can'st never once reflect
On old-long-syne.

And so on, for eighty lines.

Allan Ramsay rewrote it for his _Tea-Table Miscellany_ (1724), and a
specimen stanza will show that it was still going down-hill:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
Tho' they return with scars?
These are the noble hero's lot,
Obtain'd in glorious wars;
Welcome, my Varo, to my breast,
Thy arms about me twine,
And make me once again as blest
As I was lang syne.

The remaining four stanzas are worse. Burns may have had further hints
to work on which are now lost; but the best, part of the song, stanzas
three and four, are certainly his, and it is unlikely that he
inherited more than some form of the first verse and the chorus.


AULD LANG SYNE