bold continuation of "Christ's Kirk on the Green," which the same
biographer describes as "King James the First's ludicrous poem," in
which the poet of the High Street skilfully turns the poet-monarch's
rustic revel into a vulgar village debauch. But these pieces of
presumption and non-comprehension are happily all dead and gone, and
Ramsay's reputation rests upon a happier basis. It is not a small matter
to have pervaded a whole country with the simple measures of a rural
idyll--a poem in which there are not perhaps five lines of poetry, but
which is fragrant of the moors and fields, full of rustic good sense and
feeling, and as free of harm or offence as the most severe moralist
could desire. This latter quality is all the more remarkable as it
belongs to an age not at all squeamish in these matters, and to which
the frankest assaults upon a heroine's virtue were supposed to be quite
adapted for the treatment of fiction. But there is no Lovelace in _The
Gentle Shepherd_; the rustic love-making is ardent, but simple and
without guile. The swains respect as much as they admire their nymphs:
the nymphs are confident in their frank innocence, and fear no evil; the
old fathers sit cheerful and sagacious at their doors and indulge in
their cracks, not less pleased with themselves and their share of life
than are the young ones with their livelier pleasures: the cows breathe
balmy breath into the wild freshness of the pastoral scenery. There is
scarcely anything affected, false, or even stilted in the poetical
dialogues which, with a little licence for the verse and something for
the sentiment, come naturally and simply from the wholesome, genial
young shepherds and their sweethearts. To say this is to say as much as
the most fastidious critic could desire from such a composition.

Nor is it spoiled by classic models or similes. How Ramsay succeeded in
keeping Venus and Cupid out of it, in forgetting all eclogues and
pastorals, Virgil or Theocritus, and indulging in nothing that was out
of place in Scotland, it is hard to tell. The Mantuan bard, the oaten
reed, Philomela and her songs, Hymen, Ganymede, Bacchus, and all the
Olympian band disport themselves in his other verses: but _The Gentle
Shepherd_ is void of those necessary adjuncts of the eighteenth-century
muse. The wimpling burn is never called Helicon nor the heathery braes
Parnassus, and nothing can be more genuine, more natural, and familiar
than the simple scener