how the beauties without the
grossness of country life, should be the aim of pastoral poetry.'

By all these critics pastoral poetry is considered in its abstract or
ideal form. They never dreamed of bidding poets descend to the concrete,
or to actual rural life, as Beattie puts it, 'there to study that life
as they found it.' Dr. Pennecuik justly remarks, in his essay on _Ramsay
and Pastoral Poetry_: 'Of the ancient fanciful division of the ages of
the world into the _golden_, _silver_, _brazen_, and _iron_, the first,
introduced by Saturn into Italy, has been appropriated to the shepherd
state. Virgil added this conceit to his polished plagiarisms from
Theocritus; and thus, as he advanced in elegance and majesty, receded
from simplicity, nature, reality, and truth.'

To Ramsay's credit be it ascribed, that he broke away from these rank
absurdities and false ideas of pastoral poetry, and dared to paint
nature and rural life as he found it. His principles are thus stated by
himself: 'The Scottish poet must paint his own country's scenes and his
own country's life, if he would be true to his office.... The morning
rises in the poet's description as she does in the Scottish horizon; we
are not carried to Greece and Italy for a shade, a stream, or a breeze;
the groves rise in our own valleys, the rivers flow from our own
fountains, and the winds blow upon our own hills.'

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.

That Ramsay was influenced by the spirit of his age cannot be denied,
but he was sufficiently strong, both intellectually and imaginatively,
to yield to that influence only so far as it was helpful to him in the
inspiration of his great work, but to resist