ALLAN RAMSAY.
BY PROFESSOR NICHOL.
ENGLISH literature has often found its best echoes in the North. After the comparatively barren period of the seventeenth century, during which Poetry was shrivelled under the frown of Presbyteries, in the early years of the eighteenth the genius of Lindsay seemed to revive in Ramsay's verse. When Chaucer was half-forgotten or lan- guidly imitated by Lydgate and Hawes in England, James I. and Dunbar took up the Chaucerian lyre and struck from it fresh cadences. Similarly, in a later age, the muse of Spenser wandered across the Tweed to Hawthornden. Pope, in the eighteenth century, had many imitators : but among the poets whose verses bore trace of his versification and manner of thought, none added so much from native stores, none set his music to songs so decidedly his own, as Allan Ramsay. That he was a pupil of Pope is proved by one of his first publications, the 'Morning Interview,' in which the early visit of a beau to his mistress is made the pretext for a light satirical description of the hcau-monde in Edinburgh, in the style of the 'Rape of the Lock.' In like manner Ramsay's humorous manner of antedating the decease of his contemporaries seems to have been suggested by Swift's account of the death of Partridge, closely mimicked in the elegy on John Cowper. But as regards matter, thouglit, and lantruaee, he borrowed as much from the Scotch ballads, and more from his own resources.
He made his appearance as an author when the freer spirit, evoked by the commercial activity of the northern towns, was beginning to revolt against the extreme rigidity of Puritanic asceticism ; and he found the nation ripe for his native humour, ' his manners' painting strains,' and his lively sketches of Scottish life. The circimistances of his own career connected him with various classes of the community, and contributed to his power of sympathising with, and successfully addressing various ranks of his countrymen. Born in 1686, in a Lanarkshire village, the son of a manager of Lord Hopetoun's mines, he traced his descent to a branch of the family he apostrophises in his famous adaptation of Horace beginning —
'Dalhousie of an auld descent, My chief, my stoup, my ornament.'
His youth was spent amid the fresh breezes of Low- land braes. But, his father dying early, the poet was, on his mother's second marriage, sent to Edin- burgh as apprentice to a wigmaker. After ten years spent in this somewhat unpoetical employ- ment, we hear of him emerging into authorship as member of the Easy Club — a northern recast of the Kit-Cat, Wills', and White's, of the southern metropolis. In 1712 he married, and having found his talent, began to eke out his living by comic ballads and elegies whicJi, sold at a penny a piece, were in great demand in the alleys of the town. His first considerable effort, a republication of ' Christ's Kirk o' the Green,' issued in 1716, with two parts of his own in continuation, made his reputation as a homely humorist. It is an idyll of rustic manners, quaint as a sketch by Teniers, occasionally coarse in expression, but unsurpassed in vigour by any similar production of the century previous to the publication of the 'Jolly Beggars.' Ramsay now left off making-wigs, and betook himself wholly to writing, editing, and selling books. In 1721 he published a quarto of his own miscellanies, ending with a prophecy of his fam& (adapted from the ' Excgi monumentum'), which its reception seemed to justify. His success at this time began to excite expressions of envy, to which he replies, ' I have been honoured with three or four satires ; but they are such that several of my friends allege I wrote them myself to make the world believe I have no foes but fools.' After another volume of tales, lie published, in 1724-27, the 'Tea-Table Miscellany,' a collection of old Scotch and English songs, interspersed with several of his own, which ran through twelve editions in a few years ; and, in the same interval, ' The Ever- green,' purporting to be a collection of Scotch poems written before 1600. Half of these, how- ever, have been shown to be of later date. Ramsay was no scholar ; he could scarcely read even Horace in the original, and was no critic of the antiquities of his own tongue. In the ' Evergreen ' he published ' The Vision,' said to have been ' compylit in Latin anno 1300, and translatit in 1524.' It is as unmistakably Ramsay's own, and one of his most vigorous patriotic effusions, as Rowley's ' Ella ' is Chatterton's. In 1725 appeared ' Tlie Gentle Shepherd' — an expansion and refinement of pre- vious minor pastorals — by which the author's fame was established. It was received with acclamation, republished in London and Dublin, and procured him the friendship of Gay and the admiration of Pope. In 1730 Ramsay put forth a collection of fables in verse, and then ceased writing, in the exercise of
