SOURCE: "Scots Satires," in Allan Ramsay, Twayne Publishers, 1985, pp. 14-41.

At the very beginning of his poetic career Allan Ramsay made the conscious but risky decision of writing in his native Scottish tongue and of attempting to breathe new life into the moribund Scots poetic tradition. That tradition, as we have noted in the previous chapter, had become so impoverished that by Ramsay's time the Scots language was used only for humorous treatments of low life. It was, therefore, wholly natural if not inevitable that Ramsay should launch his career as a Scots poet by turning to various types of comic verse at the outset. He began with two major efforts in satiric verse—social satire in his continuations of "Christis Kirk on the Green" and political satire in "A Tale of Three Bonnets." At about the same time he moved into another popular comic form, the Scots comic elegy, producing no fewer than six of these from 1712 onward. Another traditional Scots satiric form, the "mock testament," attracted him also, and he tried his hand at two or three other types of comic verse in the vernacular. Altogether, Ramsay produced over fifteen satiric poems in Scots, most of them early in his career, including several of his finest efforts.

"Christis Kirk on the Green," Cantos 2 and 3

Ramsay's two supplemental cantos of "Christis Kirk on the Green," nearly 400 lines in all, are his most sustained effort in Scots except for The Gentle Shepherd and "A Tale of Three Bonnets." Of his many poems in English, only "Content" and "Health" are longer. These cantos, therefore, must be regarded among his major works, and yet they have been strangely neglected by the critics. Lord Woodhouselee, it is true, devotes some four laudatory pages to them—"a composition of very high merit"—but his discussion is largely summary, with minimal critical analysis [in The Works of Allan Ramsay, 1848]. Among modern critics, Burns Martin [in Allan Ramsay, 1931] praises Ramsay's handling of the stanza form, David Daiches [in Scottish Poetry: A Critical Survey, ed. James Kinsley, 1955] and David Craig [in Scottish Literature, 1961] stress the self-conscious antiquarianism of the work, but none of them pays more than cursory attention to it. Most unaccountably, Kinghorn in his otherwise admirable critical treatment of Ramsay's poetry [in The Works of Allan Ramsay, Vol. 4, 1970] ignores "Christis Kirk" altogether. Yet the two cantos represent, as we shall see, an ambitious and solid achievement.

For his inspiration Ramsay looked backward some three centuries to the original "Christis Kirk on the Green." George Bannatyne, the Edinburgh lawyer who compiled in 1568 a massive and invaluable manuscript anthology of Middle Scots poetry, ascribed the poem to King James I of Scotland (died 1437) and it probably is by him. At any rate, the fifteenth-century "Christis Kirk" became the prototype of an extremely popular, distinctively Scottish genre. In this type of poem we have a genial, satiric depiction of a lower-class celebration, such as a wedding, a fair, or a country dance, as seen from the point of view of an amused, superior onlooker. The poem normally begins with a panorama of the whole uproarious scene of merry-making, drunkenness, and horseplay, followed by a series of vignettes highlighting the antics of individual characters amid the general confusion. There is considerable use of dialogue in the separate scenes, scenes that have a cumulative effect in building a vivid impression of the affair as a whole. In "Christis Kirk" and its companion piece, "Peblis to the Play," this formula is embodied in a distinctive and rollicking verse form, the "Christis Kirk" stanza, consisting of eight lines of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter with a rhyme scheme of a b a b a b a b, followed by a "bobwheel" of a very short line (monometer) and a trimeter refrain at the end. In the fifteenth-century prototypes a fairly consistent pattern of alliteration is superimposed, adding to the intricacy of this very difficult verse form.

The original "Christis Kirk" became very popular during the Middle Scots period, influencing the work of William Dunbar, Sir David Lindsay, Alexander Scott, and others of the Scots makars. In his hilarious poem called "The Justing and Debait" (ca. 1575), Scott fused the "Christis Kirk" tradition with another medieval genre, the "mock tournament," and modified the basic verse form slightly by using a refrain line ending always in the words "that day" or "that night." During the long winter of the seventeenth century "Christis Kirk," almost alone among Middle Scots art poems, retained its popularity and was reprinted several times. It was only natural, then, that this famous poem should be a favorite of the eighteenth-century revivalists. James Watson gave "Christis Kirk" the place of honor in his Choice Collection (1706), and Allan Ramsay took it under his wing a few years later.

Ramsay's earliest known editions of "Christis Kirk" are both dated 1718; the first of these reprints the old poem as canto 1 with a sequel by Ramsay as canto 2; the second repeats these cantos and adds a further sequel, canto 3. In his prefatory note to canto 2 in the three-canto edition, Ramsay states that he composed canto 2 in 1715 and canto 3 in 1718, so that it seems probable that there was an earlier publication (now lost) of the two-canto version before 1718. Ramsay further asserts in his introductory note to canto 1 that he took the text of the fifteenth-century poem "from an old Manuscript Collection of Scots Poems written 150 Years ago"—that is, from the Bannatyne Manuscript. This statement is clearly inaccurate since the text Ramsay printed is not the Bannatyne version but is basically the corrupt text published in Watson's Choice Collection. What certainly happened is that Ramsay prepared his two-canto edition before he had access to Bannatyne, and he simply copied the old poem straight from Watson, including Watson's erroneous attribution of the work to King James V. Sometime between the publication of the two-canto and the three-canto versions Ramsay was able to borrow the Bannatyne Manuscript; from it he changed the authorship to King James I and made some other (largely minor) revisions. But even in his final three-canto version the text of canto 1 is still predominantly Watson's rather than Bannatyne's. One evidence of this is the fact that Ramsay, both in his printing of the old poem and in his own sequels, adopted the simplified stanza form that he found in Watson—a shortening of the two-line "bobwheel" into a single dimeter tag line ending in "that day." Watson undoubtedly derived his text from one of the corrupt seventeenth-century printings of the poem, such as that of Bishop Edmund Gibson (1691) where the shortened bobwheel also appears. Where and when this version of the stanza originated remains a mystery, though it surely was suggested by Alexander Scott's "that day" refrain in "The Justing and Debait." Kinghorn and Law are mistaken in asserting [in The Works of Allan Ramsay, Vol. 6, 1974] that Ramsay himself "altered" the stanza, he just took it as he found it in Watson.

The original "Christis Kirk" describes a gathering of rustics on some festive occasion. A fight breaks out between two of the young men over a girl, leading to a kind of burlesque archery contest to decide the issue, and finally to a barbarous and drunken free-for-all involving the entire male population of the village. The poem seems to be a fragment, though the final stanza (there are twenty-four in all) begins with the words "When a' was done." Ramsay assumes that the work is incomplete and that the occasion of the festivities described was a wedding, though there is no indication of this in the text. His attempt to "complete" a famous poem such as this, already three centuries old, was indeed a daring one, fraught with potential pitfalls. Fortunately, Ramsay did not try to imitate the language and to write in Middle Scots. (His knowledge of that tongue was certainly shaky, as nearly all critics have noted, though not nearly so bad as some have suggested.) Rather, Ramsay's sequels are in more or less contemporary Scots, but sprinkled with proverbial sayings or "quaint" phrases that detract from its naturalness. Beyond that, Ramsay drags into the poem descriptions of old-fashioned folk rituals, such as the "bedding of the bride" and the "riding of the stang," to such an extent that he felt it necessary to add a set of footnotes to his poem to explain these old customs and quaint sayings. Daiches, Craig, and others are right in deploring the studied antiquarianism of Ramsay's sequels; his cantos suffer artistically from this sort of forced folklore in precisely the same way that Burns's "Halloween" suffers. But that is not the whole story of Ramsay's "Christis Kirk"; his cantos have some fine redeeming qualities, as a close look at the text will show.

Ramsay opens canto 1 with a really brilliant transitional stanza:

Here Ramsay takes skillful advantage of the rollicking rhythm of the "Christis Kirk" stanza to bring the general brawl to a swift and dramatic end. The light, tricksy effect of the feminine rhymes in the trimeter lines helps with this, as does the sudden slowing down of the tempo in the final tag-line. At the same time, the formidable figure of the "Good-wife of Braith" with amusing folklore associations, is an ideal means of bringing about the truce. In this stanza Ramsay succeeds in catching much of the rambunctious and witty spirit of the original. It would indeed be difficult to imagine a more effective way of bridging the gap between the old poem and the new.

Though the rest of canto 2 does not quite live up to the brilliance of the opening stanza, Ramsay does maintain a brisk and entertaining pace. In stanzas 3 and 4 he presents contrasting vignettes of two characters carried over from the old poem, "Hutchon " (brave) and "Tam Taylor" (cowardly), in their different reactions to the truce. As in the Middle Scots original, Ramsay makes effective satiric use of the themes of peasant cowardice and bungling. In the next stanza a minstrel is brought in to provide music for dancing, and then, in stanza 6, Ramsay gives us a scene of uproarious farce as one of the young men approaches a girl with strenuous directness:

This stanza probably owes something to a passage in Chaucer's Miller's Tale (lines 3271-87) where Nicholas's initial wooing of Alisoun is described; but in any case Ramsay's handling of the scene is very skillful. He strikes just the right note of hilarious burlesque, with swift movement and funny dialogue.

In his next dozen stanzas or so Ramsay presents a series of dancing scenes that are lively and convincing. The middle lines of stanza 10, for example, are wonderfully vivid:

What better way to suggest the sensual, sweaty bouncing of a reel than in these brief lines? This is Ramsay at his earthy, colloquial best. Many more such examples could easily be drawn from canto 2, but the passages cited above are perhaps enough to suggest the vigorous quality of the whole. In the latter part of this canto Ramsay goes on to depict various excesses of eating and drinking at the party, and finally the coming of evening and the ceremonial "bedding" of the bride.

Canto 3 opens with a whimsical description of daybreak the next morning when the sleepy villagers "Begoud to rax and rift" (began to stretch and break wind), many with hangovers. They soon reenter the cottage where the newly married couple are still abed, and lay their simple wedding gifts on the coverlet. Two of the local girls are given contrasting sketches: one is lighthearted and "kanty" (happy), but "Mause begrutten [in tears] was and bleer'd" because she had lost her virginity the night before. One of the older women, Maggy, consoles her with the thought that this is a common occurrence and not the end of the world, with an amusingly worded example from her own experience (stanza 9):

Then the celebration begins all over again, even more wildly than on the previous day.

Ramsay is generally effective in portraying these scenes of drunkenness, horseplay, and bickering between husbands and wives. He manages the complex verse form skillfully throughout. But this last part of his "Christis Kirk" is not quite so strong or delightful as canto 2, mainly because of the labored effect of the folklore. In stanza 12, for example, we have the "creeling of the groom," a custom Ramsay has to explain in a footnote: "For Merryment, a Creel or Basket is bound, full of Stones, upon his Back; and if he has acted a manly Part, his young Wife with all imaginable Speed cuts the Cords, and relieves him from the Burthen. If she does not, he's rallied for a Fumbler." Similarly, in stanzas 16 and 17, he gives us "The Riding of the Stang on a Woman that hath beat her Husband," an even more elaborate ritual that is artistically obtrusive and boring. These episodes, self-conscious and strained, detract from canto 3, but do not nullify its effectiveness otherwise.

On the whole, Ramsay's continuations of "Christis Kirk on the Green" are a notable achievement, a sustained effort of rollicking action, humorous caricature, and realistic dialogue that is mainly successful. He cleverly bridges the gap from the old poem, and he catches much of its spirit and flavor—though not its wild comic momentum. In doing this, and in doing it so well, Ramsay gave a vital new impetus to the "Christis Kirk" tradition; he showed its adaptability to modern times, and he paved the way for the more brilliant exploitation of the form by Fergusson and Burns. His cantos are no small achievement.

Ramsay's only other poem in the "Christis Kirk" form is dated May 1720, "Edinburgh's Salutation to the Most Honourable, My Lord Marquess of Carnarvon," consisting of six stanzas in a kind of Scoto-English style—that is, the language is basically standard English with a thin sprinkling of Scots words or spellings. This is a fairly competent effort, though the personification of Edinburgh welcoming a distinguished visitor is somewhat strained, and the piece as a whole comes nowhere near the spriteliness and vigor of Ramsay's earlier cantos.

"A Tale of Three Bonnets"

This dramatic poem in four cantos and 669 lines is Ramsay's longest original work in Scots or English, apart from The Gentle Shepherd. Like Ramsay's continuations of "Christis Kirk," it has suffered from unaccountable neglect at the hands of the critics. Woodhouselee, himself an ardent Unionist, did not appreciate Ramsay's strong anti-Unionist views (which he calls "absurd") in this work; as a result he devotes to it only a sentence or two of faint praise as a work of art. Of recent critics, Martin, Daiches, and Lindsay ignore the poem altogether, while Kinghorn barely mentions it, and that only in connection with Ramsay's political ideas. Surely, as Ramsay's second longest work the tale deserves some discussion—and it has more positive merits, as we shall see.

The date of "A Tale of Three Bonnets" is problematic, but it is generally thought to be an early work that Ramsay did not dare to publish until 1722, and then only as an anonymous pamphlet. It did not appear among his official collected works until 1729. Most probably Ramsay composed the tale for the amusement of his radical friends in the Easy Club; if so, the year 1715 will have to suffice as an educated guess. In any event, this dramatic poem is a hard-hitting political satire on the Act of Union, in the form of transparent allegory that would have been instantly clear to all of Ramsay's readers. In form the work is a series of dramatic dialogues among various characters, enclosed within a narrative framework spoken by "Bard" (Ramsay himself). The framework arrangement anticipates the structure of Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd, where each scene is introduced by a chatty, colloquial prologue. For his verse form Ramsay employs another traditional Scots meter, the tetrameter couplet.

The characters in "A Tale of Three Bonnets" are listed at the beginning, with descriptive phrases, and their allegorical significances become quickly apparent. Following "Bard" we have "Duniwhistle, Father to Bristle, Joukum, and Bawsy," who represents the old historic independence of Scotland. "Bristle, A Man of Honour and Resolution" is clearly the contemporary, independent, patriotic son of Scotland of the type of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun who led the fight against the parliamentary Union of Scotland and England. Next comes "Joukum, In love with Rosie," the Anglophile Scot seduced by "English gold"; followed by "Bawsy, A Weak Brother" whose epithet is self-explanatory. "Rosie, An Heiress" is obviously the red rose of England, loaded with wealth. Finally, there is "Ghost, Of Duniwhistle," and, amusingly, "Beef, Porter to Rosie."

In the opening canto Duniwhistle, on his deathbed, bequeaths to his sons the three bonnets which represent the ancient virtues and integrity of Scotland, a proud heritage that has been handed on from generation to generation for many centuries. He admonishes them never to surrender their birth-right:

And if ye'd hae Man betray ye,
Let naithing ever wile them frae ye,
But keep the BONNETS on your Heads,
And Hands frae signing foolish Deeds.

All three sons swear never to give up their bonnets. "Bard" then intrudes to tell us that Duniwhistle was scarcely in his grave before the promise was broken by two of the sons (Joukum and Bawsy) as a consequence of Joukam's falling in love with the flamboyant Rosie. The description of Rosie who lives, of course, south of the border hills, is especially entertaining, including two lines ("She was a winsome Wench and waly, / And cou'd put on her Claiths fu' brawly") that were to stick in the memory of Burns and to affect a famous passage in "Tam O'Shanter" ("But Tam kend what was what fu' brawlie, / There was ae winsome wench and wawlie"). The remainder of canto 1 is taken up with Joukum's crass wooing of Rosie—a strong satiric scene in which the mercenary motives of both characters are stressed. Rosie finally agrees to marry Joukum on condition that he break his father's will and turn over to her the three bonnets of Scotland.

In canto 2 Joukum approaches Bristle with promises of riches if he will give up his ancestral bonnet. Bristle explodes in righteous anger at the suggestion of this base deal, and attacks Joukum in a passage of cutting vigor:

Thou vile Disgrace of our Forbeers,
Wha lang with valiant Dint of Weirs,
Maintain'd their Rights 'gainst a' Intrusions
Of our auld Faes the Rosycrucians,
Do'st thou design at last to catch
Us in a Girn [snare] with this base Match,
And for the hading up thy Pride,
Upon thy Breether's Riggings ride?
I'll see you hang'd and her thegither….

This is followed in canto 3 by Joukum's approach to the slovenly Bawsy, whom he easily bribes into giving up his bonnet. In this section the Bard's extended description of Bawsy's filthy cottage is particularly rich in comic realism.

In canto 4 Joukum delivers two of the three bonnets to Rosie. They are interrupted by the "Ghaist" (ghost) of Duniwhistle who denounces them both and so frightens Joukum that Rosie has to "soup him up with Usquebae" (whisky) to revive his courage. The marriage of Joukum and Rosie then takes place, with the understanding that Rosie will now have a free hand with the resources of Scotland. It should be noted that Rosie gets two out of the three bonnets, a proportion that roughly corresponds to the actual vote in the Scottish parliament in 1707 in favor of the Union.

In the last part of Ramsay's allegory the disastrous results of the marriage are shown. Rosie and Joukum squander Rosie's wealth until they are deeply in debt and Rosie must send Joukum back to "Fairyland," that is, Scotland, to raise rents and taxes a mere thirty percent to support their high living. Ramsay's satire here is devastating:

Away, with strict Command, he's sent
To Fairyland to lift the Rent,
And with him mony a Catterpillar
To rug from Birss and Bawsy Siller [silver],
For her braid Table maun be serv'd,
Tho' Fairy-fowk shou'd a' be starved.

Bristle is furious, but legally helpless; Bawsy, greedily expecting riches, is treated with contempt and ridicule by Beef (Rosie's flunky) and is easily placated with false promises from Rosie and Joukum. And thus the seduction and humiliation of Scotland is accomplished.

Though "A Tale of Three Bonnets" is seldom brilliant in style, it is consistently well written, with a few passages of "hamely" colloquial imagery that are very effective. This dramatic poem is a daring, patriotic attack upon the Union which Ramsay depicts as a shameful surrender of independence for supposed economic benefits that prove to be illusory. Bawsy, for instance, is forced to pay for the extravagances of Rosie and Joukum, and is despised by them in the bargain. Like most of his countrymen Ramsay mistrusted the Union; he was indeed passionately opposed to it, and in this tale he frankly says so. That does not mean that Ramsay was a radical—politically, economically, or socially. On the contrary, he was fundamentally conservative, and leery of what seemed to him to be drastic and untrustworthy solutions such as the Union. His anti-Union sentiment is part of his special Scottish conservatism; he wished to preserve traditional Scottish values and the main thrust of his literary career is in that direction. He was prudent enough, however, to publish "A Tale of Three Bonnets" anonymously; there was no need to give offense to some of his powerful friends who happened to be on the other side of this issue. Nevertheless, "A Tale of Three Bonnets" is a courageous, outspoken, and quite remarkable satire that has been undervalued or totally ignored in Ramsay scholarship. It deserves to be recognized as one of his major works.

Comic Elegies

The Scots comic elegy tradition was inaugurated about 1640 by a talented Renfrewshire laird, Robert Sempill of Beltrees, in his celebrated poem "The Life and Death of Habbie Simson, the Piper of Kilbarchan," followed by a second elegy in the same style called "Epitaph on Sanny Briggs." For his verse form Sempill adopted a stanza that was fairly common in late medieval poetry in Scotland and northern England, consisting of six lines rhymed a a a b a b, with tetrameter lines for the a rhymes and dimeters for the b' s. This stanza in the next century was christened "Standart Habby" by Allan Ramsay, became the favorite of both Fergusson and Burns, and in more recent times has often been called the "Burns stanza." The witty, clinching effect of the final rhyme makes it well suited for comic or satiric purposes, as the opening stanza of Sempill's "Habbie Simson" will show:

Sempill's poem became the prototype of a new Scots satiric genre. In it the subject is usually an eccentric local character who has in fact died. The narrator expresses comically exaggerated grief as he describes the past life of the departed with good-natured satire, in such a way as to leave the final impression that the subject was a worthy person in spite of peculiarities, or because of them. "Habbie Simson" itself is by no means a great comic poem; though it has several flashes of genuine wit, on the whole it is no more than competent. Yet this poem, perhaps partly by virtue of its effective verse form, caught the popular imagination to such an extent that by Ramsay's time it was no doubt the most widely known and loved of Scots comic pieces. It was, therefore, inevitable that the young Ramsay should be drawn to this genre.

Altogether, Ramsay composed six comic elegies in the "Habbie" stanza; the four that he thought fit to publish—those on Maggy Johnston, John Cowper, Lucky Wood, and Patie Birnie—were all products of the first phase of his career. The dates of composition of some of these elegies are slightly uncertain. The historical Maggy Johnston died in 1711, and there is evidence that Ramsay's elegy in some form existed in 1712, which makes it one of the very earliest of his surviving works. The poem on John Cowper is dated "Anno 1714" by Ramsay himself. Lucky Wood died in 1717, and Ramsay dated his poem in May of that year. All three of these early elegies were published together in pamphlet form in 1718. The one on Patie Birnie was first published in 1720. Ramsay's last two elegies, unpublished during his lifetime, were certainly later. That on Magy Dickson, who was hanged in 1724, could not have been written earlier than that year; the final elegy, on Samuel Clerk, is wholly uncertain as to date but is probably still later.

"Elegy on Maggy Johnston, who died Anno 1711" celebrates a famous alewife who kept a tavern on a small farm about a mile south of Edinburgh on the southern edge of the ancient golf course of Bruntsfield Links. Maggy was popular among all classes, Ramsay tells us, because of her low prices, genial disposition, and, above all, her "Pawky [cunning] Knack / Of brewing Ale amaist [almost] like Wine." Ramsay's poem is, of course, based solidly on the tradition established by Sempill's comic elegies, even to the extent that he echoes in his thirteenth stanza the "remead—dead" rhyme from "Habbie Simson." But Ramsay departs from his model in one significant respect: whereas Sempill's tributes to Habbie Simson and Sanny Briggs are taken up with amusing descriptions of those characters, Ramsay devotes only four of his fifteen stanzas to Maggy Johnston herself. The bulk of his elegy consists of fond reminiscences of happy times in Maggy's "Howff ' (tavern), including hearty drinking parties, the playing of "Hyjinks" (a drunken game similar to the modern "chug-a-lug"), the enjoyment of tasty snacks, a personal account of falling into a drunken sleep in a nearby field on a summer night, and so forth. Stanza 4 is typical:

The poem is full of this kind of youthful bravado; its real subject is conviviality, Ramsay and his friends having fun at Maggy's, rather than Maggy herself.

Ramsay's "Elegy on Maggy Johnston" is one of the most frequently anthologized of all his poems, but it is far from his best. As we have seen, it is one of his very earliest writings, and it suffers from immaturity in substance and in technique. Now and then there is a flash of wit or an effective trick rhyme, as in the tenth stanza:

Such imaginative touches, however, are rare in "Maggy Johnston." On the whole, it is competent in style, but lacking in subtlety and spark; it is a promising but relatively crude specimen of Ramsay's earliest verse in Scots.

His next effort in this genre, "Elegy on John Cowper Kirk-Treasurer's Man, Anno 1714," is much better and is historically very important. Ramsay's long prefatory note to this poem defining for the benefit of "Strangers" the functions of the Kirk-Treasurer and his man is interesting evidence that even at this early stage in his career he hoped to interest readers beyond the borders of Scotland. Obviously, for Scottish readers this kind of information would have been wholly unnecessary; from the beginning Ramsay was aiming at London as well as at Edinburgh. He explains that in each town a Kirk-Treasurer is appointed each year to oversee the private morals of the parishioners, especially in matters of fornication and prostitution. "The Treasurer being changed every Year, never comes to be perfectly acquainted with the Affair; but their general Servant continuing for a long Time, is more expert at discovering such Persons, and the Places of their Resort, which makes him capable to do himself and Customers both a good or an ill Turn. John Cowper maintain'd this Post with Activity and good Success for several Years."

Ramsay begins with a powerful stanza expressing mock grief:

Two things should be noted about this remarkable opening of a remarkable poem. For one thing, Ramsay deviates sharply from the typical comic elegy pattern by lamenting the death of a wholly unworthy, if not despicable, character—a slimy informer and extortionist of the type of Chaucer's Summoner, not at all comparable to the genial and entertaining figures of Habbie Simson, Sanny Briggs, or Maggy Johnston. Secondly, the narrator seems to approve of John Cowper. Though his point of view is slightly ambiguous, the speaker consistently praises Cowper as an efficient enforcer of kirk discipline. He deplores the passing of this hypocritical officer as a disaster for the municipality—"The Loss of him is publick Skaith" (injury)—and in stanza 6, he curses Death as the malevolent instrument of Edinburgh's deprivation:

The voice here, and throughout, is surely not Ramsay's, but rather that of a bigoted prude, one of Edinburgh's evangelical Calvinists.

In short, Ramsay's method in this elegy is that of lively burlesque, an important and daring innovation in the "Habbie" tradition. He adopts the voice of the "enemy" in order to make his point of view as ludicrous and loathsome as possible in his grief for the reprobate Cowper. As John C. Weston has pointed out in a very perceptive essay [in Scottish Literary Journal, December, 1974], Ramsay's use of the ironic voice in this poem provided a crucial hint for Burns's brilliant exploitation of the burlesque technique in such poems as "The Holy Tulzie," "The Ordination," and "Holy Willie's Prayer." Further, Ramsay's addition of a witty "Postscript" to the elegy may have suggested to Burns the same device in "Tam Samson's Elegy" and "Epistle to William Simson."

On the whole, the "Elegy of John Cowper" is most original and historically important of Ramsay's comic elegies. Artistically, it is far superior in technique and imagination to the one on Maggy Johnston. It is also one of the most underrated of his Scots poems.

Ramsay's third effort in this genre, "Elegy on Lucky Wood in the Canongate, May 1717" is, like his poem on Maggie Johnston, a celebration of a local tavern keeper, but this time with the more traditional emphasis on the character of the woman herself. In Ramsay's day the Canongate (now part of central Edinburgh) was a separate municipality, a suburb of the city extending from the Nether-bow Port, the city gate at the eastern end of the High Street, down the slope to the palace of Holyrood-house. The elegy contains several allusions to local matters which Ramsay has to explain in footnotes, including an amusing reference to Aikenhead (stanza 10), the porter at the Nether-bow who customarily locked up the city gate at midnight. Late drinkers at Lucky Wood's, like Ramsay and his friends, returning in the wee hours of the morning, would have to bribe Aikenhead with gills of whisky to open the gate and let them back into the city.

Ramsay opens his elegy with the usual expressions of comically exaggerated grief, including the notable second stanza:

This strong and witty stanza must have impressed Burns, since echoes of it crop up in phrases and in the overall conception of his "Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson." Most of Ramsay's elegy, however, is taken up with spritely and humorous praise of Lucky Wood's general excellence and neatness as an alewife, and especially of her generosity with free food. Stanza 7 is typical:

The final "Epitaph" on Lucky Wood also anticipates the endings of Burns's elegies on Henderson and on Tam Samson. Moreover, the entire poem was destined to influence Robert Fergusson's sparkling description of Lucky Middlemist's oyster cellar in "Caller Oysters."

As a whole, the "Elegy on Lucky Wood" is skillful and delightful poem. It gives us a genial satiric view of night life in old Edinburgh, with the emphasis on the lighthearted and more wholesome aspects of that world, with nothing of the crudity or immaturity of "Maggy Johnston." Though it lacks the imaginative boldness of "John Cowper," it is at least its equal in craftsmanship, and it shows Ramsay steadily increasing in stylistic control as a comic poet in vernacular Scots.

"The Life and Acts of, or An Elegy on Patie Birnie," composed about 1720, is the longest (twenty-one stanzas) of Ramsay's comic elegies and the last of them that he chose to publish; it is also, at least in terms of style and craftsmanship, the most accomplished. Here, even more than in "Lucky Wood," Ramsay follows the pattern of Sempill's "Habbie Simson" very closely, partly because his subject, a famous fiddler of Kinghorn (on the coast of Fife across from Edinburgh), is a similar sort of eccentric local musician as the immortal Habbie. But Ramsay's elegy is by no means a servile imitation; it is wholly original in its details and is, in fact, a much superior poem when compared to Sempill's. As might be expected, "Patie Birnie" strongly influenced Burns in at least two respects, as we shall see.

After the usual amusing expressions of grief, Ramsay plunges into a series of anecdotes of the career and character of Patie Birnie. Though it takes some annotation by Ramsay to make several of Birnie's escapades clear, on the whole they are highly entertaining. In stanzas 3 to 5, for example, we see Birnie's standard trick to gain employment as a fiddler: whenever he saw wealthy looking strangers enter an inn he would rush breathlessly up to them, pretend that he had been sent for, apologize for being late, whip out his fiddle, and immediately start playing, with all kinds of ingratiating lies and hilarious antics—all expressed in a rich, colloquial Scots, with touches of burlesque.

In stanza 8 we learn that Patie began as a fiddler with a home-made instrument with strings attached to a mare's skull. Ramsay then draws a whimsical analogy from Greek mythology:

This clever stanza obviously suggested Burns's passage on another fiddler in "The Jolly Beggars":

Ramsay next introduces (stanza 10) Birnie's pal "Jonny Stocks," identified in a footnote as "A Man of a low Stature, but very broad, a loving Friend of his, who used to dance to his Musick":

And in the following stanza Ramsay's ludicrous picture of Jonny dancing with a much taller girl ("With Nose forgainst a Lass's Midle") gave yet another hint to Burns for his brilliantly farcical sketch in "The Jolly Beggars" of the tiny fiddler smitten with love for the huge female pickpocket—"Her strappan limb an' gausy middle, / (He reach'd higher)." Similarly, Ramsay's surprise ending for the elegy in which he tells his readers to wipe away their tears because Patie Birnie, after all, is still alive ("He is not dead"), became the model for Burns's final stanza in "Tam Samson's Elegy" where the same kind of reversal is effected ("Tam Samson's livin!").

Of the several escapades in Birnie's career that Ramsay recalls in this poem perhaps the most entertaining is the final one (stanzas 19 and 20). Here Ramsay explains that Patie went to the battle of Bothwell-Brig in 1679, but decided, Falstaff-like, that discretion was the better part of valor; he saw no point in risking injury to his eyesight or to his precious "Fidle-Hand":

The smooth technique and wry wit of these lines are typical of the poem as a whole. Incidentally, the "straightfaught" rhyme in this stanza is an interesting illustration of the kind of compromise with standard English spelling that Ramsay felt obliged to make in his Scots poems, a pattern that was to be followed by both Fergusson and Burns later in the century. In those poems that he left unpublished during his lifetime Ramsay tended to use a more or less phonetic spelling, as we shall see, a spelling that tried to approximate the actual sounds of Scots speech in his day. But in the Scots poems that he revised for publication Ramsay adopted, somewhat inconsistently, a sort of semi-Anglicized spelling in order to make his work more easily accessible to non-Scots readers. In his "Preface" to Poems, 1721, he derides those pedants who "are ignorant of the Beauties of their Mother Tongue," defends his use of Scots, argues that Scots blended with English provides richer vocabulary and sound effects, and states that even his poems in standard English are meant to be read with a Scots pronunciation. The Scots pronunciation of the word "straight" in this instance would be "straught," providing an identical rhyme with "faught" in the last line. Why, then, would Ramsay use the English spelling for the one word and the Scots for the other? He probably feared the "straught" might present a problem for English readers, whereas "faught" would be clear enough to all. Nevertheless, the inconsistency creates a slightly confused effect, an effect that Ramsay must have felt was the lesser of two evils, preferable to making himself incomprehensible to members of that wider audience that he hoped to interest.

In any event, the "Elegy on Patie Birnie" is a remarkably good poem, lively in its humor, consistently skillful in its style. It is not only his longest comic elegy, but also, artistically speaking, his best.

Ramsay's last two efforts in this genre are much less substantial and may be treated briefly. In 1724 he produced "Magy Dickson," a rather slapdash poem in the comic elegy tradition, inspired by the incredible adventure of a local character who became an Edinburgh celebrity as "half-hangit Maggie Dickson." Kinghorn and Law in their note on this poem summarize the whole affair neatly and eloquently: "In 1724, Margaret Dickson of Fisherrow, Musselburgh [a fishing village near Edinburgh], who had been separated from her husband for ten months, was hanged for concealing the birth of an illegitimate child. Cut down from the gallows, she recovered as she was being taken home for burial, and was none the worse for the experience except, as the Caledonian Mercury felicitously expressed it, for a pain in the neck." Ramsay's opening stanza will suffice to illustrate the quality as well as the phonetic spelling of this unpublished piece:

On the whole, "Magy Dickson" is a rather careless occasional poem, mildly amusing but seldom more than competent in style. The actual facts of this grotesque case are, indeed, funnier than Ramsay's poem about them; so that his mock elegy can hardly be called an artistic success.

"An Elegy on Mr. Samuel Clerk Running Stationer," also unpublished by Ramsay and of uncertain date, is much better. Clerk was another local Edinburgh character, a "running stationer"—that is, a street vendor of books and pamphlets with no fixed place of business, or, as Ramsay puts it (stanza 3), "A Stationer without a Station." In this lively poem Ramsay focuses on three aspects of Clerk's character, beginning with his usefulness and courage as an impartial seller of controversial and sometimes treasonous political pamphlets (stanzas 3-5). Then we learn (stanzas 4-6) that his parents had intended him for a career in the ministry, "But his wise Head— / To Arts mair usefou was inclined." Ramsay wryly explains in stanza 5 that Clerk was ill suited to the ecclesiastical life because his tender soul could not stand the petty bickering of theological disputes:

This is witty enough, but even more entertaining is the last part of the elegy (stanzas 8-13) on Clerk's addiction to strong drink ("Delicious Drams were his Delight") and on his rumored liaison with his hard-drinking landlady (stanza 11):

The elegy on Samuel Clerk is a relatively polished performance, in contrast to "Magy Dickson," with more or less orthodox spelling and capitalization, a fact which leads us to suspect that Ramsay prepared it for publication but never got round to it, or changed his mind for some reason. However that may be, it is a charming piece of goodnatured wit, well worth reading.

Ramsay's comic elegies, taken together, are a significant achievement. Starting with a very popular seventeenth-century poem, Sempill's "Habbie Simson," as his inspiration, Ramsay developed the form far beyond the limitations of his model. In "John Cowper" he introduced a burlesque method wholly new to this genre, as well as a sharper edge of satire. In "Patie Birnie" and to a lesser extent in "Lucky Wood" and "Samuel Clerk" he surpassed Sempill in general wittiness and sophistication of style. Looked at chronologically, Ramsay's elegies show a steady improvement (except for the sloppy "Magy Dickson") from the relative awkwardness of "Maggie Johnston" to the smooth and skillful effects of the later pieces. For the eighteenth-century Scots revival Ramsay himself, in fact, created the comic elegy as an important genre which he passed on to Fergusson and Burns.

Mock Testaments and Other Satiric Genres

Ramsay's Scots satires include two notable specimens of the "mock testament" or "last dying words" type. This genre has medieval roots, but Ramsay's immediate model was undoubtedly Hamilton of Gilbertfield's "Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck" which he found in Watson's Choice Collection. For this poem Hamilton used the "Habbie" stanza and also the beast fable method; his speaker is a dog, "A Famous Greyhound in the Shire of Fife," so that his "Bonny Heck" provided the obvious precedent for Burns's "The Death and Dying Words of Puir Mailie" where the speaker is a sheep. For his own purposes Ramsay omitted the animal speaker, but adopted the verse form and "last dying words" device of Hamilton's work.

Ramsay's earliest effort in this genre is "Lucky Spence's Last Advice," apparently composed in 1718. Lucky Spence was another well-known Edinburgh character, the keeper of a brothel near the palace of Holyroodhouse. In an opening stanza of narrative Ramsay depicts the old bawd, about to expire, calling her team of young whores to her bedside to hear her final admonitions; the rest of the poem, sixteen "Habbie" stanzas, presents her dying words. The second and third stanzas typify the flavor of the whole:

This is fairly spirited stuff; the poet exploits his verse form with skill, making deft satiric use of the end-rhymes in each stanza. Ramsay portrays the way of life of the prostitute with relentless realism, stressing the appalling risks of disease and imprisonment as well as the cash rewards that result from utterly unscrupulous methods. In stanza 6, for example, Lucky Spence gives sage advice on rolling a helpless drunk:

"Lucky Spence," in general, affords vivid pictures of low life in Ramsay's Edinburgh. It is moderately successful as a comic treatment of the oldest profession, presenting glimpses of squalid human degradation in a way that makes us laugh rather than cry—with humor and some lively wit. Artistically, this is fairly effective comic poetry, though not among Ramsay's very best pieces.

Ramsay's other effort in this genre, "The Last Speech of a Wretched Miser," is more impressive. First published in 1724 and probably written in that year, this poem is notable in at least three respects. For one thing, it is Ramsay's most sustained work in the "Habbie" verse form, with twenty-nine stanzas and 174 lines. Secondly, it differs from most of Ramsay's Scots satires in that it appears to be a generalized attack upon a human type rather than a personal satire on an individual—though, of course, the poet may have had one or more actual men in mind. Finally, and somewhat surprisingly, it is a remarkably good poem, a piece of comic grotesquerie, full of extravagantly earthy but effective images that make it one of Ramsay's most imaginative works.

Ramsay's "Miser" is totally unrepentant; in his dying words he simply explains and graphically illustrates his obsession, and his only regret is that he cannot take his money with him but must leave it to a spendthrift son. He compares his long, painful struggle to amass wealth to that of Tantalus ("Chin deep into a Siller Flood"), or to the self-denying vigilance of eunuchs guarding Oriental harems (stanza 4):

After this brilliant analogy the Miser goes on to detail the incredible economies to which he gladly subjected himself. He tells us in the seventh stanza that "I never wore my Claiths [clothes] with brushing, / Nor wrung away my Sarks [shirts] with washing," and in the ninth—

There are several passages in the poem as telling as these, but one more must suffice to demonstrate its power. Toward the end of his speech (stanza 24) the Miser sums up the terrible sacrifices he has made:

All things considered, "The Last Speech of a Wretched Miser" is one of Ramsay's finest poems. Despite its generalized subject, it is full of bold, concrete images that give it a kind of imaginative force that is unusual in Ramsay's work. The unabashed confessional quality reminds one of Chaucer's Pardoner's Prologue; the speech's strong, gritty comedy is an impressive achievement, generally underrated by the critics.

Two or three others of Ramsay's Scots satires deserve mention, including "The Rise and Fall of the Stocks, 1720." This piece in tetrameter couplets is in the form of an epistle to Lord Ramsay, dated 25 March 1721, and is a moderately witty satire on foolish speculations on the South Sea Bubble. Ramsay uses as his motto four lines from Samuel Butler's Hudibras and his work is clearly modeled on that poem. The opening paragraph with its comic personification of the nation is especially spritely (lines 4-8):

Viewing our poor bambousl'd Nation,
Biting her Nails, her Knuckles wringing,
Her Cheek sae blae, her Lip sae hinging;
Grief and Vexation's like to kill her,
For tyning [losing] baith her Tick and Siller.

Unfortunately, Ramsay fails to maintain this level of style through the 196 lines of his topical epistle. It is generally competent and mildly amusing, but lacks imaginative spark; Maurice Lindsay is correct in characterizing this piece as a kind of "versified journalism" [in History of Scottish Literature, 1977].

"The Marrow Ballad" is a very different story. This trenchant satire on religious bigotry, never published during Ramsay's lifetime, bears the subtitle "On Seeing a Stroling Congregation Going to a Field Meeting, May 9th, 1738," and is written to the tune of the popular seventeenth-century song "Fy let us a' to the Bridal." In their notes to this poem Kinghom and Law quietly assert that the "poem has resemblances, in style and attitude, to Burns's Holy Fair. " That is surely an understatement, since the resemblances are quite astonishing, not only in style and attitude but also in the structural method of highlighting the dramatic contrasts between the pious preaching and the profane behavior of lads and lasses in the congregation. The general resemblances are indeed so striking that one would be tempted to see in Ramsay's poem the catalyst for Burns's, were it not for the fact that it is improbable in the extreme that Burns could ever have seen this poem in manuscript.

In "The Marrow Ballad" Ramsay launches an ironic attack upon the extreme Presbyterian position as represented by such popular preachers as Erskine and Mair of the breakaway Associate Synod. The opening lines set the tone very deftly:

In his next stanzas Ramsay goes on to suggest, as Burns does in "The Holy Fair," not only that these religious revival meetings provide opportunities for boys and girls to get together for lovemaking, but also that the mood of spiritual exaltation induced by the sermons leads directly into sexual passion. Ramsay's speaker throughout is a young man on the way to the field meeting (stanza 3):

Later, in the opening lines of the final stanza, the speaker gives ironic thanks to the ministers for providing such ideal conditions for love, and then slips in an incisive thrust at their rigid fanaticism:

That last line, in its context, is wonderfully devastating.

Why did Ramsay leave this fine poem unpublished? Discreet as he was in this late stage of his career (1738), after he had made his fortune, Ramsay no doubt was reluctant to give offense; perhaps also he worried about libel suits, since the poem names the names of distinguished churchmen. In any case, he held it back, and "The Marrow Ballad" remained buried in an obscure manuscript for well over two centuries. It ranks high among his satires and deserves to be widely known.

Summary

Obviously, Ramsay's Scots satires constitute a major part of his significant poetry. One striking fact about them is that, with the exception of the "Christis Kirk" cantos, parts of "A Tale of Three Bonnets," and one or two others, all of these satires deal with town life—especially with Edinburgh, "Auld Reekie," the old greystone jungle of narrow wynds and closes flanking the High Street and Canongate, the crowded, battered, squalid, vibrant city he lived in all of his adult life and clearly loved. The vivid impressions of that unique world that we get in these poems look back two centuries to the incisive Edinburgh satires of William Dunbar, and they provided a solid modern precedent for the brilliant Edinburgh poems of Robert Fergusson fifty years later.

Another point worth noticing in these satires is that in them Ramsay limited himself to three verse forms: the "Christis Kirk" stanza, the "Habbie" stanza, and the tetrameter couplet—all traditional Scottish meters. The only exception to this, "The Marrow Ballad," is composed in a pattern very closely related both in form and spirit to the "Christis Kirk" tradition. In so doing Ramsay succeeded in showing that these ancient native poetic forms were still alive and adaptable to modern themes, and he passed them on, reinvigorated, to his successors. At the same time, he revealed the possibilities of the burlesque method for modern Scots satire in "John Cowper," "Lucky Spence," and "Wretched Miser"—a development that was to have a profound effect on Burns.

How good are Ramsay's Scots satires intrinsically? As we have seen, their quality is uneven, and we should not claim too much for them. "Maggy Johnston" is awkward and immature, "Magy Dickson" is sloppy, others are no more than competent. But in the best of them—including the second canto of "Christis Kirk," the bold experiment of "John Cowper," the skilled, genial satire of "Lucky Wood" and "Patie Birnie," the imaginative power of "Wretched Miser," and the cutting wit of "The Marrow Ballad"—Ramsay shows an impressive talent. Kinghorn, in the most recent and in many respects most valuable biographical and critical work on Ramsay, largely ignores these remarkable satires, preferring to focus on his pastoral poetry, adaptations of Horace, and editorial labors. But the Scots satires cannot be ignored; they belong to the vital, central part of Ramsay's life work.