Born, at Leadhills, near Crawford, Lanarkshire, 15 Oct. 1686. Educated at village school at Crawford. Apprenticed to a wig-maker in Edinburgh, 1701. At conclusion of apprenticeship, set up in business. Married Christian Ross, 1712. Mem. of Jacobite “Essay Club,” 1712–15. Prolific writer of occasional poetry. Started business as a bookseller, 1716 [?]. Drama, “The Gentle Shepherd,” performed in Edinburgh, 1729. Built a theatre in Edinburgh, 1736; closed it 1737. Retired from business, 1755. Died, in Edinburgh, 7 Jan. 1758. Buried in Old Greyfriars Churchyard. Works: “The Battle” (anon.), 1716; “Tartana” [1717?]; “Scots Songs,” 1718; “The Scriblers Lash’d,” 1718; “Christ’s Kirk on the Green,” 1718; “Elegies on Maggie Johnson, John Cowper and Lucky Wood,” 1718; “Content,” 1720; “The Prospect of Plenty,” 1720; “Robert, Richy and Sandy,” 1721; “Poems” (2 vols.), 1721–28; “Fables and Tales,” 1722; “A Tale of Three Bonnets” (anon.), 1722; “The Fair Assembly,” 1723; “Health,” 1724; “The Tea-Table Miscellany” (3 vols.), 1724–27; “The Ever Green” (2 vols.), 1724; “The Gentle Shepherd,” 1725; “A Scots Ode to the British Antiquarians” [1726]; “New Miscellany of Scots Songs,” 1727; “A Collection of Thirty Fables,” 1730; “The Morning Interview,” 1731; “An Address of Thanks from the Society of Rakes” (anon.), 1734; “Collection of Scots Proverbs,” 1737; “Hardyknute,” by Lady Wardlaw, completed by Ramsay, 1745; “The Vision” (anon.), 1748. Collected Works: in 3 vols., 1851. Life: by O. Smeaton, 1896.

Personal

  The personal history of Allan Ramsay is marked by few circumstances of striking interest; yet, independently of his poetry, he cannot be reckoned an insignificant individual who gave Scotland her first circulating library, and who established her first regular theatre.

  Allan Ramsay knew his friends Gay and Somerville as well in their writings, as he did when he came to be personally acquainted with them; but Allan, who had bustled up from a barber’s shop into a bookseller’s was “a cunning shaver;” and nobody would have guessed the author of the “Gentle Shepherd” to be penurious.

  Allan Ramsay was not a man to be patronised; he had too good an opinion of himself; he was too contented with his lot in the world; and it can hardly be questioned that when he went to this or the other nobleman’s house he considered the favour reciprocal and the obligation mutual. This frank jovial little man did not abate one whit of his dignity in any one’s presence; and his good nature, his liberality of opinion, his ready palliation for other people’s shortcomings, were something unusual at that time for one in his station, and served to render him a general favourite.

  He was one of the poets to whom, in a pecuniary point of view, poetry had been really a blessing, and who could combine poetic pursuits with those of an ordinary business. He possessed that turn of mind which Hume says it is more happy to possess than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year—a disposition always to see the favourable side of things.

  To the Castlehill Allan Ramsay retired in his later years, and there in the lodging built for himself on this novel Parnassus, he sported anew with the Muses to whom he had paid his devoirs in earlier years, sometimes in less prudent fashion. There in 1743 the “Poet’s Nest” was built, which still stands surrounded by private garden and civic pleasure grounds, looking across the bed of the old Nor Loch on as magnificent a landscape and civic foreground as poet could desire. According to the tale told to me by Mr. Alexander Smellie,—the son of Burns’s old cronie, author of “The Philosophy of Natural History,”—the poet applied to the Crown for a grant of as much land on the Castlehill as would suffice him to build a cage for his burd, i.e., his wife. On the site apportioned to him he erected the octagonal structure, still forming the centre of Ramsay Lodge, which, before it received its later additions, looked not unlike a large parrot’s cage.

  At fifteen, he stood alone in the world, an orphan in a strange city, friendless and penniless, entirely dependent for the means of earning a livelihood on the prospect of being wig-weaver. He gradually raised himself to a position of honour and wealth, became the associate and friend of some of the most eminent men in his neighbourhood, and the correspondent of several of the leading literary men of his time, gave his son a costly training in art both at home and abroad, and left his children well-provided in an easy independency. His enterprise is another feature of his conduct. He abandoned the trade to which he had been bred, and by which he was securing an independency, for one of which he had little but an onlooker’s knowledge, and found without assistance his advantage in the exchange. Then he was the first to introduce that system of lending out books which is now known as the Circulating Library. He was further the first person to erect a house in Edinburgh for dramatic representations, and though the undertaking failed, and almost ruined him, it failed only through the bigotry and timidity of the city rulers. If the house had been licensed there is no doubt that it would have been both a profitable venture and a liberalising agency.

  Allan Ramsay is believed to lie under a birch-tree almost in front of the tablet to his memory, on the south side of the Greyfriars’ Church, although there is no stone to mark his grave.

  Perhaps as good an idea as any, of the personal appearance of the poet, is to be got from his statue by Sir John Steel which stands close by the monument to Scott in Princes Street Gardens; but references to his short, active figure, his round humourous face, dark twinkling eyes, and mouth ever ready with a merry epigram, live in all the Edinburgh reminiscences of his time. Of all the great personages, indeed, who at that day came and went on the plainstones of Edinburgh, none is remembered more pleasantly and affectionately than the genial bookseller-poet.

  Existing portraits, including the one most valued for its fidelity to the original, that by his son, Allan Ramsay, the artist (Portrait-painter in Ordinary to King George III.), show him to have possessed features that were delicate and sharply chiselled, keen dark eyes, a mobile, sensitive mouth, a complexion dark almost to swarthiness, and a high rounded forehead. To these items may be added those others coming as side-lights, thrown on a man’s character and individuality by the passing references of contemporaries. From such sources we learn that his face was one whereon were writ large, contentment with himself and with the world, as well as a certain pawky shrewdness and unaffected bonhomie. This expression was largely induced by the twinkling of his beadlike eyes, and the lines of his mouth, which curved upwards at the corners; almost imperceptibly, it is true, yet sufficiently to flash into his countenance that subtle element of humourous canniness which has been accepted by many as the prime attribute of his character…. His figure was thickset, but had not as yet acquired the squatness of later days. If in the years to come he grew to resemble George Eliot’s portrait of Mr. Casson, when the inevitable penalty of sedentariness and good living has to be paid in increasing corpulence, he never lost his tripping gait which in early manhood earned for him the sobriquet of “Denty Allan.” In deportment and dress he was “easy, trig and neat,” leaning a little to vanity’s side in his manners, yet nathless as honourable, sound-hearted, clean-souled a gentleman as any that lounged around Edinburgh Cross of a sunny Saturday afternoon. Such was the youth that presented himself to bonny Kirsty Ross at her father’s tea-table…. His lovableness and generosity notwithstanding, Ramsay’s vanity and self-complacency meets us at every turn. To omit mentioning it would be to present an unfaithful portrait of the honest poet. On the other hand, justice compels one to state that, if vain, he was neither jealous nor ungenerous. He was always ready to recognise the merits of others, and his egoism was not selfishness. Though he might not care to deny himself to his own despite for the good of others, he was perfectly ready to assist his neighbour when his own and his family’s needs had been satisfied.

Fables and Tales, 1722

  “The Monk and the Miller’s Wife” would of itself be his passport to immortality as a comic poet. In this capacity he might enter the lists with Chaucer and Boccacio with no great risk of discomfiture. Though far their inferior in acquired address, his native strength was perhaps not widely disproportionate…. A story of more festive humour could not have been devised. The characters are sustained with consummate propriety; the manners are true to nature; and poetic justice is not strictly observed in the winding up of the piece.

The Tea-Table Miscellany, 1724–27

  The object of “The Tea Table Miscellany” was to please the public, not to instruct the inquirer into the history of Scottish songs; and all who have ever handled it with a historical object in view have had in consequence to lament the vagueness and meagerness of the information supplied. Nothing is told but the bare fact that a song is old, old with additions, or new—sometimes not so much as that. In what way recovered, or how old, or on what ground it was believed to be old, are questions to which there is no answer in Ramsay. He cannot however be blamed for not accomplishing what he never attempted, or for being blind to that which none of his contemporaries perceived. “The Tea Table Miscellany,” faulty as it is from the point of view of literary history, was and long remained without rival as a collection of Scottish songs; and it has preserved much that otherwise would probably have been lost. The success of Ramsay too, encouraging others, like Oswald and Thomson, to labour in the same field, led indirectly to the recovery and preservation of other pieces.

The Evergreen, 1724

  But the first editor who seems to have made a determined effort to preserve our ancient popular poetry was the well-known Allan Ramsay, in his Evergreen, containing chiefly extracts from the ancient Scottish Makers, whose poems have been preserved in the Bannatyne Manuscript, but exhibiting amongst them some popular ballads.

  But for the publication of the “Evergreen,” the world might never have learnt to doubt the veracity of Allan Ramsay. On the other hand, had the “Evergreen” not come down to us, the “Vision”—its principal attraction—would have been wanting, and the poet would have lost one of the noblest of his laurels. It is better, perhaps, as it is. At any rate it is certain, that what Ramsay has lost in character, he has gained in poetic fame. The world deals mercifully with literary frauds, the more so, perhaps, as the world is likely to be a gainer by them. On the other hand, who does not feel for those gentlemen who spent years of their lives in fruitless researches, all because a Ramsay would not own that he was the author of the “Vision,” or a Chatterton that he wrote the “Rowley Manuscripts”? Perhaps the less we say on the matter the better for our author, who certainly deserves enough at our hands to be spared any unnecessary reproaches. There are spots on the sun; our author was not without his. His gravest fault was that he was a dishonest editor. We must not forget, however, that he wrote one of the finest pastorals in any language and that the authorship of the “Gentle Shepherd” is a passport to immortality as good as any that has been signed of late years.

The Gentle Shepherd, 1725

  I spoke of Allan Ramsay’s “Gentle Shepherd,” in the Scottish dialect, as the best pastoral that had ever been written; not only abounding with beautiful rural imagery, and just and pleasing sentiments, but being a real picture of manners; and I offered to teach Dr. Johnson to understand it. “No, sir,” said he; “I won’t learn it. You shall retain your superiority by my not knowing it.”

  The greater part of Ramsay’s “Gentle Shepherd” is written in a broad Scotch dialect. The sentiments of that piece are natural, the circumstances interesting; the characters well drawn, well distinguished, and well contrasted; and the fable has more probability than any other pastoral drama I am acquainted with. To an Englishman, who had never conversed with the common people of Scotland, the language would appear only antiquated, obscure, or unintelligible; but to a Scotchman who thoroughly understands it, and is aware of its vulgarity, it appears ludicrous; from the contrast between meanness of phrase, and dignity or seriousness of sentiment. This gives a farcical air even to the most affecting parts of the poem; and occasions an impropriety of a peculiar kind, which is very observable in the representation. And accordingly, this play, with all its merit, and with a strong national partiality in its favour, has never given general satisfaction upon the stage.

  It is a great disadvantage to this beautiful poem, that it is written in the old rustic dialect of Scotland, which, in a short time, will probably be entirely obsolete, and not intelligible; and it is a farther disadvantage, that it is so entirely informed on the rural manners of Scotland, that none but a native of that country can thoroughly understand or relish it. But, though subject to those local disadvantages, which confine its reputation within narrow limits, it is full of so much natural description, and tender sentiment, as would do honour to any poet. The characters are well drawn, the incidents affecting, the scenery and manners lively and just. It affords a strong proof, both of the power which nature and simplicity possess, to reach the heart in every sort of writing; and of the variety of pleasing characters and subjects, with which pastoral poetry, when properly managed, is capable of being enlivened.

  Exhibited rusticity without vulgarity, and elegant sentiment without affectation.

  One of the finest pastoral comedies in any language; and which could have been only produced by art, co-operating with genius, in a propitious moment for shepherdish poetry.

  To every Englishman, and, I trust, to every Scotsman not of fastidious refinement, the dialect of the “Gentle Shepherd” will appear to be most perfectly consonant to the characters of the speakers and the times in which the action is laid. To this latter circumstance the critics I have just mentioned seem not to have been sufficiently attentive. The language of this pastoral is not precisely the Scotish language of the present day: the poet himself spoke the language of the beginning of the century, and his persons were of the age preceding that period. To us their dialect is an antiquated tongue, and, as such, it carries with it a Doric simplicity. But when we consider both the characters and the times, it has an indispensable propriety; and to have given the speakers in the “Gentle Shepherd” a more refined and polished dialect, or more modern tone of conversation, would have been a gross violation of truth and nature.

  The Gentle Shepherd stands quite apart from the general pastoral poetry of modern Europe. It has no satyrs, no featureless simpletons, nor drowsy and still landscapes of nature, but distinct characters and amusing incidents. The principal shepherd never speaks out of consistency with the habits of a peasant; but he moves in that sphere with such a manly spirit, with so much cheerful sensibility to its humble joys, with maxims of life so rational and independent, and with an ascendancy over his fellow swains so well maintained by his force of character, that if we could suppose the pacific scenes of the drama to be suddenly changed into situations of trouble and danger, we should, in exact consistency with our former idea of him, expect him to become the leader of the peasants, and the Tell of his native hamlet. Nor is the character of his mistress less beautifully conceived. She is represented, like himself, as elevated, by a fortunate discovery, from obscure to opulent life, yet as equally capable of being the ornament of either. A Richardson or a D’Arblay, had they continued her history, might have heightened the portrait, but they would not have altered its outline. Like the poetry of Tasso and Ariosto, that of the “Gentle Shepherd” is engraved on the memory of its native country. Its verses have passed into proverbs; and it continues to be the delight and solace of the peasantry whom it describes.

  Shepherd.  I hae some thocht o’ writing a play—a Pastoral Drama.
  North.  What, James! after Allan Ramsay—after the “Gentle Shepherd?”
  Shepherd.  What for no? That’s a stupid apophthegm, though you said it. I wad hae mair variety o’ characters, and inceedents, and passions o’ the human mind in my drama—mair fun, and frolic, and daffin—in short, mair o’ what you, and the like o’ you, ca’ coorseness;—no sae muckle see-sawing between ony twa individual hizzies, as in Allan; and, aboon a’ things, a mair natural and wise-like catastrophe. My peasant or shepherd lads should be sae in richt earnest, and no turn out Sirs and Lords upon you at the hinder end o’ the drama. No but that I wad aiblins introduce the upper ranks intil the wark; but they should stand abeigh frae the lave of the characters,—by way o’ contrast, or by way o’ “similitude in dissimilitude,” as that haverer Wordsworth is sae fond o’ talking and writing about. Aboon a’ things, I wus to draw the pictur o’ a perfect and polished Scotch gentleman o’ the auld schule.

  One of the most remarkable and truly national Scottish poets is Allan Ramsay, whose “Gentle Shepherd” is perhaps the only modern pastoral which can be compared to the exquisite creations of Theocritus. It is the first successful solution of that difficult problem, to represent rustic manners as they really are, and at the same time so as to make them attractive and graceful. The difficulty of the task will best be appreciated by reflecting on the innumerable failures, from Virgil down to Shenstone, which crowd the annals of literature. But the rustic pictures of Allan Ramsay breathe the freshness of real country life—they have an atmosphere of nature, the breezy freshness of the fields; he has revived the magic of Theocritus, and given us a glimpse into the interior life of the real shepherds, with their artless vigour and unsophisticated feelings.

  Allan Ramsay is the prince of the homely pastoral drama…. Allan Ramsay is not only entitled to the designation we have given him, but in some respects is the best pastoral writer in the world…. Allan Ramsay’s poem is not only a probable and pleasing story, containing charming pictures, much knowledge of life, and a good deal of quiet humour, but in some respects it may be called classical, if by classical is meant ease, precision, and unsuperfluousness of style. Ramsay’s diction is singularly straightforward, seldom needing the assistance of inversions; and he rarely says anything for the purpose of “filling up;”—two freedoms from defect the reverse of vulgar and commonplace; nay, the reverse of a great deal of what pretends to be fine writing, and is received as such. We confess we never tire of dipping into it, “on and off,” any more than into Fletcher, or Milton, or into Theocritus himself, who, for the union of something higher with true pastoral, is unrivalled in short pieces. The “Gentle Shepherd” is not a forest, nor a mountainside, nor Arcady; but it is a field full of daisies, with a brook in it, and a cottage “at the sunny end;” and this we take to be no mean thing, either in the real or the ideal world. Our Jar of Honey may well lie for a few moments among its heather, albeit filled from Hybla. There are bees, “look you,” in Habbie’s How. Theocritus and Allan shake hands over a shepherd’s pipe.

  Allan Ramsay’s pastoral play of “The Gentle Shepherd” deserves Hogg’s censure, for it has the fault of being in rhyme, which is not the language of common, to say nothing of pastoral, life. The dénouement, accurately described in the text, is forced and unnatural. He scarcely merits the title of “the Scottish Theocritus.”

  The finest existing specimen of its class.

  Any one at all acquainted with the literature of the age in which Ramsay lived, is, on reading for the first time “The Gentle Shepherd,” at once struck with its peculiar freshness and naturalness: summer breezes seem to be rushing through its pages, scented with odours of bean-blossom and clover. His pictures of country scenery are most life-like and pleasing; his characters talk frankly and openly, without set forms of speech, and without that coarseness which so frequently disfigures the writings of contemporary authors. An excellent piece of dramatic composition, “The Gentle Shepherd” is also a thoroughly genial and satisfactory book for the fire-side, or for a summer afternoon’s ramble; the Scotticisms with which it abounds give it an air of quaintness, and rarely obscure the text even for southern readers; while there is throughout a healthy, cheerful tone, refreshing as the blowing of July winds.

  The feelings of our age may be now and then offended by a freedom of speech that borders on coarseness, but that the texture of the poem is stirring and human hearted is proved by the hold it still retains on the Scottish peasantry. If here and there a false note mars the truth of the human manners, as when Scotch Lowland shepherds talk of playing on reeds and flutes, the scenery of “The Gentle Shepherd” is true to Nature as it is among the Pentland Hills.

  With genuine freshness and humour, but without a trace of burlesque, transferred to the scenery of the Pentland Hills the lovely tale of Florizel and Perdita. The dramatic form of this poem is only an accident, but it doubtless suggested an experiment of a different kind to the most playful of London wits.

  Though it now reads like a conventional drama, seemed like a breath of fresh air to those who first read it. All the wits of the time admired it, and justly.

  In his creations the people recognised themselves, and the scenes amid which they moved—their every-day life, their loves, their aspirations were all mirrored in its pages. Their emulation was roused, and Patie and Peggy have lived as an ideal hero and heroine in the minds of many a Scottish lad and lass. It must be remembered that “The Gentle Shepherd” does not pretend to convey any exalted philosophy of life or morals. It is purely and simply a love story, and its “summons” to lads and lasses to “pu’ the gowan in its prime” is no more “pagan” than similar advice given in higher quarters. There are, of course, some suggestions of coarseness in it; it would not be the graphic portraiture of peasant life of the eighteenth century that it is, if there were not; but for the time at which it was written it is singularly free from such blemishes, and its teaching is on the side of contentment and virtue.

  Even Burns had not the universal acceptance, the absolute command of his audience, which belonged to honest Allan. There were politicians and there were ecclesiastics, and good people neither one nor the other, who shook their troubled heads over the ploughman who would not confine himself to the daisy of the field or the Saturday night’s observances of the Cottar, but was capable of Holy Willie and the Holy Fair. But Ramsay had no gainsayer, and “The Gentle Shepherd” was the first of books in most Lowland homes. Its construction, its language and sentiments, are all as commonplace as could be imagined, but it is a wholesome, natural, pure, and unvarnished tale, and the mind that brought it forth (well aware of what pleased his public) and the public who relished and bought it, give us a better view of the honest tastes and morals of the period than anything else which has come to us from that time. There has always been a good deal of drinking, and other vices still less consistent with purity of heart, in Scotland. Now and then we are frightened by statistics that give us a very ill name; but it is difficult to believe that if the national heart had been corrupt “The Gentle Shepherd” could have afforded it such universal and wholesome delight.

  “The Gentle Shepherd” is the work of a poet, and gives a higher impression of Ramsay’s power than his songs alone would warrant.

  Kindled by the theories and the practice of the English wits and poets, Allan Ramsay wrote real pastoral poetry, exhibiting the customs, the dress, the games, the domestic sorrows, the loves, and the lives of real shepherds. And the “Gentle Shepherd” awoke the genius of Burns.

  Deserves praise rather for the intention than for the performance of his “Gentle Shepherd.” A very few lines of genuine Scotch landscape are here placed among conventional and uninteresting dialogue; like his songs, his Pastoral does not rise above the trite half-classical phrases from which Burns could not always detach himself.

  To the fact that Ramsay has painted Scotland and Scottish rustics as they are, and has not gone to the hermaphrodite and sexless inhabitants of a mythical Golden Age for the characters of his great drama, the heart of every Scot can bear testimony. Neither Burns, supreme though his genius was over his predecessors, nor Scott, revelling as he did in patriotic sentiments as his dearest possession, can rival Ramsay in the absolute truth wherewith he has painted Scottish rustic life. He is at one and the same time the Teniers and the Claude of Scottish pastoral—the Teniers, in catching with subtle sympathetic insight the precise “moments” and incidents in the life of his characters most suitable for representation; the Claude, for the almost photographic truth of his reproductions of Scottish scenery.

  It is better adapted for the study than for the stage, in large measure because ideal actors for it are simply impossible. The action is slow and languid, and the interest aroused is mainly sentimental. At first it was without songs, and the lyrics afterwards interspersed are not brilliant. The poem is remarkable for its quick and subtle appreciation of rural scenery, customs, and characters; and, if the plot is slightly artificial, the development is skilful and satisfactory. In its honest, straightforward appreciation of beauty in nature and character, and its fascinating presentation of homely customs, it will bear comparison with its author’s Italian models, or with similar efforts of Gay.

General

  Ramsay was a man of strong natural parts, and a fine poetical genius, of which his celebrated pastoral, “The Gentle Shepherd,” will ever retain a substantial monument; and though some of his songs may be deformed by far-fetched allusions and pitiful conceits, “The Lass of Peattie’s Mill,” “The Yellow-Hair’d Laddie,” “Fairwell to Lochabar,” and some others, must be allowed equal to any, and even superior, in point of pastoral simplicity, to most lyric productions, either in the Scotish or any other language. As an editor, he is, perhaps, reprehensible, not only on account of the liberties he appears to have taken with many of the earlier pieces he published, in printing them with additions, which one is unable to distinguish, but also for preferring songs written by himself, or the “ingenious young gentlemen” who assisted him, to ancient and original words, which would, in many cases, all circumstances considered, have been probably superior, or, at least, much more curious, and which are now irretrievable. In short, Ramsay would seem to have had too high an opinion of his own poetry, to be a diligent or faithful publisher of any other person’s.

  Green be the pillow of honest Allan, at whose lamp Burns lighted his brilliant torch.

  Ramsay, to be sure, is ideal enough; but there are good ideas and bad ideas. To be snatched from the commonplaces of life that one might “ride on the curl’d clouds,” or penetrate the solitudes of a poet’s imagination, is good; but it is not so to leave the busy facts of society merely to get on the platitude of a barren table-land. Out of a proper reverence to my master’s opinion, I have looked again and again at the “Gentle Shepherd,” and I am so unfortunate as to think it the flattest rubbish I ever read. “Prove and Love” in plenty. Take any one page of Browne’s “Pastorals,” or Jonson’s “Shepherd,” or Fletcher’s “Shepherdess”—see the fancy, the imagination, the exquisite truth of landscape painting; and then browze on the insipid leaves of the Scotch bookseller if you can.

  The simple tenderness of Crawford, the fidelity of Ramsay, and the careless humor of Fergusson.

  It is hardly possible to ignore the fact that Allan Ramsay is by no means so highly esteemed at present as he was in the eighteenth century. The greater brilliancy of Burns has thrown his glory into the shade. He is no longer, as he was a hundred and fifty years ago, the national poet of Scotland. Many good and true Scotsmen know little about him but his name; and scholars south of the Tweed think it quite sufficient to have dipped into his chef-d’œuvre with the assistance of a dictionary. But Allan Ramsay has become, if not a popular, at any rate a classic author, and no student of literature can be said to have fairly finished his education who has not read the “Gentle Shepherd.”

  After Milton died (1674), rural life and Nature, for more than half a century, disappeared from English poetry…. It was in the Scottish poet, Allan Ramsay that the sense of natural beauty first reappeared. Since his day Nature, which, even when felt and described in earlier English poetry, had held a place altogether subordinate to man, has more and more claimed to be regarded in poetry as almost coequal with man.

  It is as a painter of manners with keen, sly, humorous observation, and not as a lyrist, that Ramsay deserves to be remembered. We can well understand Hogarth’s admiration for him. His elegies on Maggie Johnstone and Lucky Wood, and his anticipation of the “Road to Ruin” in the “Three Bonnets” were after Hogarth’s own heart. But the life that he painted in the Scotch capital as he saw it with his twinkling eye, broad sense of fun, and “pawky” humour, was too coarse to have much interest for any but his own time. In a happy hour for his memory, he conceived the idea of describing the life which he had known in his youth in the country.

  Ramsay created his own audience, and it is wonderful how rapidly it grew and how widely it extended. There is scarcely any better proof of the accuracy and piquancy of his descriptions, and the thoroughly representative and national character of his sentiments and language, than is afforded by this undeniable fact. It is true there was a small reading public to welcome such a collection as Watson’s, and to form such a nucleus as a new and original genius might successfully utilise. But it is just as true that he had no such audience as was waiting in Edinburgh for Fergusson, and in lowland Scotland for Burns. These later singers were indebted to him for several advantages, not the least of which was an audience already familiarised with that freedom of subject and sentiment in which both of them, though in unequal degrees, excelled.

  He gave up the outside of the head for the inside, by becoming a bookseller and a publisher…. Most of Ramsay’s original songs were poor, but he preserved the habit of writing in the Doric dialect, and as an editor and collector of national poetry he did thoroughly efficient and valuable work.

  He is really one of the most remarkable figures in the early history of Romanticism. In both his creative and critical work, he threw his influence decidedly against the age. He brought before the public some thoroughly Romantic poetry, and stands as one of the pioneers among ballad collectors.

  For any trace of the inevitable in his verse the reader will look in vain. The higher imagination was a gift denied to him; yet with comparatively commonplace powers he exercised an influence which many men far more richly endowed have vainly striven to attain. It is to this, fully as much as to the intrinsic worth of his verse, considerable as its merit often is, that he owes his interest…. He had predecessors, indeed he was so little of an original genius that he would probably never have written had there not been a popular demand for the kind of verse he supplied. The language of political economy is well applied to it, for there never was a clearer case in literature of the operation of economic laws. But except Ramsay, there was no one who displayed any sustained capacity to furnish what was wanted.

  No Scottish poet, probably, has been subjected at once to praise so much beyond his merits and to distract so grossly unjust to his deserts, as Allan Ramsay. While by some it has been averred that he was merely a time-serving manufacturer of verse, who wrote what would sell, by others he had been extolled as not only the first but as one of the greatest of the singers of a new era. Burns himself spoke of Ramsay’s “Gentle Shepherd” as the “most glorious poem ever written.” Neither the eulogy nor the disparagement perhaps has been exactly just; but if indeed, as has been said of him, he appears to some to have been less a poet born than one made by circumstances, it must also at least be said that by what he did for the muse of his country he merits a place in Scottish poetic history little behind that of the greatest makers, Barbour, Henryson, Dunbar, Lyndsay, and Burns.

  The characteristic touch of humour blended with romance, that formed its most distinctive feature, was preserved with a certain freshness and verve, by the individuality of Ramsay, and his sympathy with the realities of life and with nature made him keep in touch with what was the most valuable inheritance of Scottish song. His geniality won for him the favour of the leading spirits of the nation. His revival of the older forms harmonised not with the taste only, but with the deeper feelings of his day; and whatever the limitations of his genius, the author of the “Gentle Shepherd” claims the profound gratitude of his nation as one who transmitted a tradition, and who passed on the torch through the hands of Robert Fergusson to the more powerful arm and more commanding genius of Burns.