If not the victim of the contradictory poetic models, English and Scots, which he sought combinedly to imitate, Ramsay, except in the case of The Gentle Shepherd, was nothing advantaged, either as Scots or English versifier, by any compensating result of the twofold influence. His familiarity with the vernacular song and some of the verse of the old Scots 'makaris,' in no wise tended to modify the pompous commonplace of his more ambitious essays in English verse, while his acquaintance with the English classics exercised little truly educative influence on his vernacular method. But this twofold acquaintanceship assisted him to construct a species of Scoto-English song which was rampantly popular both in Scotland and England. While his vernacular pieces won him universal fame among the lower classes of his native land, and his English verse was read with something resembling admiration by the more enlightened classes of both countries, his songs—as is abundantly testified by the song-books and sheet music of the period—were warbled, to rapturous applause, by the favourite vocalists at the London 'gardens,' and other places of popular resort. Familiar with the old popular songs of both countries, he utilised them for his own purposes with much superficial cleverness. His manner was exactly that which the masses could thoroughly appreciate, and the Scottish flavour, comparatively mild as it was, conferred on them a piquancy which in England greatly aided their popularity.

Some of them—as "Nany," "O, Bony Jean," "I'll never leave Thee", "Clout the Caldron," and "Through the Wood, Laddie"—were reminiscent of old English broadsides. A great many more, usually published as his own, are founded on older Scottish songs, some of them poetically much superior, and all of them at least equal to Ramsay's versions. They include "Bessy Bell and Mary Gray," "Auld Lang Syne," "The Bob of Dunblane," … in addition to many old songs which he merely amended. Indeed, Ramsay can claim comparatively few songs as wholly his own. Among his best are "The Lass of Patie's Mill"—which some assert is not wholly his—and "Lochaber No More," and both are marred by solecisms. Yet he has written one admirable lyric, perfectly faultless in its simplicity, "My Peggy is a Young Thing". His worst defect is his penchant for the grovelling, and when not grovelling, he is too apt to be stalely commonplace.

"The Soger Laddie," for example, which used to create a furore at Mary'bone Gardens, and other popular London resorts of the eighteenth century, but expresses the unadorned sentiments of Mary Jane, in language even more prosaic and banal than many a Mary Jane would employ:

My soger laddie is over the sea
And he will bring gold and money to me;
And when he comes hame, he'll make me a lady;
My blessing gang with my soger laddie.
My doughty laddie is handsome and brave,
And can as a soger and lover behave;
True to his country, to love he is steady,
There's few to compare with my soger laddie.

Shield him, ye angels, frae death in alarms,
Return him with laurels to my langing arms;
Syne frae all my care he'll pleasantly free me,
When back to my wishes my soger ye gie me.

O soon may his honours bloom fair on his brow,
As quickly they must, if he get his due:
For in noble actions his courage is ready,
Which makes me delight in my soger laddie.

Nor even in the best of his convivial songs does he embody the true rapture of good fellowship. " Up in the Air" begins fairly well, and stanza ii contains a rather picturesque allusion to a snowy night; but the piece is wholly lacking in poetic glamour, while the last stanza is but stiffly wooden:

But as the comic satirist of low life Ramsay evidenced the possession of a strong vein of clever clownish humour. The "Elegy on John Cowper" and "Lucky Spence's Last Advice," are caustic and graphic enough after their own rancid fashion; and the elegies on "Maggy Johnstone" and "Lucky Wood" supply us with a curious photographic picture of the tavern life of Old Edinburgh. The portrait of Lucky Wood, the pattern ale-wife of the Canongate, is indeed quite admirable:

But the most elaborate effort of Ramsay's in expounding the humours of common life is his two additional cantos to "Christis Kirk," which, while lacking the vivid conciseness of the earlier piece, and indeed little better than a mere vulgar parody of its method, depict realistically enough the more sordid aspects of Scottish mirth. The first canto of Ramsay describes a wedding-feast, ending with the bedding ceremony; and in the second the rejoicings are renewed on the morrow until all the men reach the becoming condition of brutal intoxication. It is all true to nature and all most grotesquely comic, but not all quite quotable. Here, however, are some quaint stanzas depicting the arrival of the gossips on the morning after the marriage:

Ramsay's Tales and Fables call for little comment. A good many are in English or in Scoto-English, and the majority in the octo-syllabic couplet. Some, he states, were 'taken from Messieurs la Fontaine and la Motte,' and those which are his 'own invention with respect to the plot as well as the numbers' he leaves the reader 'to find out,' or if any one thought 'it worth his while to ask' him, he professed his willingness to tell him. Ramsay is now beyond interrogation; but one may venture to affirm that "The Monk and the Miller's Wife," which was long credited to him, was neither his own invention nor 'taken from Messieurs la Fontaine and la Motte,' but is merely a modernised and vulgarised reading of 'The Freiris of Berwick;' and that his most elaborate tale, "The Three Bonnets," a long-winded, complicated, and occasionally gross satire on the Union, is most probably all his own.

Ramsay's satires entitle him to rank as at least a cleverly comic vernacular Zola, but for the author of The Gentle Shepherd something more than this may be claimed. If not quite poetry, it is at least admirable 'kailyaird.' A most pleasing because a quite unaffectedly homely and simple sketch of rustic courtship—somewhat idealised—it almost by mere accident reveals a literary talent which had been partly smothered by his imperfect training and untoward circumstances. Here his twofold course of poetic study stood him in much better stead than usual. The English pastorals, which he so far made his model, exercised a certain restraining influence on his rather too realistic Scottish method, while by electing to write in the vernacular he avoided the worst pitfalls of artificiality. It has given him a certain acknowledged position in literature, and not undeservedly; but though also as a vernacular satirist his strenuity and wit—often too much tinged with squalidity—are undeniable, and though he contrived one excellent and one or two passably good lyrics, it is rather as editor than author that he occupies his peculiar place in the vernacular revival. The results of his editorial enterprise were twofold: (1) The Tea Table Miscellany—dedicated gallantly (and pawkily)

in conjunction with Thomson's Orpheus aroused—curious patchwork of old and new, of Scots, English, Scoto-English, and Anglo-Scots, though it be—in a new fashion the old interest in popular song among the bulk of the Scottish people; and (2) by The Evergreen—which he described as 'a Collection of Scots Poems wrote by the Ingenious before 1600,' and which included, besides a few ballads such as "Hardyknute," "Johnie Armstrang," and "The Battle of Harlaw," and "The Vision" (which may be wholly or partly his own), and one or two of The Gude and Godlie Ballates, a large number of the best productions (often very freely altered) of the old 'makaris' preserved in the Bannatyne MS.—he was the first to rescue from oblivion the old vernacular poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which, thus resurgent after a trance of some century and a half, was found to have lost comparatively little of its ancient vitality, and by its vivifying effects partly rekindled in the eighteenth century the old vernacular poetic flame.