grammarian, and Dr Pitcairn, the 'Scottish Voltaire.' The club printed and published the address, and appointed Ramsay their poet-laureate. He was now launched in versifying. An Elegy on Maggy Johnston (a disreputable female) took the fancy of the club, which published much if not all that he wrote for its delectation-The Qualifications of a Gentleman, The Great Eclipse of the Sun, and broadly humorous Elegies on John Cowper, the Kirk Treasurer's Man, and Lucky Wood, an alewife. The town began to look for the broadsides on which his successive productions were printed; and when in 1716 he essayed a continuation of the royal canto, Christ's Kirk on the Green, to which he added a third canto in 1718, he was acknowledged the Scottish poet of the day. By 1719, when he gave up wig-making and turned bookseller, we find Hamilton of Gilbertfield addressing him as O fam'd and celebrated Allan ! Renowned Ramsay! Canty Callan! Joyous fellow His In 1720 he published a collection of his pieces in a quarto volume, which included some English poems that were considered by his admirers as good as the best produced in the England of Pope's time. Pope, Steele, Arbuthnot, and Gay were subscribers; and Arbuthnot, Philips, Tickell, and others flattered him to the top of his bentand his appetite for praise was egregious. shop became the rendezvous of the literary and the fashionable in Edinburgh, whose patronage he retained by a steady production of verse- -Fables and Tales and The Three Bonnets (1722); The Fair Assembly, a satire on the Puritan objection to dancing (1723); Health, containing portraits of contemporary debauchees (1724). In 1724 he commenced the publication of the Tea-table Miscellany: a Collection of Scots Songs, in which 'new words' were wedded to 'known good tunes' mainly by himself, but partly by Hamilton, Mallet, and others. This was followed by The Evergreen: 'being ane Collection of Scots Poems, wrote by the Ingenious before 1600.' The Miscellany was excellent work of its kind. The Evergreen is a monument of editorial stupidity. Ramsay had access to the Bannatyne MSS., but what he took from them he cut and carved and modernised according to his own taste; he passed off some of his own work as old Scots by the device of pseudo-archaic spelling. Finally, in 1725, he published The Gentle Shepherd, a dramatic pastoral, which his contemporaries esteemed not only his greatest work but a masterpiece of literature; poets and critics sang an unbroken chorus in its praise. It was by way of a realistic picture of Scottish rural life as it was-in reality as false as much of the Kail-yard literature of to-day-and had an enormous success. Thenceforward the poet rested on his oars, adding nothing to his output during the rest of his life but a masque, a pastoral epithalamium, a volume of fables, and an epistle to the Lords of Session. He was a prosperous man of business, and whether or not he was conscious that he had nothing more to say to his contemporaries, he was content to go on publishing, bookselling, managing a circulating library, and enjoying the society of his numerous friends. He sustained serious losses in 1736 through building a theatre, which the dominant class-half-bigoted, but perhaps three parts rightly loath to allow the Restoration dramas, which were the vogue, to pollute the Edinburgh youth-did not allow him to open; his circulating library had barely escaped the Presbyterian Inquisition. All his influence with the leading men of the day in Edinburgh could not save his theatre, and he had to wait other ten years for the popular sanction of a legal quirk through which a playhouse, thanks largely to his efforts, was erected and opened in the Canongate. Ramsay's shops were successively in the Grassmarket, the High Street, and the Luckenbooths. He built a house for himself on the Castlehill in 1742, to a design by his son Allan the painter, and there spent the evening of his days. He died 7th January 1758. The science of heredity' being as yet in its infancy, it would be rash to speculate much or confidently as to the influence that the fact that Allan Ramsay had English blood in his veins may have had on his destiny as a man or his career as a poet. Yet there is nothing unreasonable in the supposition that this circumstance had a chastening effect upon the Scottish perfervidity which he inherited from his father, and may even have qualified him for the position of 'leader of the Scottish poetical revival of the eighteenth century' by helping him to write Scottish verse that was popular in England, as well as English verse that, frankly imitative though it was of southern models, was not boycotted for 'patriotic' reasons in Scotland. Ramsay was at his best when, through poetry, he preached the gospel of his own nature of the dark-com. plexioned-neat Black-a-vic'd, snod, dapper fallow, Nor lean nor overlaid with tallowhe was not ashamed to describe himself. That nature, as set forth by himself, is less suggestive of typical Scottish 'canniness,' which is the shrewdness not of temperament but of calculation, than of English good temper, free from religious or moral austerity; not averse from the pleasure afforded by the 'tappit hen' for the sound practical reason that 'good claret best keeps out the cauld,' but distinctly averse from excess. At all events the 'canty callan,' the moderate convivialist of the Easy Club, the worldly bookseller who carried the courtly deference of the wig-maker into his poetic 'tributes to reigning beauties,' was eminently fitted to do justice to a period of literary transition, to recall Dunbar and Henryson, and prepare the way for Fergusson and Burns. Although in almost everything he wrote he appealed, like the dedication of his Tea-table Miscellany, To ilka lovely British lass, True ladies Charlotte, Anne, and Jean, Wha dances barefoot on the green and although in his Gentle Shepherd he undoubtedly realised his comprehensive ambition, Ramsay desired primarily to please the well-to-do society of the Scottish capital, which was bent above all things on rivalling London, which regarded the 'rustic life' much as a later generation regarded the 'Kail-yard,' and which wished to see expressed in not too strenuous verse its own epicurean rather than rationalistic rebellion against "the Kirk.' Ramsay made an admirable laureate for such a society. He could hold his own with all but the greatest of his English contemporaries. He could be sufficiently realistic when reproducing 'local' life, as in his Elegies on Maggy Johnston and Lucky Wood; he could even fall to the realism of the squalid-picturesque, as in some portions of the Gentle Shepherd and in the cantos he added to Christ's Kirk. While he advocated the pagan naturalism of 'puin' the gowan in its prime,' he did not carry his representation of passion to excess. To the ecstasies of 'the cannie hour at e'en' he preferred the Dinna pu' me; gently thus I fa' Into my Patie's arms for good and a’— of the far-seeing Peggie, who calculates that Bairns and their bairns make sure a firmer tie Ramsay had the limitations of the successful poet of a transition period. He was superficial, mistook vulgarity for humour, and could on occasions be commonplace in an appalling degree; not without reason has the charge of 'buffoonery' been preferred against him. In spite of 'The Lass of Patie's Mill,' 'Bessy Bell and Mary Gray,' and 'Farewell to Lochaber'-if indeed he wrote the last-he can be allowed a place only among the minor lyrists of Scotland. There is nothing classical or 'inevitable' in Ramsay; yet the fidelity to truth of three-fourths of the Gentle Shepherd, and the prudent and genuinely 'national' Horatianism of Be sure ye dinna quat the grip Of ilka joy when ye are young, Before auld age your vitals nip, And lay ye twafald o'er a rung— quit every double over a staff TUNE-The wauking of the faulds.' Patie. My Peggy is a young thing, Just enter'd in her teens, Fair as the day, and sweet as May, Fair as the day, and always gay. My Peggy is a young thing, And I'm not very auld, Yet well I like to meet her at The wauking of the fauld. My Peggy smiles sae sweetly, Whene'er we meet alane, I wish nae mair to lay my care, My Peggy speaks sae sweetly, To a' the lave I'm cauld; But she gars a' my spirits glow At wauking of the fauld. groans cheerfuller watchingsheepfold rest choice (Act i. scene 1.) holmslopes A flowrie howm between twa verdant braes, Jenny. Come, Meg, let's fa' to wark upon this green, sky-blue waterfall singing Peggy. Gae farer up the burn to Habbie's How, Hollow Where a' that's sweet in spring and simmer grow; Between twa birks out o'er a little lin The water fa's, and makes a singance din : A pool breast-deep, beneath as clear as glass, Kisses with easy whirles the bordering grass. We'll end our washing while the morning's cool, And when the day grows het, we'll to the pool, There wash our sells-'tis healthfou now in May, And sweetly cauler on sae warm a day. SANG X. fresh (Act i. scene 2.) wealth Symon. Whene'er he drives our sheep to Edinburgh port, He buys some books of history, sangs or sport: Nor does he want of them a rowth at will, And carries ay a pouchfu' to the hill. About ane Shakespear and a famous Ben, He aften speaks, and ca's them best of men. How sweetly Hawthornden and Stirling sing, And ane caw'd Cowley, loyal to his king, He kens fou weel, and gars their verses ring. I sometimes thought, that he made o'er great frase About fine poems, histories and plays. When I reprov'd him anes-a book he brings, With this, quoth he, on braes I crack with kings. Auld Lang Syne. makes fuss chat (Act iii. scene 4.) Should auld acquaintance be forgot, These are the noblest hero's lot Methinks around us on each bough Whilst thro' the groves I walk with you, Bessy Bell and Mary Gray. Be sure ye dinna quat the grip Of ilka joy when ye are young, Before auld age your vitals nip, rake warm pint measure quart measure wise quit every Upon a borrowing day when sleet Made twinters and hog-wedders bleet, And quake with cauld; behind a ruck Met honest Toop and snaking Buck; Frae chin to tail clad with thick hair, He bad defiance to thin air; But trusty Toop his fleece had riven, When he amang the birns was driven : Half naked the brave leader stood, He look'd compos'd, unmov'd his mood. When thus the Goat, that had tint a' His credit baith with great and sma', Shunn'd by them as a pest, wad fain New friendship with this worthy gain. Ram, say, shall I give you a part Of mine? I'll do 't with all my heart, 'Tis yet a lang cauld month to Beltan, And ye 've a very ragged kelt on; Accept, I pray, what I can spare, To clout your doublet with my hair. No, says the Ram, tho' my coat 's torn, Yet ken, thou worthless, that I scorn To be oblig'd at any price To sic as you, whose friendship's vice; I'd have less favour frae the best, Boons frae the generous make ane smile, Christ's Kirk on the Green. Grudgin their groat to pay. But what aft fristed's no forgeen When fouk has nought to say; Climbed-westward Began-stretch-retch Yet sweer were they to rake their een; Auld Bessie in her red coat braw Came wi' her ain oe Nanny, An odd-like wife, they said that saw, A moupin, runkled granny; She fley'd the kimmers ane and a', Word gae'd she was na kanny, Nor wad they let Lucky awa, Till she was fou wi' branny, Like mony mae. Flew to-breeches By precentor Early trusted loath fine grandchild mumbling-wrinkled frightened-gossips safe more (From Canto iii.) A complete edition of Ramsay's poems, with a biography by George Chalmers, was published in 1800, and has been often reprinted. A selection by Mr Logie Robertson was issued in 1887. The Tea-table Miscellany and the Evergreen have been reprinted more than once. There is a short biography of Ramsay by Mr Oliphant Smeaton (1896), and an admirable essay in Professor Masson's Edinburgh Sketches (1892). WILLIAM WALLACE. William Meston (1688–1745), who aspired to write the Scottish Hudibras, was the son of an Aberdeenshire blacksmith, and, after an education at Marischal College, became one of the regents there through the influence of the noble family of Keith. Following his patrons, however, in the rebellion of 1715, he lost his office, and had to go for a while into hiding, and during the rest of his life he earned a precarious subsistence as schoolmaster and tutor in various places in the north of Scotland, under the protection of several Jacobite families. His Knight of the Kirk (1723) shows a close and even servile imitation of the plot and metre of Butler. Sir John Presbyter takes the place of the English Puritan knight, and that of Ralph is filled by a squire who evidently represents the Wild Westland Whigs. The poem had a certain vogue among Scottish Jacobites, and it would seem that about five or six editions of it appeared within forty years. But it shows no trace of original genius, and the almost entire lack of action in its pages makes it very tedious reading even in its fragmentary state. Meston's collected verses, which were printed at Edinburgh in 1767, and reprinted at Aberdeen in 1802, include also a series of short stories in verse entitled Mother Grim's Tales. Robert Crawford (c. 1695-1733), author of 'Tweedside' and 'The Bush aboon Traquair,' was the son of an Edinburgh merchant. He assisted Allan Ramsay in his Tea-table Miscellany, and, according to information obtained by Burns, was drowned in coming from France in May 1733. His two lyrics, admired by Burns and Allan Cunningham, now strike one as oddly conventional; though there is only one word of unmistakable Scotch in the two songs, we place him here with the vernacular and local poets. The Bush aboon Traquair. My vows and sighs, like silent air, That day she smiled and made me glad, I thought myself the luckiest lad, I tried to soothe my amorous flame, If more there passed, I'm not to blame- Yet now she scornful flees the plain, If e'er we meet she shews disdain, Ye rural powers, who hear my strains, Why thus should Peggy grieve me? O make her partner in my pains, Then let her smiles relieve me : If not, my love will turn despair, My passion no more tender; I'll leave the Bush aboon Traquair— To lonely wilds I'll wander. Tweedside. What beauties does Flora disclose! How sweet are her smiles upon Tweed! Yet Mary's, still sweeter than those, Both nature and fancy exceed. No daisy, nor sweet blushing rose, Not all the gay flowers of the field, Not Tweed, gliding gently through those, Such beauty and pleasure does yield. The warblers are heard in the grove, The linnet, the lark, and the thrush; The blackbird, and sweet cooing dove, Let us see how the primroses spring; And love while the feathered folk sing. 'Tis she does the virgins excel; No beauty with her may compare ; She's fairest where thousands are fair. Say, charmer, where do thy flocks stray? Oh, tell me at morn where they feed? Shall I seek them on sweet-winding Tay? Or the pleasanter banks of the Tweed? Alexander Ross (1699-1784), from 1732 schoolmaster at Lochlee in Forfarshire, when nearly seventy years of age, in 1768, published at Aberdeen, by the advice of Dr Beattie, a volume entitled Helenore, or the Fortunate Shepherdess, a Pastoral Tale in the Scottish Dialect, to which are added a few Songs by the Author. Some of his songs-as 'Woo'd, and Married, and a',' 'The Rock and the Wee Pickle Tow'-are still popular in Scotland. Being chiefly written in the Buchan dialect-which differs in words and in pronunciation from the west-country Scotch of BurnsRoss's pastoral is little known even in Scotland. Beattie took a interest in the 'goodhumoured, social, happy old man'-who was independent on £20 a year-and to promote the sale of his volume, he addressed a letter and a poetical epistle in praise of it in Aberdeenshire Scotch to the Aberdeen Journal. warm Woo'd, and Married, and a'. And have neither blankets nor sheets; Woo'd, and married, and a', Married, and woo'd, and a'! That was woo'd, and married, and a'? Out spake the bride's father, As he cam in frae the pleugh: 'Oh, haud your tongue, my dochter, And ye 'se get gear eneugh; The stirk stands i' the tether, And our braw bawsint yaud, Will carry ye hame your corn What wad ye be at, ye jaud?' wiped mare with a white forehead jade |