According to Ramsay's own statement The Gentle Shepherd was written in the years 1724 and 1725. When the first edition came out in 1725 there were only four songs, "Peggy, now the King's come", II, iii; the duet between Patie and Peggy, "By the delicious warmness of thy mouth", II, iv; Bauldy's snatch of song, "Jenny said to Jocky, 'Gin ye winna tell'", IV, i; and the conclusion to the whole work, Peggy's "My Patie is a lover gay". Although it is most unlikely, as is sometimes claimed, that the first edition, containing a mere handful of songs, had any influence on The Beggars' Opera, it is nevertheless certain that there was at first some interaction between these almost opposite works. Gay's ballad opera was performed in Edinburgh by Tony Aston's company in October 1728 and seen by the pupils of Haddington Grammar School, who thereupon asked Ramsay to do the same with his drama; the upshot was a 'public performance of The Gentle Shepherd, with musical accompaniment, given on 22 January, 1729 "in Taylor's Hall, by a Set of Young Gentlemen"', in which the four songs were expanded to twenty-one. The 1734 printed edition describes itself as 'the sixth edition with the songs'. A manuscript life of the poet, ascribed to his son, Allan Ramsay the painter, claims that he soon became unhappy with the expanded form and wished the songs away, but 'comforted himself with the thought that the contagion had not infected his second Volume in Quarto, where The Gentle Shepherd is still to be found in its original purity'. Nevertheless, it was in its ballad opera form that it was widely known, in both Scotland and England, until the early nineteenth century; and it was through the reprints of the songs in the later editions of The Tea-Table Miscellany, other song-books, and chapbooks that it most influenced the popular lyrical tradition.

The Gentle Shepherd is set at the time of the Restoration of 1660, and its plot is of the slightest. In a village at the foot of the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, the poor but independent Patie is in love with Peggy, who requites his passion; his rich friend Roger dotes on Jenny, who slights him. The foundling Peggy, brought up by a shepherd called Glaud, is actually a laird's daughter; and Patie, reared in his turn by Symon, is the son of Sir William Worthy, exiled during the Cromwellian interregnum. Sir William returns disguised as a fortune-teller, reveals himself to Symon and covertly observes young Patie, with whom he is well pleased. The shepherd's real identity is disclosed to him; he is truly 'gentle' (i.e. one of the upper classes), and it behooves him, now that his restored father is about to enjoy his own again, to give up the low-born Peggy. This is the cue for Mause, who had at one time been Peggy's nurse, to reveal the truth about the heroine. All this time the action has been counterpointed by a sub-plot. In her flouting of Roger, Jenny coquettishly appears to favour the boorish Bauldy. But Bauldy (who once courted Neps) now wants Peggy; believing that Mause is a witch he asks her to use her eldritch skills to make Peggy dote on him and transfer Patie's affections to his own former sweetheart, Neps. In IV, i Madge (Glaud's sister) accuses Bauldy of being a heartless jilt and drives him off the stage in the style of crude popular farce, while Mause and Madge plot to scare Bauldy out of his wits, and his unseemly passion, by dressing up as ghosts. At the end Patie and Peggy are betrothed, as are Roger and Jenny while the sadder and wiser Bauldy goes back to Neps, and there is general rejoicing.

The plot is so trite and conventional that, as A. M. King-horn has put it, [in The Works of Allan Ramsay, Vol. IV, 1970] 'direct ancestry is untraceable … the pattern of lovers, the foundling complications, and the device of disguise are all stylised descendants of classical comedy': it goes right back through the Renaissance to Roman comedy and Attic new comedy. But the structure of the action, deriving so obviously from written, even learned forms, and couched in the form of a regular neo-classic drama observing the unities, nevertheless manages to preserve some of the responses aroused by the folk-tale. After a minute examination of a hundred Russian fairy tales, Vladimir Propp concluded [in Morphology of the Folk-tale, 1970] that the total number of 'structural functions' never exceeded thirty-one, and that whatever the number of such functions in a given tale, they always appear in the same order. Examples of such structural functions are Propp's nos. 21, 22 and 23—'the hero is pursued', 'rescue of the hero from pursuit' and 'the hero, unrecognised, arrives home from another country'. No less than twentyone of Propp's functions appear in The Gentle Shepherd, only they are not always assigned to a single hero, but are split between Patie and his father, and they do not always appear in the same order as in narrative folk-tale. When The Gentle Shepherd is scrutinised with Propp's categories in mind, some of the functions which in a simple Fairy Tale are given to hero or villain, are in Ramsay embodied in the historic process itself: for example, 'the hero acquires the use of a magical agent'. Because History is on the side of Sir William's return and therefore, unknown to him, of Patie, History usurps the function of a magical agent. I shall come back to this point in a moment. In the meantime, it is worth observing that at the level of structure Ramsay's pastoral attempts to synthesise different traditions; and that it does exactly the same at the level of texture.

This is exemplified in the first four lines of the piece, in the six-lined Prologue which sets the scene:

Beneath the south side of a craigy beild,
Where crystal springs the halesome waters yield,
Twa youthful shepherds on the gowans lay,
Tenting their flocks ae bonny morn of May.

Not only is the plain directness of the first line, moving from the neutral 'south side' to the downright Scots of 'craigy beild', contrasted with the Augustan balance of the second, but the counter-pointing within the figure is heightened by the way the Scots 'halesome' offsets the English 'crystal', at the same time as Scots and English are linked between the lines by the cross alliteration of 'craigy' and 'crystal'. In the ballad-opera the Prologue is followed immediately by one of Ramsay's best pastoral lyrics, "My Peggy is a young thing", sung by Patie, and first printed in the 1729 edition of the Tea-Table Miscellany. This lyric shows exactly the same contrasts as the Prologue. Its thin sprinkling of Scots is dramatically appropriate for Patie, one of nature's gentlemen who also happens to be socially a gentleman, although he does not yet know it; and a Scots expression in the second stanza, 'To a' the lave I'm cauld' is paralleled in the last stanza by its English translation, no doubt to provide the medial rhyme: 'By a' the rest, it is confest / By a' the rest that she sings best'. In this first song, too, we are presented with a genuine contemporary ideal that is one of the positives of the play. The songs Peggy sings best are informed 'With innocence the wale o' sense'; she is loved for her own personal qualities which are those of nature's gentlewoman; she excels others not only in singing but in true womanly qualities, as a Scots lady should. In the whole of the following eclogue, which does duty for Act I, sc. i, the movement is at first from the contrast between Patie's joyous mood, perfectly in tune with the sunny morning, and Roger's despair at Jenny's scorn, towards the more permanent difference between their inherent characters. Patie, cheerful but impoverished, is popular with all; Roger, despairing though wealthy, is unpopular—especially with the girls. The notions of innate excellence, of its opposite, innate meanness, and of 'Slow rises Worth, by poverty depressed', are brought out by the rhetoric of Roger's very first couplet:

I'm born, Patie! to a thrawart fate;
I'm born to strive with hardships sad and great.
(I, i, 15-16)

The stars and his forbears have given Patie a slow, solid, stoical common-sense that can be found in all classes, but is particularly suitable in a landowner or community leader:

The bees shall loath the flower, and quit the hive,
The saughs on boggie-ground shall cease to thrive,
Ere scornful queans, or loss of warldly gear,
Shall spoil my rest, or ever force a tear.
(I, i, 21-4)

The transition to the second part of the scene, where the topic is Jenny's coquettishness, is made by means of superstition, a subsidiary theme of the whole work; … such folk-beliefs were a debating point in the theoretical discussions over pastoral. Roger says:

I dream'd a dreary dream this hinder night,
That gars my flesh a' creep yet with the fright
(lines 63-4)

which Patie counters with 'Daft are your dreams' (line 67)—the very voice of common-sense and the Enlightenment; but when Roger begins to tell how badly Jenny has treated him, he uses another allusion to rural superstition—'she fled as frae a shellycoat (spectre clad in a rattling coat) or kow (goblin)' (line 78), thus consolidating the difference between the character-types of the two men. Patie advises him to give over his 'silly whinging way' (line 103) and use amorous tactics, seeming to forsake her. After all, it worked for him with Peggy:

Blythsome, I cry'd, my bonny Meg, come here,
I ferly wherefore ye're sae soon asteer;
But I can guess, ye're gawn to gather dew:
She scoured awa, and said, 'What's that to you?'
'Then fare ye well, Meg Dorts, and e'en's ye like',
I careless cry'd, and lap in o'er the dike.
I trow, when that she saw, within a crack,

She came with a right thievless errand back;
Misca'd me first,—then bade me hound my dog
To wear up three waff ews stray'd on the bog.
I leugh, and sae did she; then with great haste
I clasp'd my arms about her neck and waste,
About her yielding waste, and took a fouth
Of sweetest kisses frae her glowing mouth.
(lines 121-34)

This is a completely new voice in British poetry. The pentameter couplet is now naturalised in Scotland and has become something quite different in the process. It has acquired a colloquial vigour not found in [Thomas] Purney or [Ambrose] Philips, let alone in [Alexander] Pope's Pastorals: and the passage quoted, so admirably conveying the cut and thrust of everyday flyting ('What's that to you?', 'Fare ye well, Meg Dorts, and e'en's ye like'), and so full of action-verbs, is preceded by a beautifully sensuous description that is again far more effective than any similar passage from Ramsay's southern predecessors:

I saw my Meg come linkan o'er the lee;
I saw my Meg, but Meggy saw na me:
For yet the sun was wading thro' the mist,
And she was close upon me ere she wist;
Her coats were kiltit, and did sweetly shaw
Her straight bare legs that whiter were than snaw;
Her cockernony snooded up fou sleek,
Her haffet-locks hang waving on her cheek;
Her cheek sae ruddy, and her een sae clear;
And O! Her mouth's like ony hinny pear.
(lines 109-18)

In the ballad-opera, Patie expands his advice given in the following couplet

Seem to forsake her, soon she'll change her mood;
Gae woo anither, and she'll gang clean wood

into the song "Dear Roger if your Jenny geek", which quite charmingly embroiders the meaning of the preceding couplets: unlike some of the later songs, though it may be superfluous, it still manages to be effective as decoration. The first scene—the eclogue—is resolved in a new friendship and understanding between Roger and Patie. Roger agrees to follow the advice of his natural superior (Patie) and will celebrate the change in their relationship with the gift of a tartan plaid of his mother's making. Patie caps this with the offer of his own greatest treasure, his new flute, in a marvellous couplet that triumphantly blends the idiomatic with the concise:

My flute's be your's, and she too that's sae nice
Shall come a will, gif ye'll tak my advice.
(lines 157-8)

In an equally fine and simple couplet, Roger refuses the flute—

As ye advise, I'll promise to observ't;
But ye maun keep the flute, ye best deserv't.
(lines 159-60)

The scene ends with an anticipation of breakfast which gives Ramsay an opportunity to restate in Scots the old pastoral preference for homely fare and the traditional condemnation of luxurious dishes:

Be that time bannocks, and a shave of cheese,
Will make a breakfast that a laird might please;
Might please the daintiest gabs, were they sae wise,
To season meat with health instead of spice.
(lines 165-8)

The contrast and linking of Scots and English language, of the simple with the sophisticated, which we noted in the Prologue, are again present here, and aptly synthesised in the last line quoted, balancing 'health' against 'spice': an abstract noun standing for a whole way of life against the concrete symbol of an opposite complex of values. A Scots colouring is delicately imparted by the pronunciation; the normally voiced 'wise' becomes voiceless to rhyme with 'spice'.

The second scene—and it too, we remember, was originally a separate eclogue—is formally parallel to the first. It is a debate between Peggy and Jenny where

… Jenny what she wishes discommends,
And Meg with better sense true love defends
(lines 7-8)

to such effect that, just like Pate in the preceding scene, she converts her friend to her own view. Their friendship is re-established under the dominance of the natural leader, Peggy: she is as superior in her feminine sphere as Patie is in his masculine one.

For the girls, any debate about love is automatically a debate about marriage. Jenny scorns her own lover out of fear because of what she has seen and heard of the 'perils' of marriage, but Peggy utterly rejects her suggestion that Pate will tire of her after a fortnight, 'And think he's tint his freedom for your sake' (line 85). His innate male superiority is her guarantee that he will respect her type of female superiority for life: 'His better sense will lang his love secure' (line 106). Jenny next paints a grim picture of the trouble of family life—'whindging getts about your ingle-side, / Yelping for this or that with fasheous din', toiling and spinning from morn to night, and the inevitable sick and fractious children:

The deel gaes o'er John Wobster, hame grows hell,
When Pate misca's ye war than tongue can tell.
(lines 116-17)

We have come a long way from the deliberate idealisation demanded by Fontenelle [in "Discours sur la nature de l'eclogue," 1688], or the contention in Guardian 22 that true pastoral writing represents only the simplicity and hides the misery of country life. In her next statement, Jenny gives a stark picture of rural poverty in a period of general economic crisis:

Gif o'er your heads ill chance shou'd beggary draw:
But little love, or canty chear can come,
Frae duddy doublets, and a pantry toom.
Your nowt may die—the spate may bear away
Frae aff the howms your dainty rucks of havy….
A dyvour buys your butter, woo and cheese,
But, or the day of payment, breaks and flees.
With glooman brow the laird seeks in his rent:
Tis no to gi'e; your merchant's to the bent;
His Honour mauna want, he poinds your gear:
Syne, driven frae house and hald, where will ye steer?
(lines 129-33, 136-41)

In reply, Peggy avers that Jenny's mistake has been to ignore the mental aspects of love (line 190) and she wins the minx over in a beautiful, if traditional, extended simile:

Bairns, and their bairns, make sure a firmer try,
Than ought in love the like of us can spy.
See yon twa elms that grow up side by side,
Suppose them, some years syne, bridegroom and bride;
Nearer and nearer ilka year they've prest,
Till wide their spreading branches are increast,
And in their mixture now are fully blest.
This shields the other frae the eastlin blast,
That in return defends it frae the west.
Sic as stand single,—a state sae liked by you!
Beneath ilk storm, frae ev'ry airth, maun bow.
(lines 191-201)

Ramsay does not just set a glib idealism over against a brutal 'real world' of battered babies, battered wives and unfaithful husbands. His vision of married happiness is far from idyllic; he well knows the storms of life are fierce; but it is a matter of simple observation that the friendship and companionship of a happy marriage are the surest safeguards against such storms. The values in this scene are the highest point in the drama, and they are precisely those which Burns was later to express in four of his most hackneyed lines [in 'To Dr Blacklock']:

The extended, musical version has three songs summing up the girls' respective positions in the debate: Sang iii, given to Peggy ('The dorty will repent / If lover's heart grows cauld'); Sang iv, given to Jenny ('O dear Peggy, love's beguiling'); and Sang v, which is again Peggy's ('How shall I be sad when a husband I hae / That has better sense then any o' thae'). In Sang vi ('I yield, dear lassie, ye have won'), Jenny acknowledges her defeat. While all are lyric expansions of what is more pithily expressed in the dialogue, only the third and the sixth songs are completely mechanical: the fourth and the fifth add some nuances of emotional tone to what is said in the preceding passages.

One function of the two eclogues which Ramsay put together to form Act I is to set the pastoral firmly in place. We only gradually become aware of its exact locale, and this arouses in us a distinct sense of movement inwards towards a center. When Patie tells us he has bought a new flute in the West-port, we deduce, if we are watching a performance without a printed programme, that the action probably takes place near Edinburgh (I, i, 56). And it is only in the second scene, when Peggy says 'Go farer up the burn to Habby's How', that we know the little community is situated in a particular corner of the Pentland Hills (I, ii, 13).

The parallel function of II, i, where Glaud and Symon crack about politics, is to fix the play solidly in time, using the Scots reductive idiom to bring national politics within the compass of a rustic mind. Symon brings the news:

Now Cromwell's gane to Nick; and ane ca'd Monk
Has play'd the Rumple a right slee begunk,
Restor'd King Charles, and ilka thing's in tune….
(II, i, 29-31)

The two main political themes of the scene, that political revenge is sweet and that the ideal landlord, epitomised in the character of Sir William Worthy, does not 'stent' his tenants in a 'racket rent', are singled out by the seventh and eighth songs in the opera version:

The social paternalism of the last lines is no isolated observation but connects with Peggy's conviction that a tenant's first duty is to his landlord:

A flock of lambs, cheese, butter, and some woo,
Shall first be sald to pay the laird his due;
Syne a' behind's our ain.
(I, ii, 157-9)

II, ii and II, iii develop the sub-plot and prepare the way for the discomfiture of the wretched Bauldy. Mause's fine song 'Peggy, now the King's come' to the tune of 'Carle and the king come', one of the four lyrics in the original drama, allows the audience to anticipate the final resolution by informing them that Peggy is herself 'gentle', at the same time as it relates Mause to the main plot.

These scenes connect obviously and even obtrusively with Burns. Ramsay's Enlightenment condemnation of witchbeliefs and also much of his detail are taken over bodily into 'Tam o' Shanter'. In II, iv the action shifts to a lovers' meeting between Patie and Peggy, and lines 57-68 of the original, describing how they became acquainted, are in the opera expanded into a courtship dialogue song of three stanzas in anapaestic couplets to the tune of 'Winter was cauld, and my claithing was thin'. The first two stanzas are surely as good as the corresponding couplets, and the whole song is aesthetically pleasing in itself:

     Peggy

When first my dear laddie gaed to the green hill,
And I at ewe-milking first sey'd my young skill,
To bear the milk bowie no pain was to me,
When I at the bughting forgather'd with thee.

     Patie
When corn-riggs wav'd yellow, and blue heather-bells
Bloom'd bonny on moorland and sweet rising fells,
Nae birns, brier, or breckens, gave trouble to me,
If I found the berries right ripen'd for thee.
(Sts. i, ii)

It is a lyric community that surrounds Patie and Peggy, where songs are sung at work and at evening ceilidhs, forming part of the very texture of daily life:

At the end of the scene there is a duet, "By the delicious warmness of thy mouth", sung 'to its own tune', that ends with a kiss upon the stage. The lyric puts forward once again the official ideal of this society—long devotion and no sex before marriage, though some sensuality is permitted:

Sung by both
Sun, gallop down the westlin skies,
Gang soon to bed, and quickly rise;
O lash your steeds, post time away,
And haste about our bridal day:
And if ye're wearied, honest light,
Sleep, gin ye like, a week that night.
(II, iv, 120-5)

This song at least, which was in the text from the start, is dramatically appropriate.

Since III, i introduces Sir William Worthy, who speaks English as a matter of social decorum, except when disguised, the prologue is in Scots-English with a modicum of Scots vocabulary, the pronunciation being indicated by the orthography. Sir William's English couplets are not sign of a split national consciousness but a matter of realism and decorum. His long soliloquy of fifty-two lines, taking up the entire scene, presents the stock 'happier than kings' ideal, the simple life to which he has consigned his son during exile; in the opera, these ideas are repeated in the nondescript Sang xii. The scene as a whole connects what the audience has come to accept as a real community of homely peasants with an almost mythic ideal; it presents the little hamlet or village as a microcosm of the Golden Age within a society menaced by the 'dinsome town', revolutionaries like Cromwell, and corrupt self-seeking money-grubbers. The conclusion, not stated directly but implicit in the feeling-tone of the drama as a whole, is that the closest we can come to realising the pastoral ideal is when the worthy, epitomised by Sir William, enjoy their own—when the best rule, and the entire country is governed by a natural aristocracy who are in practice identical with the traditional aristocracy of property and blood.

In the next scene (III, ii) the hint that Peggy is a natural aristocrat, given in II, iii by Mause's song "Peggy, now the King's come", is strengthened by Symon, when the repeats the rumour that Peggy was a foundling. We are now in the second part of the play, which A. M. Kinghorn finds decidedly less attractive than the first: 'the action dominates the background and there is only a limited appeal in the conventional gathering of the threads. The manipulations in the interests of a standard dénouement are not particularly ingenious, nor is there much attempt on Ramsay's part to make the principal characters individual.' Surely Dr Kinghorn is less than fair to Ramsay. Surpassing ingenuity is not required by the genre and truly realistic character-presentation would necessitate a kind of historical drama nowhere produced in early eighteenth-century Europe. Although it is true, as Dr King-horn says, that The Gentle Shepherd 'was not intended as a mask for political allegory', its great achievement was to give expression to both the social and national character of early eighteenth-century Scotland: an achievement of which Ramsay was partly conscious, and partly unconscious. In the remainder of III, ii, disguised as a spaeman peddlar, Sir William offers to tell fortunes—and does so, in good vernacular Scots. When the strange 'warlock' prophesies that Patie will be a laird, Patie is the identical stalwart sceptic of Act I:

A laird of twa good whistles, and a kent,
Twa curs, my trusty tenants, on the bent,
Is all my great estate—and like to be:
Sae, cunning carle, ne'er break your jokes on me.
(lines 94-7)

The rationality of the natural aristocrat is identical with the shrewd common-sense of the more solid and experienced peasants, for both Glaud and Symon are sceptical of spaemen. There is some simple but effective stage-business. Sir William 'looks a little at Patie's hand, then counterfeits falling into a trance, while they endeavour to lay him right'; when he 'starts up and speaks' it is to foretell his own return and Patie's transformation into 'Mr Patrick', via an allegorical tale about 'A knight that for a Lyon fought, / Against a herd of bears' (III, ii, 112-24). In a strongly contrasting love scene, Jenny—despite her decision to accept love and its obligations—repeats a real fear to Roger, the tyranny of a soul-destroying domestic drudgery:

When prison'd in four waws, a wife right tame,
Altho' the first, the greatest drudge at hame.
(lines 38-9)

Roger retorts that woman's slavery is caused by money and arranged marriages: it is different in a love-match. Love—as in a hundred lyrics of 'the common pursuit'—is supreme, and—should Jenny's father deny,

In III, iv, the recognition scene between Sir William and Symon, Symon praises Pate to his father. As befits a natural aristocrat, he is the acknowledged leader of the other shepherds, and studious too, buying books every time he goes to Edinburgh. To say, as A. M. Kinghorn does, that the laird's 'sententious observations about the elevating value of education for peasants as well as for gentlemen read rather quaintly nowadays', and that his 'ponderous moral statements delivered in his rôle as patron of the rustics' are equally uninteresting, is to give less than due attention to The Gentle Shepherd in its historical context. When we are told that Roger reads Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Drummond, William Alexander, and Cowley (lines 73-6), we are being told what sort of traditions ought to mould Scottish culture: Anglo-Scottish ones, uniting the best from both countries. And when (lines 84-5), Sir William says

Reading such books can raise a peasant's mind
Above a lord that is not thus inclin'd

he is in fact expressing a national ideal, the 'social character' of the Good Scotsman implicit in John Knox's free school in every parish, looking forward to the later myth of the 'lad o' pairts'. In the opera, the only song from this scene (Sang xv), to the tune 'Wat ye wha I met yestreen', which occurs at the end of the act just before the curtain falls, no more than paraphrases the soliloquy that precedes it, where Sir William says that 'Mister Patrick' must now forget his 'rustic business and love' and go abroad to improve his 'soul' in 'courts and camps'. In other words, the leading classes must be not just Scottish; they must be international, experiencing the practical introduction to European culture and manners, which only the grand tour can give.

In IV, i, when Maud and Madge tell us how the community rejoiced at Sir William's restoration, there is one highly significant line which 'nationalises' the values of pastoral, identifying them with the heroic age of the War of Independence. Without giving away anything about Peggy's birth, Mause hints that she may, after all, be able to marry 'Mr Patrick':

Even kings have tane a queen out of the plain:
And what has been before, may be again.
(lines 36-7)

To which Madge retorts:

Sic fashions in King Brace's days might be;
But siccan ferlies now we never see.
(lines 40-1)

The artificial plot, by ensuring that this 'ferly' takes place after all, identifies Sir William's restoration, and therefore, by extension, the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, with 'King Bruce's days'. When Bauldy comes on, singing the magnificent 'Jocky said to Jenny, Jenny wilt thou do't', of which only four lines were printed in the 1728 text, follows a vigorous vernacular flyting between Madge and Bauldy, leading on to the slapstick already mentioned, where Madge bloods his nose and drives him off the stage.

The hero's dilemma when he is expected to give up Peggy, is the subject of IV, ii, formally organised in two dialogues-the first between Roger and Patie, the second between Patie and Peggy—separated by a brief soliloquy in which Patie beautifully sums up her conflicting emotions and, by implication, his own:

With what a struggle must I now impart
My father's will to her that hads my heart!
I ken she loves, and her saft saul will sink,
While it stands trembling on the hated brink
Of disappointment.—Heaven! support my fair,
And let her comfort claim your tender care.
Her eyes are red!
(lines 106-12)

At the purely formal level the scene parallels both the first eclogue (I, i) between the two shepherds, and the first love-meeting of Peggy and Pate (II, iv). And at the level of meaning the two halves of the scene set before us (I) ideological tensions which run through the whole drama—love against duty, rural simplicity against the 'monkey-tricks' of aristocrats in capital cities where Mammon rules, and (2) the concepts we are to see as 'positives'—inborn uncomplicated innocence, the improving power of education and book-learning (lines 91-4) and life-long sincere love whose centre is marriage and the family. The first part of the scene is a debate in which Roger, though in a muted and subordinate manner, as befits one of the 'lower orders', shows exactly the same solid common-sense as Patie did in I, i; the second is an emotional dialogue about parting, full of contrasting satirical thrusts at the affectations of upper-class life (lines 178-85). In the opera text four songs are added, which merely embellish crucial parts of this dialogue, and give the actress who plays Peggy a chance to captivate the audience still further with her singing. They are set to such popular tunes as 'Wae's my heart that we should sunder', 'Tweedside' and 'Bush aboon Traquair'; the second of these, …is a ludicrously naïve expression of female submissiveness. Peggy has no doubts whatever about her rôle: the husband is superior, the upper classes are superior, 'virtue' and common-sense are woman's highest qualities. The best of the three (Sang xix) has one delightful quatrain:

In the fifth act two recognition scenes flank an interchange between Glaud, Jenny, Peggy and Madge that concludes on a note both stoical and fatalistic:

Gif I the daughter of some laird had been,
I ne'er had notic'd Patie on the green:
Now since he rises, why should I repine?
If he's made for another, he'll ne'er be mine:
And then, the like has been, if the decree
Designs him mine, I yet his wife may be.
(V, ii, 71-6)

The first recognition (V, i, continued at the beginning of V, iii) sees folk-superstition firmly vanquished by civilised reason, and Sir William's sophisticated ridicule finds an echo in Glaud's peasant common-sense:

'Tis true enough, we ne'er heard that a witch
Had either meikle sense, or yet was rich.
(V, i, 76-8)

The lyric which ends V, i in the opera is the once popular 'The bonny grey-ey'd morn begins to peep', given to Sir William, expressing the Horatian ideal of 'health and quietness of mind' in country retirement 'plac'd at a due distance from parties and state', untroubled by either ambition or avarice blind, and (in lines 3-4) anticipating some of the language of Gray's Elegy:

The hearty hynd starts from his lazy sleep,
To follow healthfu' labours of the day.

In V, iii, when Peggy is revealed as Sir William's niece, she and Pate embrace and kneel to him in a visual emblem of the play's utterly orthodox values. Reunion is to be followed by social reconstruction: pastoral is now subsumed in the improvements and rational planning of enlightened landlords:

I never from these fields again will stray:
Masons and wrights shall soon my house repair,
And bussy gardners shall new planting rear….
(V, iii, 163-5)

Dynastic restoration of the Stuarts and political Toryism are identical with 'building' and 'planting'; the magical agent of fairy-tale, the Warlock, is identified with the social class and the ethic of sober reason which will dominate the next hundred years, and therefore with the historic process itself. The last word is almost left to Sir William:

My friends, I'm satisfied you'll all behave,
Each in his station, as I'd wish or crave.
Be ever virtuous, soon or late you'll find
Reward, and satisfaction to your mind.
(V, iii, 222-5)

But not quite. The final note, in both play and opera, is lyrical, a song on the supreme value of 'virtuous love' from the lips of an attractive singer, to the tune of 'Corn rigs are bonny':

The song is yet another instance of the formal balance of the whole work; it is the counterpart of Pate's 'My Peggy is a young thing' which begins the operatic version. But thematically it by no means negates Sir William's adjuration. 'Each in his station' and 'chaste granting' are of equal value, and it is towards the effect achieved by putting them so closely together that the entire play has been moving.

How, then, does Ramsay's drama fit in with the early eighteenth-century debate about pastoral which is part of its background? It must be seen as 'practical criticism' of the more nostalgic forms of pastoral idealisation. Symon, Glaud, Bauldy, Madge, Elspa, Roger and Jenny are not courtiers in masquerade, with ladies' and gentlemen's feelings below their shepherds' clothing: and when Pate and Peggy turn out to be from the upper classes, this is acceptable because their 'natural aristocracy' is an extension and embellishment of peasant virtues and peasant common-sense. If The Gentle Shepherd does not idealise, as the fêtes galantes of Watteau idealise, it nevertheless presents a model to be imitated—a simplified silhouette of the type of man Ramsay admired. Although there are passages which unmask bad landlords and urban affectation as well as oafish superstition, its main effect is not socially critical but a bodying forth of the social char acter of early eighteenth-century Scotland. It reveals and builds on some of the main tensions of contemporary society—between, for example, man and woman in a money-economy, between realistic and idealistic views of marriage, between superstition and sceptical common-sense, between the urge for refinement and the brutal inheritance of the past: thus Bauldy is punished by Mause, not because he is a fool, but because he broke good-breeding's laws (V, iii, Prologue). The social character, which produces its ideal man and woman for innumerable citizens to emulate, is manifest above all in Sir William Worthy, restored royalist and ancestral Tory; in Pate, the man of independent, rational common-sense who may be found in any social class; and in his female counterpart, Peggy. These idealised embodiments are transitional between upper-class Augustan paradigms of 'the happy and the good' man or woman, and Burns's man of independent mind, perhaps self-educated, who 'looks and laughs at a' that'. The Burnsian ideal is a democratisation of the image held up by Ramsay for our approval; in the following century he formed a pattern for innumerable lowlanders to imitate—self-made men, godly fathers of families, radical Chartists, pioneer settlers in Canada and Middle America, in Brisbane and Otago and the African veldt. Kipling's Macandrew and Conrad's McWhirr in Typhoon were among his descendants, and countless non-Scots—humble artisans, democrats, evangelical Christians, radicals and socialists of every persuasion, identified themselves with the archetypal figure behind [what Auguste Angellier terms] the 'Marseillaise of Equality' [in Robert Burns: la vie, les oeuvres, 1893].

Not for nothing does the statue of Burns in Canberra bear as its inscription Pope's line 'An honest man's the noblest work of God', quoted in The Cotter's Saturday Night (line 166) and, on the statue, wrongly ascribed to Burns himself. For there is a direct line of evolution between the enlightened hard-headedness of a Pope or a Swift, the ideology of the Scottish Vernacular Revival, and colonial democracy.