Alas! Allan, 'backwardness in coming forward' was never one of thy failings!

To Allan, digito monstrari was a condition of things equivalent to the seventh heaven of felicity; but he felt it would be more to his advantage to be pointed out as a bookseller than as a wigmaker, when his reputation as a poet would cause his social status to be keenly examined. We learn that he consulted his friend Ruddiman on the step, who spoke strongly in its favour, and gave him good sound advice as to the kind of stock most likely to sell readily. The 'Flying Mercury,' therefore, which up to this date had presided over the 'theeking' of the outside of the 'pashes' (heads) of the worthy burgesses of Auld Reekie, was thereafter to preside, with even increased lustre, over the provision of material for lining the inside with learning and culture.

That the time was an anxious one for the poet there can be little doubt. He was virtually beginning the battle of life anew; and though he did so with many advantageous circumstances in his favour, none the less was the step one to be undertaken only after the gravest consideration and calculation of probabilities. But by its results the change is shown to have been a wise one. From the outset the bookselling business proved a lucrative venture. The issue of his own broadsides, week by week, was of itself a considerable source of profit. These, in addition to being sold at his shop and hawked about the country, were disposed of on the streets of Edinburgh by itinerant stallkeepers, who were wont to regard the fact as one of great moment to themselves when they could cry, 'Ane o' Maister Ramsay's new poems—price a penny.' In this manner his famous piece, The City of Edinburgh's Address to the Country, was sown broadcast over the county.

Meantime, while Ramsay's literary and commercial prosperity was being established on so firm a basis, he was becoming quite a family man. The little house opposite Niddry's Wynd was gradually getting small enough for his increasing ménage. Since his marriage in 1712, happiness almost idyllic, as he records, had been his lot in his domestic relations. He had experienced the pure joy that thrills through a parent's heart on hearing little toddling feet pattering through his house, and sweet childish voices lisping the name 'father.' The following entries in the Register of Births and Baptisms for the City of Edinburgh speak for themselves:—

'At Edinburgh, 6th October 1713.

'Registrate to Allan Ramsay, periwige-maker, and Christian Ross, his spouse, New Kirk Parish—a son, Allan. Witnesses, John Symer, William Mitchell, and Robert Mein, merchant, burgesses; and William Baxter.

'Registrate to Allan Ramsay, weegmaker, burges, and Christian Ross, his spouse, North East (College Kirk) Parish—a daughter named Susanna. Witnesses, John Symers, merchant, and John Morison, merchant. The child was born on the 1st instant. 3rd October 1714.

'Registrate to Allan Ramsay, weegmaker, and Christian Ross, his spouse, North East Parish—a son, Niell. Witnesses, Walter Boswell, sadler, and John Symer, merchant. 9th October 1715.

'Registrate to Allan Ramsay, weegmaker, and Christian Ross, his spouse, North East Parish—a son, Robert. Witnesses, John Symer, merchant, and Walter Boswell, sadler. The child was born on the 10th instant. 23rd November 1716.

'Registrate to Allan Ramsay, bookseller, and Christian Ross, his spouse—a daughter named Agnes. Witnesses, James Norie, painter, and George Young, chyrurgeon. Born the 9th instant. 10th August 1725.'

Besides these named above, Chalmers states that Christian Ross brought Allan Ramsay three other daughters, who were not recorded in the Register,—one born in 1719, one in 1720, and one in 1724,—who are mentioned in his letter to Smibert as 'fine girls, no ae wally-draigle among them all.'

In 1719 our poet published his first edition of 'Scots Songs,'—some original, others collected from all sources, and comprising many of the gems of Scottish lyrical poetry. The success attending the volume was instant and gratifying, and led, as we will see further on, to other publications of a cognate but more ambitious character. Almost contemporaneously was published, in a single sheet or broadside, what proved to be the germ of the Gentle Shepherd—to wit, a Pastoral Dialogue between Patie and Roger. The dialogue was reprinted in the quarto of 1721, and was much admired by all the lovers of poetry of the period.

A reliable gauge of the estimation wherein Ramsay was now held, as Scotland's great vernacular poet, is afforded in the metrical epistles sent to him during the closing months of 1719 by Lieutenant William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, to which Allan returned replies in similar terms. This was not a poetical tourney like the famous 'flyting' between Dunbar and Kennedy, two hundred and thirty years before. In the latter, the two tilters sought to say the hardest and the bitterest things of each other, though they professed to joust with pointless spears; in the former, Hamilton and Ramsay, on the contrary, vied each with the other in paying the pleasantest compliments. Gilbertfield contributed a luscious sop to his correspondent's vanity when he saluted him, in a stanza alluded to by Burns in his own familiar tribute, as—

Then he proceeds to inform honest Allan that of 'poetry, the hail quintescence, thou hast suck'd up,' and affirms that—

After such a glowing tribute, Allan could do no less than dip deep into his cask of compliments also, and assure Gilbertfield that he felt taller already by this commendation—

Then he proceeds to shower on his correspondent his return compliments as follows—

Three epistles were exchanged on either side, bristling with flattery, and with a little poetic criticism scattered here and there. In Ramsay's second letter his irrepressible vanity takes the bit in its teeth and runs away with him. He appends a note with reference to his change of occupation, as though he dreaded the world might not know of it. 'The muse,' he says, 'not unreasonably angry, puts me here in mind of the favours she had done by bringing me from stalking over bogs or wild marshes, to lift my head a little brisker among the polite world, which could never have been acquired by the low movements of a mechanic.' He was a bookseller now, of course, and could afford to look down on wigmakers as base mechanics! 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.

At this time, also, Sir William Scott of Thirlestane, Bart., a contemporary Latin poet, as Chalmers records, of no inconsiderable powers, hailed Ramsay as one of the genuine poets whose images adorned the temple of Apollo. In the 'Poemata D. Gulielmi Scoti de Thirlestane,' printed along with the 'Selecta Poemata Archibaldi Pitcarnii' (Edinburgh, 1727), the following lines occur—

'Effigies Allani Ramsæi, Poëtæ Scoti, inter cæteras Poëtarum Imagines in Templo Apollinis suspensa:

As much as any other, this testimony evinces how rapidly our poet's reputation had increased.

At last, in the spring of 1720, Allan Ramsay came before the public, and challenged it to endorse its favourable estimate of his fugitive pieces by subscribing to a volume of his collected poems, 'with some new, not heretofore printed.' As Chambers remarks: 'The estimation in which the poet was now held was clearly demonstrated by the rapid filling up of a list of subscribers, containing the names of all that were eminent for talents, learning, or dignity in Scotland.' The volume, a handsome quarto, printed by Ruddiman, and ornamented by a portrait of the author, from the pencil of his friend Smibert, was published in the succeeding year, and the fortunate poet realised four hundred guineas by the speculation. Pope, Steele, Arbuthnot, and Gay were amongst his English subscribers.

The quarto of 1721 may be said to have closed the youthful period in the development of Ramsay's genius. Slow, indeed, was that development. He was now thirty-five years of age, and while he had produced many excellent pieces calculated to have made the name of any mediocre writer, he had, as yet, given the world nothing that could be classed as a work of genius. His sketches of humble life and of ludicrous episodes occurring among the lower classes in Edinburgh and the rustics in the country, had pleased a wide clientéle of readers, because they depicted with rare truth and humour, scenes happening in the everyday life of the time. But in no single instance, up to this date, had he produced a work that would live in the minds of the people as expressive of those deep, and, by them, incommunicable feelings that go to the composition of class differences.

As a literary artist, Ramsay was destined to develop into a genre painter of unsurpassed fidelity to nature. As yet, however, that which was to be the distinctive characteristic of his pictures had not dawned upon his mind. But the time was rapidly approaching. Already the first glimmerings of apprehension are to be detected in his tentative endeavours to realise his métier in the pastoral dialogue of Patie and Roger republished in his volume.

The quarto of 1721 contained, moreover, several pieces that had not been previously printed. These we will at present only mention en passant, reserving critical analysis for our closing chapters. Not the least noticeable of the poems in the volume are those wherein he lays aside his panoply of strength,—the 'blythe braid Scots,' or vernacular,—and challenges criticism on what he terms 'his English poems.' These were undoubtedly the most ambitious flights in song hitherto attempted by the Scottish Tityrus. To the study of Dryden, Cowley, Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot, he had devoted himself,—particularly to Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad, and to the collected edition of the works of the great author of the Rape of the Lock, issued in 1717. He had been in correspondence for some years previous with several of the leading English poets of the day, and with other individuals well known both in politics and London society, such as Josiah Burchet, who, when he died in 1746, had been Secretary to the Admiralty for forty-five years, and had sat in six successive Parliaments. This was the friend whose admiration for Ramsay was so excessive as to prompt him to send (as was the custom of the time) certain recommendatory verses for insertion in the quarto, wherein he hailed honest Allan in the following terms—

Small wonder is it that, stimulated by such flattery, Allan should have desired to evince to his friends by the Thames, that the notes of their northern brother of the lyre were not confined to the humble strains of his own rustic reed.

In the quarto, therefore, we have a poem, Tartana, or The Plaid, written in heroic couplets, with the avowed desire to reinstate in popular favour the silken plaid, which, from time immemorial, had been the favourite attire of Scots ladies, but, since the Rebellion of 1715, had been somewhat discarded, in consequence of Whiggish prejudices that it was a badge of disloyalty to the reigning house. Then we have Content, a long piece of moral philosophy in verse, and the Morning Interview, a poem written under the spell of Pope's Rape of the Lock, wherein the very machinery of the sylphs is copied from the great English satire. Nor is the 'South Sea Bubble,' which ran its brief course from 1718 to 1720, forgotten in Wealth, or The Woody (gallows), and two shorter poems illustrative of the prevailing madness. Epigrams, Addresses, Elegies, and Odes are also included, along with one or two of his famous poetical Epistles, modelled on those of Horace, and brimming over with genial bonhomie and good-humoured epicureanism. In this volume, also, we have additional evidence afforded how fondly he had become attached to Edinburgh and its environs. Scarce a poem is there in the book that lacks some reference to well-known features in the local landscape, showing that he still retained the love of wandering, in his spare hours, amid Pentland glens and by fair Eskside. Only with one extract will the reader's patience be taxed here. It is from his Ode to the Ph—, and is obviously an imitation of Horace's Ode to Thaliarchus. All the sunny glow of the great Roman's genius seems reflected in this revival of his sentiments, albeit under varying physical conditions, well-nigh three hundred and fifty lustra afterwards. The lines cleave to the memory with a persistence that speaks volumes for the catholicity and appropriateness of the thoughts—

CHAPTER VI

RAMSAY AS AN EDITOR; THE 'TEA-TABLE MISCELLANY' AND THE 'EVERGREEN'—1721-25

James Clerk of Penicuik considered Homer and Milton to be the only worthy compeers of the Caledonian bard; and Sir William Bennet of Marlefield insisted the Poet-Laureateship should be conferred on Ramsay, as the singer who united in himself the three great qualifications—genius, loyalty, and respectability! Certainly honest Allan would have been a Triton amongst such minnows as Nicholas Rowe, who held the bays from 1714-18, or Laurence Eusden, whose tenure of the office lasted from 1718 to 1730, but of whose verse scarce a scrap remains.

Compliments reached Ramsay from all quarters of the compass. Burchet, Arbuckle, Aikman, Arbuthnot, Ambrose Philips, Tickell, and many others, put on record their appreciation of his merits as a poet. But of all the testimonies, that which reached him from Pope was the most valued, and drew from Allan the following lines, indicative of his intense gratification, while also forming a favourable example of his skill in epigram—

His position in Edinburgh society was greatly improved by the success of the volume. The magnates of 'Auld Reekie' who still clung to the capital their forefathers had loved,—the legal luminaries of Bench and Bar, the Professors of the University, the great medicos of the town,—all were proud to know the one man who was redeeming the Scottish poetry of that age from the charge of utter sterility. There was the Countess of Eglinton, 'the beautiful Susannah Kennedy of the house of Colzean,' whose 'Eglinton air' and manners in society were, for half a century, regarded as the models for all young maidens to imitate. Living as she did until 1780, when she had attained the great age of ninety-one, she was visited by Dr. Johnson during his visit to Scotland in 1773. On that occasion it transpired that the Countess had been married before the lexicographer was born; whereupon, says Grant, 'she smartly and graciously said to him that she might have been his mother, and now adopted him; and at parting she embraced him, a mark of affection and condescension which made a lasting impression on the mind of the great literary bear.' She was one of Ramsay's warmest admirers. Then there were Lord Stair and his lovely lady, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, then about to become Lord Advocate: also, Laurence Dundas, Professor of Humanity; Colin Drummond, of Metaphysics; William Law, of Moral Philosophy; Alexander Monro (primus), of Anatomy, and George Preston, of Botany, all of the University of Edinburgh—and all deeply interested in the quaint, cheery, practical-minded little man, who combined in himself the somewhat contradictory qualities of an excellent poet and a keen man of business. Thus the influence was a reciprocal one. His poetry attracted customers to his shop, while his bookselling in turn brought him in contact with social celebrities, whose good offices the self-complacent poet would not suffer to be lost for lack of application.

In 1722 the proprietor of the famous John's Coffee House and Tavern, in Parliament Close, off the High Street,—which, by the way, still exists,—was a man named Balfour. The latter, who had lived for some time in London, had acquired a smattering of literary culture, and conceived the idea of rendering his house the Edinburgh counterpart of Will's or Button's. He set himself to attract all the leading wits and men of letters in the Scottish metropolis at the time, and speedily raised his house to considerable celebrity during the third and fourth decades of last century. To Allan Ramsay he paid especial court, and the poet became a daily visitor at the tavern. Here he would meet many of the judges and leading lawyers, the professors from the College, any visitors of note who might be in town; also Clerk of Penicuik, Sir William Bennet of Marlefield, Hamilton of Bangour, the poet, Preston and Crawford, the rising young song-writers of the day, as well as Beau Forrester, the leader of fashion in Edinburgh, who is recorded to have exhibited himself, once at least, in an open balcony in a chintz nightgown, and been dressed and powdered by his valet de chambre as an object-lesson to the town dandies how to get themselves up. There, too, among many others, he probably met the famous, or rather infamous, John Law of Lauriston, banker, financier, and cheat, who was in Edinburgh in 1722, after having brought France to the verge of bankruptcy and ruined thousands by his financial schemes. A motley crowd, in good sooth; yet one whence our poet could draw many a hint for future use.

The success of the quarto encouraged Ramsay to redoubled efforts, and the next six or seven years are the period of his greatest literary fertility. In 1722 appeared his Fables and Tales and The Three Bonnets, a poem in four cantos. In some criticisms of Ramsay the statement has been made that he owed the idea of his Fables to Gay's inimitable collection. That this is an error is evident, seeing the latter did not publish his volume until 1726. In his preface to the Fables and Tales the poet says: 'Some of the following are taken from Messieurs la Fontaine and La Motte, whom I have endeavoured to make speak Scots with as much ease as I can; at the same time aiming at the spirit of these eminent authors without being too servile a translator.' Ramsay took as his prototypes in this species of composition, Phaedrus, La Fontaine, and Desbillons, rather than Æsop. Many of the incidents he drew from occurrences in the everyday life around him. For example, Jupiter's Lottery has obvious reference to the South Sea Bubble lotteries; while The Ass and the Brock was thought at the time to be a sly skit on the addle-pated Commissioners Walpole had that year sent up to Scotland to nip northern Jacobitism in the bud.

Ramsay's Tales in verse contain some of his daintiest though not his strongest work. He makes no claim to originality with respect to them, but admits they are drawn in many cases from La Motte and other sources. In his preface he says: 'If my manner of expressing a design already invented have any particularity that is agreeable, good judges will allow such imitations to be originals formed upon the idea of another. Others, who drudge at the dull verbatim, are like timorous attendants, who dare not move one pace without their master's leave.' Some of the Tales are obviously modelled on those of Chaucer and Boccaccio, but in most of his, he insinuates a political or social moral, while they narrate the story for the story's sake. The Three Bonnets is a satire on his countrymen for being so shortsighted, in their own interests, as to consent to the Union. Bristle, the eldest of the three brothers in the tale, was intended to represent the Tories and Scots Jacobites, who were opposed to the scheme, and he is therefore drawn as a man of great resolution and vigour of character. Bawsy, the youngest, or weak brother, shadowed forth the character of those who consented under the persuasion of the nobility; while Joukum, the second eldest of the trio,—a vicious, dissipated roué,—stood for the portrait of those Scots noblemen who accepted Lord Somers' bribes, and sold their country to the English alliance. The story ran that their father, Duniwhistle, on his deathbed, had, to each of the brothers, presented a bonnet with which they were never to part. If they did so, ruin would overtake them. Joukum falls in love with Rosie, a saucy quean, who demands, as the price of her hand, that he should beg, borrow, or steal for her the three bonnets. Joukum proceeds to Bristle, and receives a very angry reception; he next repairs to lazy Bawsy, who, dazzled by the promises the other makes as to the good things he will receive after the wedding, surrenders his bonnet, which Joukum lays with his own at the feet of Rosie. The latter agrees to wed Joukum, and a vivid picture is drawn of the neglected state of poor Bawsy after this is accomplished. Rosie proves a harridan, leading Joukum a sorry dance; and the poem concludes with the contrasted pictures of the contented prosperity of Bristle—Scotland as she might have been had she not entered the Union—and the misery of Bawsy, representing Scotland as she then was. Somewhat amusing is it to conjecture what Ramsay's feelings would be on this subject could he for an instant be permitted to witness the progress of Scotland during the past hundred and thirty years, and the benefits that have accrued to her from the Union.

Amongst his metrical tales, one of the finest, without question, is The Lure, a satirical fable or allegory, whereof the moral, as may best be stated in the poet's own words—

The narrative, however, though possessing many merits, is too indelicate for latter-day taste even to be sketched in outline.

In 1723 appeared his poem The Fair Assembly, directed against the Puritanic severity of that section of the community which took exception to dancing and such pleasant amusements, alike for young and old. Nothing reveals to us more vividly the strange contrasts in the religious life of the time, than the fact that the clergy winked at the drunkenness which was so prominent a feature in the social customs of the eighteenth century, and fulminated unceasingly against dancing. Those who indulged in it were in many instances barred from sacramental privileges, and had such pleasant epithets as 'Herodias' and 'Jezebel' hurled at them. As Chambers states in his Traditions of Edinburgh: 'Everything that could be called public or promiscuous amusement was held in abhorrence by the Presbyterians, and only struggled through a desultory and degraded existence by the favour of the Jacobites, who have always been a less strait-laced part of the community. Thus there was nothing like a conventional system of dancing in Edinburgh till the year 1710,' when at length—induced, probably, by the ridicule cast on the ascetic strictness of Scottish social functions by the English visitors who from time to time sojourned in 'the grey metropolis of the north'—a private association commenced weekly réunions, under the name of 'The Assembly.' Its first rooms, according to Arnot's History of Edinburgh, were in a humble tenement in the West Bow (standing on the site now occupied by St. John's Free Church), where they continued to be located until 1720, when they were removed to Old Assembly Close. In the West Bow days it was, as Jackson tells us in his History of the Stage, that the Presbyterian abhorrence of 'promiscuous dancing' once rose to such a height that a crowd of people attacked the rooms when an 'Assembly' was being held, and actually perforated the closed doors with red-hot spits.

As affording an interesting picture of the austerity of the time, a sentence or two may be quoted from a little pamphlet in the Advocates' Library entitled, 'A Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to his Friend in the City, with an Answer thereto concerning the New Assembly.' The author writes: 'I am informed there is lately a Society erected in your town which I think is called an "Assembly." The speculations concerning this meeting have of late exhausted the most part of the public conversation in this countryside. Some are pleased to say 'tis only designed to cultivate polite conversation and genteel behaviour among the better sort of folks, and to give young people an opportunity of accomplishing themselves in both; while others are of opinion it will have quite a different effect, and tends to vitiate and deprave the minds and inclinations of the younger sort.'

The Assemblies themselves must have been characterised by the most funereal solemnity, particularly during the régime of the famous 'Mistress of Ceremonies,' or directress, Miss Nicky Murray. So late as 1753, when the horror at 'promiscuous dancing' might be supposed to have mitigated a little, Goldsmith, who then visited the Assembly, relates that, on entering the room, he saw one end of it 'taken up by the ladies, who sat dismally in a group by themselves. On the other side stand their pensive partners that are to be, but with no more intercourse between the sexes than between two countries at war. The ladies, indeed, may ogle and the gentlemen sigh, but an embargo is laid on any closer commerce.'

As might well be supposed, such bigoted austerity had no friend in Allan Ramsay. All that he could do he did to dissipate the mistaken ideas of the Scottish clergy and the stricter section of the Presbyterian Church, on the subject of dancing and the holding of the Assemblies. In the preface to his poem of The Fair Assembly he remarks: 'It is amazing to imagine that any are so destitute of good sense and manners as to drop the least unfavourable sentiment against the Assembly. It is to be owned with regret, the best of things have been abused. The Church has been, and in many countries is, the chief place for assignations that are not warrantable.... The beauty of the fair sex, which is the great preserver of harmony and society, has been the ruin of many. So places designed for healthful and mannerly dancing have, by people of an unhappy turn, been debauched by introducing gaming, drunkenness, and indecent familiarities. But will any argue from these we must have no churches, no wine, no beauties, no literature, no dancing? Forbid it, Heaven! whatever is under your auspicious conduct must be improving and beneficial in every respect.'

His poem is an ode in praise of dancing, and of the manner in which the Assemblies were conducted. Fortifying his case with Locke's well-known sentence—'Since nothing appears to me to give children so much becoming confidence and behaviour, and so raise them to the conversation of those above their age, as dancing, I think they should be taught to dance as soon as they are capable of learning it,' he boldly avows himself as an advocate for the moderate indulgence in the amusement, both as health-giving and as tending to improve the mind and the manners, and concludes with these two spirited stanzas, which are quoted here as space will not permit us to refer to the piece again—

But we must hasten on. In 1724 Ramsay published his poem on Health, inscribed to the Earl of Stair, and written at the request of that nobleman. In it Ramsay exhibits his full powers as a satirist, and inculcates the pursuit of health by the avoidance of such vices as sloth, effeminacy, gluttony, ebriety, and debauchery, which he personifies under the fictitious characters of Cosmelius, Montanus, Grumaldo, Phimos, Macro, etc. These were said to be drawn from well-known Edinburgh roués of the time, and certainly the various types are limned and contrasted with a masterly hand. To the cultured reader, this is the poem of all Ramsay's minor works best calculated to please and to convey an idea of his style, though at times his genius seems to move under constraint.

But in 1724 our poet showed himself ambitious of winning distinction in a new field. In 1718, as was stated previously, he had published a volume of Scots Songs, some of them original, but a large number of them adapted from older and imperfect copies. So successful had the venture been, that a second edition had been called for in 1719, and a third in 1722. To attempt something of a cognate character, yet upon a larger scale, Ramsay now felt encouraged. In January 1724 appeared the first volume of the Tea-table Miscellany: a Collection of Scots Sangs. The second volume was published in 1725, with the note by Ramsay: 'Being assured how acceptable new words to known good tunes would prove, I engaged to make verses for above sixty of them in these two volumes; about thirty were done by some ingenious young gentlemen, who were so pleased with my undertaking that they generously lent me their assistance.' 'Among those young gentlemen,' as Professor Masson says in his excellent monograph on Ramsay in his Edinburgh Sketches and Memories, 'we can identify Hamilton of Bangour, young David Malloch (afterwards Mallet), William Crawford, William Walkinshaw,' to which we would add James Preston. A third volume of the Miscellany appeared in 1727 and a fourth in 1732, though, as regards the last, grave doubts exist whether Ramsay were really its editor or collector. Few compilations have ever been more popular. In twenty-five years twelve large editions were exhausted, and since Ramsay's death several others have seen the light, some better, some worse, than the original. All classes in the community were appealed to by the songs contained in the Miscellany. That he intended such to be the case is evident from the first four lines of his dedication, in which he offers the contents—

In the collection each stratum of society finds the songs wherewith it had been familiar from infancy to age. Tunes that were old as the days of James V. were wedded to words that caught the cadences of the music with admirable felicity; words, too, had tunes assigned them which enabled them to be sung in castle and cot, in hall and hut, throughout 'braid Scotland.' The denizens of fashionable drawing-rooms found their favourites—'Ye powers! was Damon then so blest?' 'Gilderoy,' 'Tell me, Hamilla; tell me why'—in these fascinating volumes, even as the Peggies and the Jennies of the ewe-bughts and the corn-rigs rejoiced to note that 'Katy's Answer,' 'Polwart on the Green,' 'My Daddy forbad, my Minny forbad,' and 'The Auld Gudeman,' had not been lost sight of. For many a long day, at each tea-party in town, or rustic gathering in the country, the Tea-Table Miscellany was in demand, or the songs taken from it, for the entertainment of those assembled.

The widespread delight evoked by the Miscellany allured Ramsay to essay next a task for which, it must be confessed, his qualifications were scanty. Nine months after the publication of the first volume of the Miscellany—to wit, in October 1724—appeared another compilation, The Evergrene: being ane Collection of Scots Poems, wrote by the Ingenious before 1600. It was dedicated to the Duke of Hamilton, and in the dedicatory epistle he informs his Grace that 'the following old bards present you with an entertainment that can never be disagreeable to any Scotsman.... They now make a demand for that immortal fame that tuned their souls some hundred years ago. They do not address you with an indigent face and a thousand pitiful apologies to bribe the goodwill of the critics. No; 'tis long since they were superior to the spleen of these sour gentlemen.' He had been granted access to the 'Bannatyne MSS.'—the literary remains of George Bannatyne, poet, antiquarian, and collector of ancient manuscripts of Scottish poetry. This valuable repository of much that otherwise would have perished was lent to Ramsay by the Hon. William Carmichael of Skirling, advocate (brother to the Earl of Hyndford), with permission to extract what he required. From this priceless treasure-trove he drew specimens of Dunbar, Henryson, Alexander Scott, Lyndsay, Kennedy, Montgomery, Sempill, Gavin Douglas, and others. A similar favour was in 1770 granted to Lord Hailes when preparing his volume, Ancient Scottish Poems. Interesting, therefore, it is, to compare the manner in which the two editors respectively fulfilled their tasks.

In Ramsay's case the poems he selected from the Bannatyne MSS. were passed through the alembic of his own brain. Everything was sacrificed to popularity and intelligibility. Lord Hailes, on the other hand, was the most scrupulous of editors, refusing to alter a single letter; for, as he said, the value of the poems lies in the insight they afford us into the state of the language at the periods when the various pieces were written. Alter them in any degree, even the slightest, and you destroy the intrinsic character of the composition. 'In making his compilation from the Bannatyne MSS.,' continued Lord Hailes, 'Ramsay has omitted some stanzas and added others, has modernised the versification and varied the ancient mode of spelling.' To offend thus was to render himself liable to the severest censure from all literary antiquarians. The fault was as inexcusable as would be a trader's in palming off shoddy goods as those of the best materials. As an example of the ruthless liberties our poet took with the text, it may be well to follow Chalmers' example, and print side by side a stanza of Ramsay's 'paraphrase' and Lord Hailes' severely accurate rendering of the opening of Dunbar's 'Thistle and the Rose'—

In Dunbar's 'Lament for the Deth of the Makkaris' he not only varied but added several lines, and these in the silliest manner possible. For example, at the conclusion of Dunbar's noble elegy, Ramsay must needs tack on three stanzas, as a prophecy by Dunbar himself, wherein the vanity-full poet is introduced as 'a lad frae Hethermuirs.' What censure could be too strong for inappropriate fooling like the following, coming in to mar the solemn close of Dunbar's almost inspired lines?—

In the Evergreen Ramsay published two of his own poems, The Vision (in which the author bewails the Union and the banishment of the Stuarts) and The Eagle and the Robin Reid-breist (likewise a Jacobite poem), wilfully altering the spelling in both, and introducing archaicisms into the thought, so as to pass them off as 'written by the ingenious before 1600.' He also inserted Hardyknute, a fragment, which subsequent research has proved to have been written by Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, a contemporary of Ramsay's. Although the Evergreen did much to revive popular interest in early Scottish poetry, and thus prepare the way for Lord Hailes and Bishop Percy, from a critical point of view it was worse than worthless, inasmuch as many of the errors and alterations appearing in Ramsay's specimens of our early Scots literary remains, have not been corrected even to this day.

But though Ramsay, in the estimation of stern literary antiquarians, has been guilty of an offence so heinous,—an offence vitiating both the Tea-Table Miscellany and the Evergreen,—on the other hand, from the point of view of the popular reader, his action in modernising the language, at least, was not only meritorious but necessary, if the pieces were to be intelligible to the great mass of the people. Remembered, too, it must be, that Ramsay lived before the development of what may be styled the antiquarian 'conscience,' in whose code of literary morality one of the cardinal commandments is, 'Thou shalt in no wise alter an ancient MS., that thy reputation and good faith may be unimpugned in the land wherein thou livest, and that thou mayest not bring a nest of critical hornets about thine ears.'

In his Reminiscences of Old Edinburgh, Dr. Daniel Wilson thus succinctly states the case: 'Ramsay had much more of the poet than the antiquary in his composition; and had, moreover, a poet's idea of valuing verse less on account of its age than its merit. He lived in an era of literary masquerading and spurious antiques, and had little compunction in patching and eking an old poem to suit the taste of his Edinburgh customers.' He was no Ritson,—and, after all, even Plautus had, for three hundred years after the revival of learning, to await his Ritschl!

CHAPTER VII

'THE GENTLE SHEPHERD'; SCOTTISH IDYLLIC POETRY; RAMSAY'S PASTORALS—1725-30

In the quarto of 1721, not the least remarkable of its contents had been two Pastoral Dialogues, the one between Richy (Sir Richard Steele) and Sandy (Alexander Pope), and based on the death of Addison: the other between Patie and Roger, and concerning itself solely with a representation of rural life. Amongst the best pieces in the volume both undoubtedly ranked. In 1723 appeared another metrical dialogue, Jenny and Meggy, betraying obvious kinship with Patie and Roger. So delighted were his friends, the Clerks and the Bennets, Professors Drummond and Maclaurin, and many others, with the vraisemblance to Scottish rural life, and with the true rustic flavour present in the two dialogues, that they entreated him to add some connecting links, and to expand them into a pastoral drama. Doubtful of his ability to execute a task demanding powers so varied, and so supreme, Ramsay for a time hesitated. But at length, induced by their advice, he threw himself into the undertaking with enthusiasm. In a letter to his kinsman William Ramsay of Templehall, dated April 8, 1724, he writes: "I am this vacation going through with a Dramatick Pastoral, whilk I design to carry the length of five acts, in verse a' the gate, and, if I succeed according to my plan, I hope to tope [rival] with the authors of Pastor Fido and Aminta."

On the scenes wherewith he had become acquainted during his manifold rambles over the hills and the vales, the glens and glades, of fair Midlothian, he now drew, as well as from the quaint and curious types of character—the Symons, the Glauds, the Bauldies, the Rogers, the Madges, and the Mauses—wherewith he had come into contact during such seasons. That he stinted either time or trouble in making the drama as perfect as possible is evident from the prolonged period over which its composition was spread, and the number of drafts he made of it. Some of the songs, he informed Sir David Forbes, had been written no fewer than six times. At length, early in July 1725, prefaced by a dedication in prose from himself to the Right Hon. Susannah, Countess of Eglinton, and by a poetical address to the same beautiful patroness, from the pen of William Hamilton of Bangour, the poet, The Gentle Shepherd made its appearance.

Its success from the very outset was unparalleled in Scottish literature up to that date. It seemed literally to take the country by storm. By all ranks and classes, by titled ladies in their boudoirs, as well as by milkmaids tripping it to the bughts with leglins and pails, the poem was admiringly read, and its songs sung. Its performance on the stage in 1726, only served to whet the public appetite. By the leading poets of the day, Pope, Swift, Gay, Tickell, Ambrose Philips, and Lord Lansdowne, as well as by the most influential critics, Dennis, Theobald, and Dr. Ruddiman, the work was hailed as one of the most perfect examples of the pastoral that had appeared since the Idylls of Theocritus. No less eminent a judge of poetry than Alexander Pope considered it in many respects superior to the Shepherds' Calendar; while Gay was so enthusiastic in his admiration that he sent the work over to Swift, with the remark, 'At last we have a dramatic pastoral, though it is by a Scot.'

The first edition of The Gentle Shepherd was exhausted in a few months, and in January 1726 Ruddiman printed the second, while the third and a cheaper one was called for towards the close of the same year. The enormous sale of the poem may be estimated by the fact that the tenth edition was printed in 1750 by R. & A. Foulis of Glasgow. So great was the accession of popularity accruing to Ramsay through the publication of The Gentle Shepherd, and so rapid the increase in his bookselling business, that he found it absolutely necessary to shift his place of business, or Scotice dictu, to 'flit' to larger premises, in the first storey of the eastern gable-end of the Luckenbooths, a block of towering lands or tenements which, until 1817, stood in the very centre of the High Street, obstructing the thoroughfare, and affording a curious commentary on the expedients to which the burgesses of Edinburgh were compelled to resort, to eke out to the utmost the space enclosed within the charmed circle of the Flodden Wall.

At his 'flitting,' also, he changed his sign, and, thinking the 'Flying Mercury' no longer applicable to his new pursuits, he adopted the heads of Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden, a sign which in local parlance gradually grew to bear the title of 'The Twa Heids.' In his new premises also, Ramsay extended the scope of his business, adding to the other attractions of his establishment a circulating library, the first of its kind in Scotland. He entered his new shop in May 1726. Sixty years after, the ground-floor of the same land, together with the flat where formerly Ramsay was located, were in the occupancy of William Creech, the first of the great Edinburgh Sosii that were yet to include the Constables, the Blackwoods, the Chambers, the Blacks, and others of renown in their day. With the Luckenbooths' premises it is that The Gentle Shepherd is always associated. From them Ramsay dated all his editions subsequent to the first two, and there he reaped all the gratifying results of its success.

The poem, which takes its name from the 12th eclogue of Spenser's Shepherds' Calendar, whose opening runs as follows—