is among the Pentland Hills.-SHAIRP, JOHN CAMPBELL, 1877, On Poetic Interpretation of Nature, p. 195.

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.-WARD, ADOLPHUS WILLIAM, 1877, Drama, Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. VII.

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.PERRY, THOMAS SERGEANT, 1883, English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, p. 389.

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.-TULLOCH, W. W., 1886, Allan Ramsay and "The Gentle Shepherd," Good Words, vol. 27, p. 678.

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.OLIPHANT, MRS. MARGARET O. W., 1890, Royal Edinburgh, p. 459.

"The Gentle Shepherd" is the work of a poet, and gives a higher impression of Ramsay's power than his songs alone. would warrant.-DENNIS, JOHN, 1894, The Age of Pope, p. 121.

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. -MINTO, WILLIAM, 1894, The Literature of the Georgian Era, ed. Knight, p. 31.

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.-PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER, 1896, Landscape in Poetry, p. 169.

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.-SMEATON, OLIPHANT, 1896, Allan Ramsay.

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.-BAYNE, THOMAS, 1896, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XLVII, p. 231.

GENERAL

Of poetry the hail quintessence
Thou hast suck'd up, left nae excrescence
To petty poets, or sic messens,

Tho' round thy stool

They may pick crumbs, and lear some lessons At Ramsay's school.

-HAMILTON, WILLIAM, 1719, Epistle to Allan Ramsay.

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. -RITSON, JOSEPH, 1794, Scotish Songs. Thou paints auld Nature to the nines, In thy sweet Caledonian lines; Nae gowden stream thro' myrtles twines, Where Philomel,

While nightly breezes sweep the vines,
Her griefs will tell;

In gowany glens thy burnie strays,
Where bonnie lasses bleach their claes;
Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes,
Wi' hawthorns gray,

Where blackbirds join the shepherd's lays,
At close o' day.

Thy rural loves are nature's sel';
Nae bombast spates o' nonsense swell;
Nae snap conceits, but that sweet spell

whose lamp Burns lighted his brilliant torch.-SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1802–3, ed., Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry.

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 tableland. 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.-OLLIER, CHARLES, 1844, Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, vol. II, p. 66.

The simple tenderness of Crawford, the fidelity of Ramsay, and the careless humor of Fergusson.-PRESCOTT, WILLIAM HICKLING, 1826, Scottish Song, Biographical and Critical Miscellanies.

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."-MACKEY, CHARLES, 1870, ed., The Poetical Works of Allan Ramsay, Life, p. i.

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.-SHAIRP, JOHN CAMPBELL, 1877, On Poetic Interpretation of Nature, pp. 192, 194.

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. MINTO, WILLIAM, 1880, The English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. III, p. 161.

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.ROBERTSON, J. LOGIE, 1886, ed., Poems by Allan Ramsay (Canterbury Poets), Biographical Introduction, p. xxxiii.

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.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888,

A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, p. 139.

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. PHELPS, WILLIAM LYON, 1893, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, p. 126.

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.-WALKER, HUGH, 1893, Three Centuries of Scottish Literature, vol. II, pp. 9, 24.

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.-EYRE-TODD, GEORGE, 1896, Scottish Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, vol. I, p. 38.

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.CRAIK, SIR HENRY, 1901, A Century of Scottish History, vol. II, p. 32.

412

PERSONAL

I enquired after my old acquaintance Sir Charles Williams, who I hear is much broken, both in his spirits and constitution. How happy might that man have been, if there had been added to his natural and acquired endowments a dash of morality: If he had known how to distinguish between false and true felicity; and, instead of seeking to increase an estate already too large, and hunting after pleasures that have made him rotten and ridiculous, he had bounded his desires of wealth, and followed the dictates of his conscience. His servile ambition has gained him two yards of red ribbon, and an exile into a miserable country, where there is no society and so little taste that I believe he suffers under a dearth of flatterers. This is said for the use of your growing sons, whom I hope no golden. temptations will induce to marry women. they can not love, or comply with measures they do not approve.-MONTAGU, LADY MARY WORTLEY, 1758, Letter to the Countess of Bute, July 17.

He goes about again: but the world, especially a world of enemies, never care to give up their title to a man's madness, and will consequently not believe that he is yet in his senses.-WALPOLE, HORACE, 1758, Letter to Sir Horace Mann, Apr. 14; Letters, ed. Cunningham, vol. III, p. 132.

GENERAL

He spoke contemptuously of our lively and elegant, though too licentious, Lyrick bard, Hanbury Williams, and said, "he had no fame, but from boys who drank with him."-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1773, Life by Boswell, Sept. 24, ed. Hill, vol. v, p. 305.

His verses were highly prized by his contemporaries, and the letters of his friend Mr. Fox (the first Lord Holland), abound with extravagant commendations. of his poetical talents; but in perusing those which have been given to the public, and those which are still in manuscript, the greater part are political effusions, or licentious lampoons, abounding with local

wit and temporary satire, eagerly read at their appearance, but little interesting to posterity.-Coxe, William, 1801, History of Monmouth, vol. II, p. 279.

It's with great pleasure I beg your acceptance of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams' works. How pious, how canting and insincere people are become! I know it will give you great pleasure in hearing his Majesty has ordered one; three of the Cabinet Ministers have purchased copies; the Earl of Lonsdale six copies; also many great ladies, which shows their great sense. There are much more indecent poems in Pope and Prior.-JEFFERY, EDWARD, 1822, Letter to Mr. Upcot. We are ready to make some allowances for Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and although his pieces are, as we have said, the grossest ever published, they probably are not much grosser than many others which were circulated in his day; and his reputation now stands so disgracefully distinguished rather through the indiscretion and effrontery of his publishers than through any superior wickedness of his own. We should have thought a new edition of his works not only pardonable, but laudable and useful, if it had been made the opportunity of separating his better from his worse productions, and consigning the latter to obscurity and oblivion. It may not be even now too late. Some of Sir Charles' verses must live; they are not merely witty and gay, but they are the best examples of a particular class of poetry, and are not without their importance in the history of social manners and political parties. We wish that they were collected into a volume, which one could open without being shocked by the juxtaposition of the horrors to which we have alluded. . . Sir Charles, without any effort on his part, has achieved a lasting fame. He will be always mentioned, and, if a decent edition be published, often read; but of the present work we are obliged to say, notwithstanding the respectable names which the editor has entrapped into his title-page