SOURCE: "Eighteenth-Century Vernacular Poetry," in Scottish Poetry: A Critical Survey, edited by James Kinsley, Cassell and Company Ltd., 1955, pp. 150-184.

[A prominent critic, historian, and editor, Daiches has written a number of important studies of Scottish literature and culture, including The Paradox of Scottish Culture: The Eighteenth Century Experience (1964) and Robert Burns and His World (1971). In the following essay, Daiches explores the works of Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns in relation to the problem of "[how] to use the vernacular as a language in serious literature."]

The seventeenth century saw Scottish poets moving away from the older Scots literary tradition: from Sir Robert Aytoun to Montrose the trend was towards a courtly English idiom, and Scots was rapidly ceasing to be a literary language and becoming merely a spoken dialect. The most important Scots poem of the seventeenth century is the vulgar, vigorous, rollicking vernacular 'Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan', better known as "The Epitaph of Habbie Simson', by Robert Sempill of Beltress. Scots is now a vernacular, drawing on popular speech rather than on an artistic tradition. And in the early eighteenth century there is a growing interest in popular, vernacular Scots verse, represented by both imitations of it and collections of it. The first volume of James Watson's Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems (1706) shows this new interest, the interest of a printer and anthologist; and that line follows on through Allan Ramsay and David Herd to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (1787 ff.). The editorial line of collectors and improvers leads on the one hand to new appreciation of ballad and folk-song and on the other to curiosity about the older artistic tradition that flourished before first the Reformation and then the Union of the Crowns altered or at least obscured the nature of Scottish culture. This appreciation and this curiosity helped to provide the cultural climate in which Fergusson wrote his Scots poems and Burns drew the lines together to produce the grand culmination of an Indian summer of Scottish poetry.

But the second Temple was not like the first. Going back to Alexander Scott, we find a stanza like this:

The opening of 'Habbie Simson' has the same stanza form:

There is a difference in weight here; though both Scott and Sempill use images and expressions from popular speech, Scott's language is more highly charged, it has more gravity and greater reverberation. 'Habbie Simson' is sprightly popular verse written for amusement by a member of the landed gentry and written in a language which by this time few educated people felt to be suitable for the highest kind of art. The poem is important historically, both for drawing attention to the possibilities of folk-humour as a way of bringing the vernacular back into current poetry and for reviving a stanza form which was to play such an important part in eighteenth-century Scottish poetry; but it lacks a dimension. Between Sempill of Beltrees and Burns Scottish vernacular poetry had to learn how to be the product of the whole man, how to achieve scope and density—in short, how to recover the lost dimension. Where it did so, it was by transmuting antiquarian, patriotic and patronizing gestures towards the vernacular into something deeper, something with an organic connexion with contemporary sensibility; and that transmutation was itself made possible by the re-establishment of living contact with certain important currents in Scottish literature and Scottish folk-poetry.

A literary language, arising out of the different forms of the spoken language and transcending them, reflects back on the spoken language and gives it a steady relationship to the national culture. Once the literary tradition is broken, once there is no literary language growing out of the spoken language (however different from it it may be, and however many artificial elements may have been added), the spoken language is bound to disintegrate into a series of regional dialects. Scots became a vernacular only after the literary language of its serious writers had ceased to be Scots. How to use the vernacular as a language in serious literature (that is, in literature that was more than an antiquarian exercise, a jest, or a tour de force) was the problem faced by Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns, and it was never permanently solved.

'Habbie Simson' is a vernacular squib; 'Holy Willie's Prayer' is a Scots poem, written in a literary language in which English and Scots reinforce each other. Yet the latter is not quite the same kind of thing that Alexander Scott or Montgomerie wrote. Burns only re-established contact with the Scots literary tradition by looking at it through the spectacles provided by folksong and other kinds of popular art, and as a result the tradition as he uses it is a composite one, in which the satiric boisterousness of Lindsay's Satyre of the Thrie Estaits, the happy artifice of Montgomerie, the stark clarity of the ballads, the richness and warmth and earthiness of folk-song, the pious beat of Scottish psalmody, combine to produce a precarious but—while it lasted—a brilliant unity. It was Burns's predecessors who made that synthesis possible; it was his own genius that made it brilliant; it was the cultural context of his time that made it precarious.

At the opening of the eighteenth century Scotland had preserved an oral literary culture which had deep roots in the past, while both broadsides and private manuscripts were playing their different parts in another kind of preservation. How far that culture would have survived into the eighteenth century without the deliberate encouragement of those who had by now become self-conscious about it, is impossible to say; the chances are that it would not have survived long. The growing prestige of English culture, together with the closer political and economic ties between England and Scotland, would have been likely to force the native popular tradition into nooks and corners. But fortunately, by some happy shift of attention after the political hopes of Scottish patriots had been finally ruined by the Union of Parliaments, Scotland turned from politics to investigate her literary claims to nationhood.

In 1706, the year before the union was finally voted, James Watson, an Edinburgh printer of skill and enterprise, brought out the first of his three volumes entitled A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems both Ancient and Modern. Watson apparently edited the collection himself, and in a prefatory note to the first volume he explained his motives:

As the frequency of Publishing Collections of Miscellaneous Poems in our Neighbouring Kingdoms and States, may, in a great measure, justify an undertaking of this kind with us; so 'tis hoped, that this being the first of its Nature which has been publish'd in our native Scots dialect, the Candid Reader may be the more easily induced, through the Consideration thereof, to give some Charitable Grains of Allowance, if the Performance come not up to such a Point of Exactness as may please an over nice Palate….

It is clear that Watson saw himself as a pioneer, producing for the first time a collection of poems 'in our own native Scots dialect' to rival the many English collections. The preface also makes clear that he was dependent on 'Generous Helps' from 'the Repositories of some Curious and Ingenious Gentlemen' who collected 'Comic and Diverting Poems'. Watson also claimed to have printed his poems 'from the most Correct Manuscripts that could be procured of them'. The flavour of antiquarian jest still hangs a little round the project; yet the patriotic intention is real, and his ambition to print accurate texts (however faintly realized) is genuine.

With its mixture of poems of popular revelry, laboured exercises in courtly English, macaronics, mock elegies, serious sixteenth-century Scots poems, trivial epigrams and epitaphs, poems by Drummond and Montrose, flytings, laments and miscellaneous patriotic pieces, Watson's collection appears at first sight to represent the casual putting together of whatever the editor found to his hand. Yet (except for ballads, which it lacks, and song lyrics, which are few, and the perhaps surprising lack of anything by Sir David Lindsay) the collection represents with a fair degree of accuracy the different kinds of material available for the development or reconstruction of the Scottish poetic tradition in the eighteenth century. The tradition of the makars was represented by Montgomerie (we must wait until Ramsay to find the earlier poets made available); the courtly tradition in English by Drummond and Aytoun; the older popular tradition by 'Christis Kirk on the Grene' and the newer by 'Habbie Simson' and other pieces; various kinds of popular and semi-popular Scottish song were represented, some in Scots and some in English; the characteristic Scottish humour and Scottish violence are represented in several ways, as is the goliardic tradition as it developed in Scotland and the tradition of macaronic humour associated with it. Watson printed the best texts he could find, though these were often poor broadsides. Perpetuation in broadsides at least denotes vitality. Throughout the seventeenth century the line between folk-song and 'art' poem was often obscured in Scotland; poems even by courtly poets found their way to popular singers and printers of broadsides, as well as to private collectors; and changes, corruptions, emendations and additions were the natural result. What Watson printed represented things that were still going on in Scotland, though often not on the surface. In bringing them to the surface he prevented them from being obscured completely by the new face of Scottish culture and at the same time helped to divert patriotic attention from politics to literature. Scotland became concerned about its literary past and about the possibilities of continuity with that past. It is true that that concern was mixed up in many quarters with confused ideas about the vernacular and primitive poetry and the natural man, and this confusion made serious difficulties for Burns. But it also provided an environment which encouraged the writing of an enriched vernacular poetry under certain circumstances and at certain levels: and that was decisive for the course of eighteenth-century Scottish poetry.

Meanwhile, the practice of rewriting or imitating traditional Scottish songs grew among ladies and gentlemen. To John Hay, tenth Lord Yester, for example, is attributed a version of 'Tweedside.' Lady Grizel Baillie (1665-1746) wrote the simply lilting 'Werena my heart licht, I wad dee', which first appeared in Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany. Lady Wardlaw (1677-1722) presented her 'Hardyknute' as part of an old ballad; it is difficult to see now how this too smoothly running piece, with its carefully chosen echoes of common ballad phrases, could have been accepted (as it was) as a genuine old ballad. But the poem has speed and vigour, and helped to familiarize genteel Scottish ears with a polished version of the ballad cadence.

A more important character, as far as the Scottish literary tradition in the eighteenth century is concerned, is William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (to be distinguished from his younger contemporary, William Hamilton of Bangour) whose modernized version of Blind Harry's Wallace was to fire Burns's patriotism. His 'Last Dying Words of Bonnie Heck' continued the 'Habbie Simson' tradition, but with a difference. 'Habbie Simson' was an elegy on a piper, himself a representative of popular festivity, and in recalling his life Sempill recalls the folk-customs of rural Scotland:

Hamilton's poem is more definitely a mock elegy, and, further, it is a lament for an animal, which links it with 'The Mare of Colintoun' and that Scottish tradition of animal poetry that was to come alive so splendidly in Burns. True, in his dying reminiscences Bonny Heck, too, gives a picture of popular festivities, but it is the mixture of the comic and pathetic deriving from the notion of a dying animal speaking like a human that links the poem with Burns's 'Death and Dying Words of Poor Maillie'.

Hamilton is at least as important in the history of Scottish vernacular poetry for the epistles which he exchanged with Ramsay. This is the beginning of a tradition of familiar verse letters in the vernacular which was again to be magnificently exploited by Burns. It provided a medium for 'occasional' poetry, a kind of verse to which the vernacular was particularly suited, for its endeavour was to capture the accent of conversation. With literary prose always English and not Scots, and the vernacular allowed in verse only for the familiar, the popular, the comic or the mock-antique, the verse letter provided a fine new form for vernacular Scots. If the novel had been developed in Scotland by the early eighteenth century, dialogue in prose fiction might have effectively employed the spoken Scots speech of the time—this is how Galt and Scott were later to use dialogue. But lacking a tradition of colloquial prose, the eighteenth-century Scottish writer turned happily to the tradition of familiar Scots verse which Hamilton of Gilbertfield helped to establish.

With Allan Ramsay the scene becomes more complex. To the editorial function of Watson he added that of reviser, popularizer, experimenter, poet, entrepreneur, clubman, satirist, general busybody and spokesman for Scotland before the Queen Anne wits. In 1712 he joined with other young men in Edinburgh in founding the Easy Club, 'in order that by a Mutual improvement in Conversation they may become more adapted for fellowship with the politer part of mankind and Learn also from one another's happy observations'. (Burns was to found the Tarbolton Bachelors' Club with similar ends in view.) The members of this club all had pseudonyms, and Ramsay's was first Isaac Bickerstaff and later Gavin Douglas, a pair of names which reflect Ramsay's dual interest in the Queen Anne wits and in older Scottish literature. The Easy Club is important in Ramsay's career because it shows him in training to become a gentleman in the early eighteenth-century sense and also because it provided him with an audience for 'occasional' poetry for which he soon began to display his talent. Ramsay was far from being a great poet, but he was a facile versifier with certain happy flashes, and when circumstances were propitious he could turn out admirable specimens of familiar verse. The Easy Club provided the environment which encouraged this gift; it also provided a background of patriotic sentiment against which Ramsay's nationalism flourished vigorously. Isaac Bickerstaff and Gavin Douglas; a gentleman of the Augustan Age and an ardent Scottish patriot; an admirer of Pope and Gay and Matthew Prior and a devoted champion of the older Scottish makars and of the use of vernacular Scots by contemporary Scottish poets; a seeker after polish and good breeding and a vulgar little gossip whose schoolboy snigger spoils many of his poems and songs; a sentimental Jacobite and a prudent citizen who cannily absented himself from Edinburgh when Prince Charlie held court in Holyrood in 1745; a champion of Scottish folk-song and a wrecker of scores of such songs by turning them into stilted would-be neo-classic effusions—the dualism in Ramsay's life and character was deep-seated and corresponded to a dualism in the Scottish culture of his day. He could defend the coarsest and frankest language in poetry and yet dress up a Scottish song in intolerable false elegancies. At the same time he could demonstrate that he possessed the Horatian elegance of the English gentleman by rendering Horace's 'Vides ut alta stet nive candidum' in vivid and homely Scots verse:

Ramsay's first published works were single poems in English heroic couplets in the contemporary English style; these are no better if no worse than the work of many a minor English versifier of the day. 'The Morning Interview', described as 'An Heroi-Comical Poem', derives from The Rape of the Lock, but has none of Pope's metrical cunning, fineness of texture, or subtle shifts in tone. Waggish jocularity strives with self-conscious elegance to take control, and the result is not happy, though the poem has its moments. In 1718 Ramsay first showed his interest in older Scottish literature by bringing out, anonymously on broadsides, several editions of 'Christis Kirk on the Grene' (with the same stanza form as Watson had printed—different from the text he was to use in The Ever Green in 1724) with first one and then two new cantos of his own. Ramsay's new cantos have verve and ingenuity, and capture something of the spirit of the original while adding his own brand of vulgarity. In the Elegies on Maggy Johnston, John Cowper and Lucky Wood (which all appeared in 1718) Ramsay displayed his best vernacular vein. These poems are in the tradition that Ramsay himself, in a verse epistle to Hamilton of Gilbertfield, called 'Standart Habby', the comic elegy tradition of the 'Epitaph on Habbie Simson' and 'Bonny Heck'. The elegy on Maggy Johnston, famous for her cheap and good ale, moves from lament to reminiscences of conviviality. The poem on Cowper, Kirk Treasurer's Man and expert at 'sa'ring [smelling] sculdudry out', is interesting as one of the earliest pieces of Scots verse to laugh at what Burns was to call the 'holy beagles'. The 'Elegy on Lucky Wood' laments the loss of an honest and hospitable ale-house keeper in the Canongate, and again it turns from elegy to reminiscent conviviality. There is a fine sense of atmosphere in the poem, with the scenes etched in warm and lively colours like a Breughel painting of a village celebration.

About the same time also appeared 'Lucky Spence's Last Advice' (first called 'Elegy on the Death of an Auld Bawd'), where Ramsay uses the 'death and dying words' device to put grimly ironical advice to prostitutes into the mouth of a dying brothel keeper. This kind of humour does not wear well, particularly when accompanied by Ramsay's variety of vulgar coyness (for example, he draws attention to an obscene phrase by a footnote in which he declines to explain it). But the poem uses the vernacular vigorously, with a fine proverbial forcefulness.

Of the other poems which Ramsay published separately, Tartana: Or, The Plaid deserves mention for its strong patriotic feeling and warm defence of Scottish customs against foreign innovations, even though the poem is in stilted English couplets. And two pastorals are of some importance: 'Richy and Sandy', a pastoral elegy on the death of Addison, and 'Patie and Roger', the germ of The Gentle Shepherd. 'Richy and Sandy' (i.e. Richard Steele and Alexander Pope) is a dialogue between two shepherds who lament the death of a third of their number, Edie (Addison). It is a ludicrous enough mixture—Steele, Pope and Addison transformed into Scots shepherds talking in a Theocritean convention, yet Ramsay's combination of conversational idiom with classical allusion comes off better than one might expect, and the piece has something of the same 'faded charm' that critics have found in The Gentle Shepherd. 'Patie and Roger' is likewise a dialogue between two shepherds, but this time the theme is love. The vernacular flows easily and the accent of conversation is audible beneath the flow of the verse. The images are fresh and effective, and altogether the piece succeeds in putting a little life into the worn-out convention of pastoral dialogue, in spite of its faded properties. Ramsay's basic uncertainty of taste, which could lead him into the most hideous vulgarities, was less of a liability in this kind of writing: the touches of rustic realism make for freshness, not vulgarity, and the idiom and cadence of popular speech embedded in the slow-moving iambic line waters the aridity of a stock situation, as in Patie's advice to Roger on how to get his girl:

Daft Gowk [fool]! Leave aff that silly whindging [whining] Way,
Seem careless, there's my Hand ye'll win the Day.
Last Morning I was unco [uncommonly] airly out,
Upon a Dyke I lean'd and glowr'd about;
I saw my Meg come linkan [tripping] o'er the Lee,
I saw my Meg, but Maggie saw na me:
For yet the Sun was wafing [wandering] throw the Mist,
And she was closs upon me e'er she wist.
Her Coats were kiltit, and did sweetly shaw
Her straight bare Legs, which whiter were than Snaw:
Her Cockernony [gathered hair] snooded up fou [full] sleek,
Her haffet Locks hung waving on her Cheek [side]:
Her Cheek sae ruddy! and her Een sae clear!
And O! her Mouth's like ony hinny Pear.

Neat, neat she was in Bustine [fustian] Wastecoat clean,
As she came skiffing o'er the dewy Green:
Blythsome I cry'd, My bonny Meg come here,
I fairly wherefore ye'er sae soon a steer:
But now I guess ye'er gawn to gather Dew.
She scour'd 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 [leapt] in o'er the Dyke.
I trow, when that she saw, within a crack
With a right thieveles Errand [improper] she came back;
Miscau'd [abused] me first,—then bade me hound my Dog
To weer [stop] up three waff [wandering] Ews were on the Bog.
I leugh, and sae did she, then wi' great Haste
I clasp'd my Arms about her Neck and Waste …

Finally, we must mention the verse letters between Ramsay and Hamilton of Gilbertfield. The series begins with a letter to Ramsay from Hamilton:

O Fam'd and celebrated ALLAN!
Renowned RAMSAY, canty Callan [merry fellow],
There's nowther Highlandman nor Lawlan, In Poetrie,
But may as soon ding [cast] down Tamtallan As match wi' thee….

And Ramsay replies in similar strain:

The poems run on with an apparent effortlessness, given form by the demands of epistolary courtesy for an opening of compliment and a concluding benediction or invitation to the recipient to visit and make merry with the writer. From compliment to news to invitation is the commonest course of these letters, and they set a pattern which Fergusson and Burns were to follow. This is not, of course, great poetry; but it represents a craftsmanlike handling of the 'familiar' style, an exercising of the vernacular which was to stand Burns in good stead, and it further helped to provide both a social and a metrical convention for Scots verse.

Ramsay's preface to the 1721 volume of his poems gives us some important clues to his own view of the nature and significance of his poetry. He cheerfully admits that he is no classical scholar ('I understand Horace but faintly in the Original') and claims that many eminent men of letters have assured him 'That my small Knowledge of the dead or foreign Languages is nothing to my Disadvantage. King David, Homer and Virgil, say they, were more ignorant of the Scots and English Tongue, than you are of Hebrew, Greek and Latin: Pursue your own natural Manner, and be an original.' The use of vernacular Scots is thus associated with ignorance of Latin and Greek: Scots is no longer a literary language employed by poets with a European perspective and a rich background of classical culture which they draw on for vocabulary, imagery and subject-matter. We have come a long way from the aureate Middle Scots poems of Dunbar. Ramsay's classical knowledge comes through the strainer of neoclassic elegance; Greek and Roman gods and goddesses are for him useful ornamental devices which he has learned about from the English poets. Burns, too, was to pose as a heaven-taught ploughman and claim superiority to the college-educated who 'gae in stirks and come oot asses', but Burns was in fact fundamentally better educated than Ramsay, though he was faced by some of the same problems.

Ramsay warmly defends the expressive capacities of Scots, yet he is on the defensive about his 'Scotticisms'. 'The Scotticisms, which perhaps may offend some overnice Ear, give new Life and Grace to the Poetry, and become their Place as well as the Doric dialect of Theocritus, so much admired by the best Judges.' He is writing, after all, for a genteel audience, both English and Scottish, who might be expected to lift their eyebrows at his use of the Doric. He dedicates his book 'To the most Beautiful, the Scots Ladies' and quotes Prior to the effect that he writes only for the young and fair. Clearly Ramsay's role as he saw it was, if not confused, at least multiple.

In writing songs, Ramsay's favourite procedure is to take a popular Scottish song and to the same air set a new version which retains the opening line or the chorus or some other part of the original, but in all other respects is a wholly different poem deriving in tone and idiom from English love-lyrics of the period. Thus 'The last time I came ower the moor' becomes 'The happy Lover's Reflections':

The phrases here are a mass of clichés, a parody, almost, of neo-classic idiom. 'The Lass of Peattie's Mill', on the other hand, begins with a lilting stanza in the true folk-idiom, then falls away into frigid artificialities, to return to the folk-idiom again in the third and last stanza. Ramsay has been blamed for ousting the old songs by his pseudo-genteel substitutes, and indeed many of his more outrageous rewritings appear not only in his own Tea-Table Miscellany but also in David Herd's Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (where they appear anonymously), in the Scots Musical Museum and in Select Scotish Airs. It is of course possible, if not probable, that if Ramsay had not printed his versions the old versions would have died out anyway and the tunes would also have been lost: most of the original words of Ramsay's songs were irrecoverable later in the century even by such a conscientious collector as David Herd, and perhaps in many cases only the melody and the refrain were known to Ramsay. 'Of many of the songs in these volumes', wrote Herd in his preface to the second edition of his collection (1776), 'the chief merit will be found to consist in the musical air, while the poetry may appear much below mediocrity. For this the Editor has no other apology to offer, than that these were the only words existing to the tunes in question, the original words which gave rise to these tunes being irrecoverably lost.' It is important to remember that 'the musical air' was the more significant element in most of these songs; indeed, it is impossible to get any proper idea of this phase of Scottish literature without taking the music into consideration and treating the songs as songs and not as poems which happen to have been set to music.

How far Ramsay can go in the direction of pseudo-elegance in language can be seen in his song 'Delia', which is set to the tune of 'Greensleeves':

Ye watchful Guardians of the Fair,
Who skiff on Wings of ambient Air,
Of my dear Delia take a Care,
And represent her Lover …

Many of his songs contain an impossible mixture of folk-idiom and self-conscious classical allusion. He can write a song with the simple Scots title 'Bonny Jean' (the title of the old air) and open it thus:

Love's Goddess in a Myrtle Grove
Said, Cupid, bend thy Bow with Speed,
Nor let the Shaft at Random rove,
For Jeanie's haughty Heart must bleed….

And his version of 'Auld Lang Syne' (entitled 'The Kind Reception') begins:

We never know what Ramsay is going to do. 'Peggy I must Love Thee' becomes the conventional English 'Love's Cure'; 'Bessy Bell and Mary Gray' lilts happily along in true folk-style until suddenly we find

When Phoebus starts frae Thetis' Lap
The Hills with Rays adorning …

(One is reminded of Burns's outrageously obscene parody of this style of poetry.) 'The Young Laird and Edinburgh Katy' is lively Scots throughout and sticks to a single idiom:

Now [know] wat ye what I met Yestreen
Coming down the Street, my Jo,
My Mistress in her Tartan Screen,
Fou' bonny, braw and sweet, my Jo….

'Mary Scot' combines a refrain about Yarrow with such a line as 'When in soft Flames Souls equal burn'; but 'O'er Bogie' keeps to a lilting folk-style throughout, beginning with the traditional refrain, 'I will awa' wi' my Love'. 'O'er the Moor to Maggy' is the mixture again, but 'Polwart on the Green' is effective, simple Scots throughout. 'Up in the Air' is one of Ramsay's few real masterpieces, a lively drinking-song in roaring Scots. The refrain is old, and perhaps some other lines are too, but Ramsay has got into the spirit of the original magnificently:

The fireside interior, with its warmth and conviviality, is contrasted with the winter weather outside, a contrast characteristic of much Scottish poetry, from the opening of Henryson's Testament of Cresseid to the beginning of 'Tam o' Shanter'.

'Patie and Pegie', which was later incorporated into The Gentle Shepherd, has been much praised, but it is not in fact a happy performance; the deliberately cultivated sentimentality clashes with the Scots frankness. A leering or even pawing eroticism, mixed with affected sensibility, has a tendency to crop up in Ramsay, and it is not attractive.

Ramsay's songs are most successful when he sticks to the folk-idiom and enters with verve and spirit into the atmosphere of the original refrain. 'An thou wert my ain Thing', in spite of an occasional false touch, has an effective strain of lyrical simplicity; 'For the Sake of Somebody' is a fine lilting piece in true folk-style; 'The Widow can bake, and the Widow can brew' has speed and liveliness and no trace of a false sensibility; 'O Mither dear, I 'gin to fear' is a skilful and unspoiled reworking of a folk-song, and the same is true of 'The Carle he came o'er the Croft', 'This is No my ain Hoose', 'Clout the Caldron' and some others.

It is not, of course, true that all folk-songs are good or that simplicity is necessarily a good quality in a song and that any kind of stylization is bad. But it is true that Ramsay's attempt to add a dimension to Scots vernacular poetry by sprinkling bits of English neo-classic convention or other evidence of a deliberately induced genteel sensibility over a verse that is basically a realistic Scots was misguided. Realistic Scots does not necessarily produce good poetry, any more than elegantly stylized English necessarily produces bad; but whatever the language a poet uses, it must be used organically, it must be the fully realized medium of the whole man at work, and this cannot be said of Ramsay's strange mixtures of Scots and English. Sometimes (like Burns) he is successful in an English tipped with Scots; more often, in his songs at least, he succeeds when he uses the vernacular in a fairly short, lilting line, as in the one wholly successful song (with the possible exception of 'My Patie is a lover gay') in The Gentle Shepherd:

Ramsay experimented in older Scottish metres other than 'Standart Habby'. One of his epistles to Hamilton uses the same ten-line stanza as 'The Claith Merchant', a poem which he printed in The Ever Green. In 'Edinburgh's Salutation to the Most Honourable, My Lord Marquess of Carnarvon' he uses the stanza of 'Christis Kirk on the Grene' in Watson's form. In 'The Poet's Wish' he uses The Cherrie and the Slae stanza for exactly the same purpose as Burns was to use it for in his 'Epistle to Davie'—which is in fact based in many respects on Ramsay's poem, even to the point of quoting a line from it, 'Mair speir na, nor fear na'. Ramsay's description of the contented but simple life shows one of his most appropriate uses of the vernacular. Indeed, in subject-matter, language and stanza form 'The Poet's Wish' is historically one of the most important of Ramsay's poems: it showed how an older Scottish tradition could be put to contemporary poetic use, and its influence on Burns was of the greatest significance. Ramsay could make good use of octosyllabic couplets when he stuck to a Scots conversational idiom, as his epistles to James Arbuckle and to the Earl of Dalhousie testify. His renderings of Horace in octosyllabic couplets have less force and weight than the original demands: 'Horace to Virgil, on his taking a Voyage to Athens', for example, though it has speed and verve, is altogether too happy-go-lucky. But 'To the Ph——an Ode' ('Look up to Pentland's towring Taps') is an admirable domesticating of the Horatian mood in an Edinburgh setting, and easily the best of his renderings from the Latin.

The Gentle Shepherd was an expansion of 'Patie and Roger' into a five-act pastoral comedy. It is the best known of all Ramsay's works, and, in spite of its artificially contrived plot and rather stiff movement, it manages to retain a certain freshness. The first edition contained only four songs—'Peggy, now the King's come', 'By the delicious warmness of thy mouth', 'Jocky said to Jenny', and 'My Patie is a lover gay'—but many more were added in 1728, when the play was changed into a ballad opera for the pupils of Haddington Grammar School. This is the version that has been printed ever since, which is a pity, because these editions print both the original dialogue and those parts of it which Ramsay turned into lyrics to be sung, with the result that there is much irritating duplication in the text. We gain 'My Peggy is a Young Thing' from these alterations, but otherwise the only advantage of the change was that it enabled The Gentle Shepherd to be sung, and this helped to keep it alive and popular.

The language is a somewhat anglicized Scots, showing on the whole a greater sureness of touch than Ramsay generally displayed in such mixed modes. Details of rural labour and rural festivity are handled with observant precision, and though there are some melodramatic moments connected with the return of the Royalist laird Sir William Worthy, there is an atmosphere of country work and play pervading the whole which the pastoral had long lost in England and elsewhere in Europe. The first part of the play, when rustic love is displayed against a lively background of rustic labour, is better than the latter part, where the action is manipulated unconvincingly in the interests of the proper dénouement and a happy ending; Jenny and Peggy are up early to lay their linen out for bleaching, and that gives them an opportunity of talking together, and when Patie detains Peggy, after the day's work, for some amorous words, Peggy knows that she should be at home helping to prepare supper:

O Patie! let me gang; I mauna [must not] stay;
We're baith cry'd hame.

Altogether, this pastoral drama represents a precarious equilibrium for Ramsay; he has found a way of combining vernacular realism and a rather tired convention without incongruity or vulgarity. The tiredness is not altogether banished, and the plot limps. But a Scottish breeze blows through this countryside, freshening the air and blowing away at least some of the languors of a stale tradition.

Ramsay produced thirty-one verse fables and tales, of which twenty are adaptations from La Motte and three are from La Fontaine. These are lively performances in Scots, done in fast-moving octosyllabic couplets, lacking the grace and polish of the French, but with a vigorous vernacular humour of their own. He consistently expands his original, filling it out with realistic and occasionally vulgar detail; he is nearer the fabliau than either La Motte or La Fontaine, and the Scots tradition of low-life comedy comes alive again in his hands. Again, this is not the greatest kind of poetry, but it is a kind to which the Scots vernacular at this stage of its life was appropriate, and it provided exercise for the vernacular in a setting where it could be used without constraint or affectation.

More important in some respects than Ramsay's original work was his work as an editor. In The Tea-Table Miscellany he collected songs and ballads, and in The Ever Green he printed the work of the 'Scottish Chaucerians' and others from the Bannatyne MS. In his preface to one of the many later editions of The Tea-table Miscellany Ramsay wrote:

My being well assured how acceptable new words to known tunes would prove, engaged me to the making verses for above sixty of them, in this and the second volume: about thirty more were done by some ingenious young gentlemen, who were so well pleased with my undertaking, that they generously lent me their assistance; and to them the lovers of sense and music are obliged for some of the best songs in the collection. The rest are such old verses as have been done time out of mind, and only wanted to be cleared from the dross of blundering transcribers and printers; such as, The Gaberlunzieman, Muirland Willy, &c, that claim their place in our collection for their merry images of the low character.

Ramsay had thus none of the modern scholar's respect for the original text, and it may be hard to tell exactly what has happened to a song that appears in his collection. Ramsay's sources are often obscure, and a full inquiry into the history of many of the songs he prints, and indeed into the whole question of song collections in eighteenth-century Scotland, has still to be made. But, whatever their history, here the songs are, some 'improved', some rewritten, some printed as Ramsay found them. Ramsay provided some index to what had happened to the songs by marking some of them with letters. 'The SONGS marked C, D, H, L, M, O, &c, are new words by different hands; X, the authors unknown; Z, old songs; Q, old songs with additions.' But the system is not used consistently, and many songs have no letter at all.

The Ever Green is an easier collection to deal with; it takes most of its material from the Bannatyne MS. As Ramsay put it in a set of doggerel verses he wrote in the manuscript on 6 July 1726:

Ramsay's patriotic intention is made clear by his remarks in the preface:

When these good old Bards wrote, we had not yet made Use of imported Trimming upon our Cloaths, nor of foreign Embroidery in our Writings. Their Poetry is the Product of their own Country, not pilfered and spoiled in the Transportation from abroad: Their Images are native, and their Landskips domestick; copied from those Fields and Meadows we every Day behold.

The Morning rises (in the Poets Description) as she does in the Scottish Horizon. We are not carried to Greece or Italy for a Shade, a Stream or a Breeze. The Groves rise in our own Valleys; the Rivers flow from our own Fountains, and the Winds blow upon our own Hills. I find not Fault with those Things, as they are in Greece or Italy: But with a Northern Poet for fetching his Materials from these Places, in a Poem, of which his own Country is the Scene; as our Hymners to the Spring and Makers of Pastorals frequently do.

The collection introduced eighteenth-century Scottish readers to the literature of their country's golden age. Dunbar and Henryson are both represented, the former by 'The Thistle and the Rose', 'Lament: Quhen he was Sek', 'The Goldyn Targe', 'Dunbar's Dregy', the 'Flyting', 'The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis' and seventeen others. This selection gives a fair picture of Dunbar's range both in style and theme, including examples of the ceremonial, the aureate, the elegiac, the satiric, the moralizing, the humorous and the confessional. The poems from Henryson include 'Robene and Makyne', 'The Garmont of Gud Ladeis' and two of the fables. Among other pieces from the Bannatyne MS. are 'Christis Kirk on the Grene'; 'The Battle of Harlaw', one of the best known of the Scottish historical ballads; 'The Wife of Auchtermuchty', a lively verse-tale of husband and wife reversing roles to the former's discomfiture, attributed to Sir John Moffatt; several poems by Alexander Scott; a group of coarse satires on loose women by the sixteenth-century Robert Sempill, and other poems by minor sixteenth-century writers. Ramsay changes spelling, punctuation, word order and even stanza form where it suits him; and where he cannot understand a word or a phrase he is liable to rephrase the passage.

Ramsay occasionally inserts stanzas of his own into older poems. He adds two stanzas to Dunbar's 'Tydingis fra the Sessioun', containing his own friendly opinion of the Edinburgh judges and advocates, and gives no indication that these stanzas are not by Dunbar; he slips a stanza full of elaborate classical allusions into the midst of Alexander Scott's simple, singing love lyric, 'Return thee, hairt, hamewart agane' (whose first line, incidentally, Ramsay characteristically 'regularizes' to 'Return Hamewart my Hart again'); and, most notorious, he adds his own preposterous conclusion to Dunbar's 'Lament':

To which monstrous conclusion Ramsay calmly appends the words, 'Quod Dunbar'.

The two poems attributed to 'Ar. Scot' are both anti-English patriotic poems (though 'The Eagle and Robin Red-breist' is veiled in allegory) and apparently Ramsay thought that they would have more force if put in antique dress—perhaps, too, he thought it safer so to disguise them. 'The Vision' is subtitled: 'Compylit in Latin be a most lernit Clerk in Tyme of our Hairship and Oppression, anno 1300, and translatit in 1524.' It bewails the oppressed condition of Scotland and ends by prophesying successful battle for the re-establishment of an independent Kingdom of Scotland. The stanza is that of The Cherrie and the Slae. 'The Eagle and Robin Red-breist' tells how the robin, singing loyal songs to the royal eagle, is maligned by the other birds, jealous of his merit and of the king's regard for him, and driven from court. Here also the language is deliberately antique, though the verse form is the octosyllabic couplet. For Ramsay, Scots as a serious literary medium belonged to the past.

The Ever Green had nothing like the popularity of The Tea-Table Miscellany. There were no reprints in Ramsay's lifetime, and only four later reprints between 1761 and 1876. It was the popular vernacular tradition and the tradition of the late sixteenth-century poets, rather than the mediaeval makars, that influenced Fergusson and Burns. And though both the popular tradition and the tradition of Montgomerie and his contemporaries derived from and in their own way continued the mediaeval Scottish tradition, the fifteenth-century makars did not directly influence subsequent eighteenth-century Scottish poetry. The relatively homogeneous national culture of the Scotland of the early Stuarts was too far away; the Reformation, the Union of the Crowns and the Union of Parliaments had between them created too wide a gulf between past and present, and complicated the Scottish cultural situation to the point where no full, unselfconscious contact could any longer be made with Henryson and Dunbar. Both Watson and Ramsay had shown other ways and made other material available; ballad and folk-song remained alive, certain late mediaeval themes and stanza forms had been popularized, the goliardie tradition survived in the universities, and Scottish national sentiment was increasingly turning from politics to literature.

The 'ingenious young gentlemen' whose help Ramsay acknowledges in the preface to The Tea-Table Miscellany included several amateur versifiers who are remembered for a song, or a handful of songs, which took the popular fancy. This was the age of amateur poetizing among Scottish ladies and gentlemen. Their productions were as likely to be in neo-classic English as in Scots, as the artificial versions of Robert Crawford witness. Crawford's 'Tweedside', 'Bush abune Traquair', 'Broom of Cowdenknows', 'My Deary, if thou die' (to the air of 'Down the Burn, Davie') and 'One day I heard Mary say' (to the air 'I'll never leave thee') are uninspired English texts written for older Scottish song tunes, yet they remained popular throughout the century. But not all the minor song-writers of the period wrote in neo-classic English. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik is the reputed author of a lively elaboration of an old folk-song, 'O merry may the maid be' (to the tune to which 'Mary Morison' is now sung). Alexander Pennecuik wrote in a variety of styles, covering much of Ramsay's ground: his 'Elegy on Robert Forbes' is reminiscent of Ramsay's 'Elegy on John Cowper', while 'The Merry Wives of Musselburgh's Welcome to Meg Dickson' (if it really be his) is a colourful and spirited piece as good as Ramsay's best in this vein. William Hamilton of Bangour wrote mostly in English, but he contributed a remarkable, melodious elaboration of a folk-theme to The Tea-Table Miscellany in 'The Braes of Yarrow'. Alexander Ross whose Helenore, or the Fortunate Shepherdess derives from The Gentle Shepherd and presents a rather faded Buchan version of Scottish pastoral, wrote the lively songs, 'Wooed and Married and A' ' and 'The Rock and the Wee Pickle Tow'. John Skinner's rollicking 'Tullochgorum' was considered by Burns to be 'the best Scotch song ever Scotland saw', and his 'Ewie wi' the Crookit Horn', an elegy on a favourite ewe, combines humour and tenderness with considerable skill. Alexander Geddes wrote 'Lewis Gordon', a simple and effective Jacobite song (and it should be remembered that the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 provided Scotland with a folk-emotion, as well as a set of symbols with which to evoke a variety of feelings from the simply patriotic to the elegiac, the passionate and the mocking, and so gave new impetus to the interest in real and imitated folk-song and retarded the sophistication of the folk-tradition by about fifty years). Geddes was perhaps also the author of 'The Wee Bit Wifukie', a masterpiece in the rollicking vein. Jean Elliot produced her version of 'The Flowers o' the Forest', an effective rendering of the popular note of lament for Flodden, more successful than Mrs. Cockburn's more deliberately artful, and more English, poem with the same title and refrain. And Lady Anne Barnard's 'Auld Robin Gray' passed for some times as an old song.

There were other songs of the period whose authorship is uncertain or unknown, among them 'There's Nae Luck about the House' (probably by William Julius Mickle), 'O weel may the Boatie Row' (probably by John Ewen, 1741-1821), the full version of 'Aye Waukin' O', 'Logie o' Buchan' (perhaps by George Halket, d. 1756), 'The Drunken Wife of Gallowa' (also known as 'Hoolie and Fairly') and many of those found in Herd's collection.

Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany was by no means the only collection of songs published in Scotland at this time. The interest in 'primitive' poetry which prompted the publication of Percy's Reliques in England in 1765 and which later helped to determine the terms of the Ossian controversy, began earlier in Scotland and was there mixed up with patriotic motives. Collections of songs and ballads, with and without music, were numerous in Scotland from The Tea-Table Miscellany to Thomson's Select Scotish Airs (1795 ff.). In 1726 the Orpheus Caledonius was published in London, containing about fifty Scottish songs with the music, and it was followed in 1733 by an enlarged edition in two volumes. Similar collections followed in Scotland, culminating in James Johnston's Scots Musical Museum, of which the first volume appeared in 1787 and to whose subsequent volumes Burns contributed so much. Of the books of Scots songs without music, the most important was David Herd's Ancient and Modern Scots Songs. There were also many collections of the tunes alone, arranged for a variety of instruments. The pioneer volume here was the Collection of Scots Tunes made by the violinist Adam Craig in 1730, and the most impressive collection was James Oswald's Caledonian Pocket Companion, of which the first of many volumes appeared in 1740. Antiquarians, folk-lorists and romantic lovers of the past joined the procession as the century advanced; and between Herd's first edition in 1769 and John Finlay's Scottish Historical and Romantic Ballads in 1808, a whole tribe of collectors (including John Pinkerton, Joseph Ritson, Walter Scott and Robert Jamieson) were at work. This was, of course, far from being a purely Scottish movement, but in Scotland it took on special significance and sprang from special motives.

Herd's two volumes of 1776 constitute a remarkable collection. He reprinted a fair number of pieces that had appeared in Watson and in The Tea-Table Miscellany, together with much that had not appeared before, and he printed almost everything anonymously without any indication of age. But he never tampered with his material; he printed the pieces as he found them, and he was content to let many of the older songs appear in fragmentary form. Unlike Percy and most other editors of his time, he had no urge to complete and improve. Herd is thus an important figure in the transmission of the Scottish popular tradition in poetry. Scholarly, accurate and modest, he never put his own name to his work (neither of his editions mentions an editor), and in his preface to the two volumes of 1776 he 'anticipated the censure of the severe, by confessing them a work of slight importance'.

The kind of interest in Scottish literature represented by Ramsay's original and editorial work, and by that of the collectors and imitators of older Scottish songs who followed him, must be seen in its true perspective. The general cultural current was still flowing strongly towards England, and the Edinburgh historians, philosophers, scientists and literary critics who contributed so much to Scotland's second 'golden age' wrote in English and studiously avoided 'Scotticisms' in their speech. In 1761 the Irishman Thomas Sheridan (father of the dramatist) delivered twelve lectures on the 'correct' speaking of English at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Edinburgh, and about three hundred of the city's most distinguished citizens attended. In the issue of The Mirror for 22 February 1780, Henry Mackenzie explained to his readers why Scotsmen, writing an English they did not speak and speaking a dialect they did not write, were incapable of writing humorously in English or seriously in their native dialect:

When a Scotsman … writes, he does so generally in trammels. His own native original language, which he hears spoken around him, he does not make use of; but he expresses himself in a language in some respects foreign to him, and which he has acquired by study and observation…. Hence Scottish writers may have been prevented from attempting to write books of humour…. In confirmation of these remarks it may be observed, that almost the only works of humour which we have in this country, are in the Scottish dialect…. The Gentle Shepherd, which is full of natural and ludicrous representations of low life, is written in broad Scotch….

Scots thus remained a vernacular, and there was no tradition of written Scots prose in the eighteenth century. Anyone who had claims to international fame in dealing with general matters of scientific or philosophic interest wrote in English for the same reason that he would have written in Latin in an earlier age. And in poetry the vernacular established itself as a vehicle only for exercises in the mock-antique or for humorous or convivial or skittish or condescending verses. Ramsay had not enlarged the potentialities of the Scottish vernacular; still less had he re-created Scots as a full-blooded literary language. Nobody, in fact, achieved that in the eighteenth century or later: it is one of the ideals of the modern Lallans movement. But one eighteenth-century Scottish poet did achieve a Scots idiom which combined ease, weight, variety and cunning, and which pointed the way towards the re-establishment of Scots as a literary language (though it was a way that nobody was to take). This was Robert Fergusson, not the greatest of the eighteenth-century Scottish poets but perhaps the most assured in his use of Scots.

Fergusson was fortunate in not having the multiple motivations that confused the careers of both Ramsay and Burns. Unlike Ramsay, he was not a half-educated country boy trying in the city to be both genteel and patriotic, and unlike Burns he was not tempted to parade a selfconscious primitivism before the eyes of the Edinburgh literati. He was an Edinburgh man and an Edinburgh poet, who rendered the life of the city with warmth and colour. But his student days had made him well acquainted with Fife, and he had also paid visits to his mother's people in Aberdeenshire. Further, the Edinburgh of the 1760s and 1770s was not, in spite of its bustling city life, an urban area in the modern sense: the countryside extended right up to its doorstep, and there were fishing-towns and a seaport right beside it. To be an Edinburgh man did not mean, therefore, that one was ignorant of the cycles of agricultural activity or of the life of the fisherfolk (both of which Fergusson had also known in Fife), or that one was deprived of the pleasures of scrambling over hills and moors. If we think of Fergusson as a figure belonging to the closes and howffs of Edinburgh, a convivial companion at Lucky Middlemass's or with members of the Cape Club at James Mann's tavern in Craig's Close, we must not forget that he knew other scenes too. He knew the spoken Scots of Lothian, Fife and Aberdeenshire, and he knew Lowland Scottish life in both town and country: he was at home in Scotland in a quietly assured way. Further, he had received a reasonably good formal education, so that he had no inferiority complex about his knowledge of the classics. He was free to laugh at the literati if he wanted to, and when Dr. Johnson insulted the Scots he could cheerfully satirize the Grand Cham in lively and uninhibited verse. He did not have to declare defensively that he understood Horace but faintly in the original, or to present himself to the genteel world as a remarkable example of the natural man.

The Cape Club provided a better atmosphere for a poet than the self-conscious young would-be gentlemen of the Easy Club provided for Ramsay. Members of this Club—The Knights Companions of the Cape, as they called themselves—included David Herd, the painters Alexander Runciman, Alexander Nasmyth and (later) Sir Henry Raeburn; the actors Thomas Lancashire and William Woods, and Stephen Kemble, manager of the Theatre Royal; James Sibbald, the historian of Scottish poetry; the later notorious Deacon Brodie; Stephen Clarke, the musician who was to help Burns; a large number of tradesmen of convivial, literary or musical inclination; and some lawyers and other professional men. It was a democratic, informal, friendly group, having none of the genteel pretensions of the more formal societies attended by the literati yet with nothing of the coarse debauchery of the lower Edinburgh taverns. Eighteenth-century Edinburgh was a city of clubs and taverns, and Fergusson easily found his level among them. He was at home in the Cape Club (to which he was admitted in October 1772), and he was equally at home 'o'er oysters and a dram o' gin' at Lucky Middlemass's or with a dish of rizzard haddock and a bicker of tippeny at this or some other Edinburgh howff. He was also a frequenter of the theatre, the friendship of Woods the actor obtaining for him free admission.

Members of the Cape Club took knightly titles. David Herd was Sir Scrape-Greysteil, Alexander Runciman was Sir Brimstone, and Fergusson was admitted as Sir Precentor, presumably because of his good voice and his fondness for singing. He attended the meetings regularly throughout 1733.

Fergusson's first appearance as a poet was not promising. He wrote three poor English songs to Scottish airs for a performance of the opera Artaxerxes at the Theatre Royal in 1769. Two years later he began contributing to Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine, starting with three English pastorals entitled 'Morning', 'Noon' and 'Night'. But as a poet in English Fergusson never achieved anything more than a certain dexterity in the manipulation of English words. Only when he uses English in parody of the genteel literary tradition of his day does he achieve any spark at all. His poem, 'The Sow of Feeling'—the lament of a pig of sensibility whose husband and children have been slaughtered for the table—is an amusing satire of Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling and the fashion which is started. It is also a parody of the kind of English poetic style which eighteenth-century Scottish poets tended to fall into when they wanted to be genteel:

Thrice happy, had I lived in Jewish time,
When swallowing pork or pig was deem'd a crime;
My husband long had blest my longing arms,
Long, long had known love's sympathetic charms!
My children too—a little suckling race,
With all their father growing in their face,
From their profile dam had ne'er been torn,
Nor to the bloody stalls of butchers borne.

And in his 'To Dr. Samuel Johnson, food for a new edition of his Dictionary', he parodies the lexicographer's vocabulary. Such poems are significant only as indicating Fergusson's educational independence, as compared with Ramsay or Burns.

It was the issue of the Weekly Magazine for 2 January 1772 that introduced Fergusson to the public as a Scots poet. The poem was 'The Daft-Days', the period of convivial celebration at the end of the old year and the beginning of the new; it opens with a memorable picture of Edinburgh in December:

The picture of winter laying its frozen hand on Edinburgh and its rural environs is done with a gravity (far from the same thing as solemnity) of language that shows us at once that Fergusson took the vernacular more seriously than Ramsay had done. The Latin minimum and the adjective Borean take their place naturally in a descriptive verse whose tone and accent demonstrate its hospitality to any legitimate devices for adding weight and scope. A line such as 'And dwyning nature droops her wings' is stylized in an altogether appropriate way: it is not a conventional image thrown inappropriately on top of a colloquial style in the way that Ramsay so often did, but a formal handling of Scots.

After building up the atmosphere of the winter exterior, the poet turns to the contrasting interior:

As the poem develops, it becomes clear that its true theme is conviviality—brilliantly localized Edinburgh conviviality. The patriotic theme emerges naturally from the convival; when the capital of Scotland celebrates, it must be in an appropriately Scottish way:

It may be that Fergusson's touchiness about foreign influences in Edinburgh (which he demonstrates more than once) shows a parochial spirit, which the Middle Scots poets, who were Europeans as well as Scots, wholly lacked; but it must be remembered that not only was the Italianizing of Scottish song seriously threatening an important part of Scotland's musical heritage in Fergusson's day, but the uncertainty and obsequiousness about the nature and status of Scottish culture shown by so many of Fergusson's contemporaries were bound to make an initial defence of Scottish traditions take a form that would seem merely xenophobic to a more assured generation.

The theme suggested in the stanza attacking 'vile Italian tricks' in music is developed in 'Elegy, On the Death of Scots Music', which appeared in the Weekly Magazine on 5 March 1772. This is a serious patriotic poem, a lament for the swamping of the native Scottish tradition in music by foreign influences. The mock elegy form (which Fergusson had used with great spirit and considerable skill in his 'Elegy on the Death of Mr. David Gregory, late Professor of Mathematics in the University of St. Andrews', one of his earlier works) has here shed its note of rather selfconscious humour and is sublimated into something more formal and more whole. Fergusson takes his epigraph from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, with an easy appropriateness that once again shows his poetic assurance:

Mark it Cesario; it is old and plain,
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones,
Do use to chant it.

This sets the tone, and the poem opens with an elegiac stateliness:

Three more stanzas develop the mourning theme in fairly general terms, and then, in a manner characteristic of him, Fergusson begins to narrow his subject with increasing particularization:

A reference to his favourite song 'The Birks of Invermay' finishes the particularization, and the poem then moves at once to its formal conclusion:

Fergusson's next poem, 'The King's Birthday in Edinburgh', was a full-blooded performance in the Scottish tradition of poems of popular revelry though lacking what might be called the broadside accent of so many of such poems. It is a description of Edingburgh's celebration of the King's birthday, and, significantly, has as epigraph a line from Drummond's Scots macaronic, Polemo-Middinia, 'Oh! qualis hurly-burly fuit, si forte vidisses'. The style of the poem is familiar but not vulgar. The opening is humorous in a new way for eighteenth-century Scottish poetry:

The poet's mischievously familiar attitude to the Muse is not vulgarity, but controlled high spirits. It sets the tone for the ensuing description:

And off he goes, describing the noise, the pranks, the brulzies with the City Guard, with artful verve. The poet's self, introduced in the very first line, is present throughout, both as observer and as celebrant, and the introduction of his own comments adds to the spontaneity of the tone, as when he addresses the old cannon, Mons Meg:

The note of personal wonder, rising to a climax in a line which opens with four emphatic monosyllabic words—'Sax long Scots miles ayont Clackmannan'—represents technique of a high order, from which Burns was to learn. At the end of the poem he returns to the Muse, reminding himself that the final stages of riotous celebration are not fit themes for her, who is accustomed to more conventionally poetic aspects of the day's proceedings:

'Peerless Fancy' is deliberate, almost ironic, English poetic diction: the pastoral aspects of the celebration are more suitable for conventional poetic treatment than the more violent urban goings-on that he has been recounting. And on that note of mingled pastoral cheerfulness and ironic poetizing the poem concludes.

'Caller [fresh] Oysters' is another of Fergusson's convivial poems. Its opening, a fine tribute to the Forth and its fishermen, shows him handling the 'Standart Habby' stanza with a slowness and openness not often found in this verse form:

He moves inland from the sea, from the Forth coast to Auld Reekie's oyster cellars, and soon we have one of his cosy Edinburgh interiors again:

On 3 September 1772 there appeared in the Weekly Magazine a Scots poem signed 'J. S.', dated from Berwick, hailing Fergusson as Ramsay's equal and successor. The following week Fergusson's reply appeared, following the tradition of the verse epistle as developed by Hamilton of Gilbertfield and Ramsay. It is a skilful enough occasional piece, but his predecessors had done as well in this mode. More original in both style and content is 'Braid Claith', which appeared on 15 October. It is a satire, whose theme is that clothes make the man: with a good suit of braid claith a man, whatever his natural endowments, commands respect and is sure to get on in the world. The conclusion illustrates both the tone of the poem and the comic-ironic ingenuity of some of Fergusson's rhymes:

In October appeared 'Geordie and Davie, an Eclogue to the Memory of Dr. Wilkie'. Wilkie had been professor of Natural Philosophy at St. Andrews, and had taken an interest in Fergusson when he was a student there. The eclogue is modelled on Ramsay's pastoral elegies, but it is an altogether more assured performance than anything Ramsay did in that style. He uses heroic couplets with gravity and flexibility (though the lines are as a rule endstopped) and the Scots appears completely at home in this verse form. This is something new in eighteenth-century Scottish poetry:

… Tho' simmer's gane, an' we nae langer view
The blades o' claver wat wi' pearls o' dew.
Cauld winter's bleakest blasts we'll eithly [easily] cowr,
Our eldin's [fuel] driven, an' our har'st is owr;
Our rucks fu' thick are stackit i' the yard,
For the Yule-feast a sautit [salted] mart's prepar'd;

The ingle-nook supplies the simmer fields,
An' aft as mony gleefu' maments yields.
Swyth [quickly] man! fling a' your sleepy springs awa',
An' on your canty [cheerful] whistle gie's a blaw:
Blythness, I trow, maun [must] lighten ilka eie [every eye],
An' ilka canty callant sing [fellow] like me.

The language here is integrated and confident, and does not halt between genteel English and vulgar Scots. But a brief quotation loses the effect: one must read the whole poem to appreciate Fergusson's control and assurance.

'Hallow-fair' is another poem which develops a Scottish tradition that Ramsay and others had already made popular. It is an account of the lively scenes that took place at the annual market held in November in the outskirts of Edinburgh, done in that form of 'Christis Kirk on the Grene' stanza that Watson had printed and which Burns was to use. The life and colour and movement of the poem are magnificent, and the way Fergusson manages to use the short four-syllable ending to each stanza (always with the same two last words, 'that day', except for 'that night' on two occasions) shows a firm control over his medium. The poet is the mere observer here; he is not himself implicated as in 'The King's Birthday' and 'Caller Oysters'; and the poem moves from scene to scene picking out the liveliest and most striking activities. Here again Fergusson can play with classical deities without any feeling of either vulgarity or pretentiousness:

The last of the 1772 poems is 'To the Tron-kirk Bell', a magnificent piece of studied abuse directed at the 'wanwordy [worthless] crazy, dinsome thing' whose 'noisy tongue' was 'sair to thole [endure]'. Here Fergusson demonstrated a virtuosity that had not been seen in Scots poetry since the makars. The mixture of skill and gusto with which the riven bell is abused is reminiscent of Dunbar in his best flyting style; the poem, however, is not a satire on bells but on baillies: the conclusion is that the city fathers allow this scandal because they live out of its hearing:

But far frae thee the bailies dwell,
Or they wud scunner [be disgusted] at your knell….

The 1773 poems began on 21 January with 'Caller Water', a poem in praise of fresh water which, deftly handled and cunningly constructed, turns out to be a poem in praise of the Edinburgh lasses. Water kept 'father Adie' healthy in Eden (Fergusson uses that familiar tone to scriptural characters that Burns was to exploit so happily); it is prescribed by doctors who confuse their patients' noddles by giving it a pretentious Latin name; it provides healthful swimming; it cures the colic; it keeps the lasses trig and bonny. The poem, which moves trippingly throughout, comes to a neat and happy conclusion:

A more ambitious work is 'Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey', a dialogue in flexible octosyllabic couplets between the main road of the High Street (causey) and its sidewalk (plainstanes). Each complains of what it has to bear and thinks it has a worse lot than the other—causey with wagons, horses, coaches, Highland chairmen and the Luckenbooths, plainstanes (designed for nothing heavier than 'sole of shoe or pump') trod by 'burden-bearers heavy shod' and loutish rustic characters. The result is both a picture of Edinburgh street life and a satire on snobbery.

'The Rising of the Session', which appeared in March, should be considered together with 'The Sitting of the Session', which did not appear until 4 November. These poems remind us of the important part that the law played in Edinburgh life: the rising of the Court of Session at once diminished the city's activities, and the first of these two poems is a sharply etched series of pictures of the denuded city, with empty taverns and change-houses, shot through with a running satire on lawyers. 'The Sitting of the Session' presents the other side of the picture: it shows in brilliant detail the revived life of the city, with barkeepers and litigators in full cry. The poem begins with one of Fergusson's fine seasonal portraits of Edinburgh in November: he then moves through the city, as the slightly ironical observer, and describes what he sees. Sometimes he ironically encourages the activities he is describing:

The macaronic tough here, with its ironical humour, is in an old Scottish tradition.

On 13 May the Weekly Magazine printed 'The Farmer's Ingle', one of Fergusson's two real masterpieces (the other is 'Auld Reekie'). Hitherto Fergusson had excelled as an urban poet, as the bard of Edinburgh, but here he celebrates the agricultural life in a rich, slow-moving verse of a kind that Scottish poetry had not seen for centuries. The stanza is a modified Spenserian; the tone is that of affectionate observation, without a trace of sentimentality; the structure, moving from the vivid description of evening settling over the countryside to the interior domestic scene and then taking the farmer and his family through their evening's activities until they retire to rest, to conclude on a note of peaceful benediction, is perfectly controlled throughout. 'The Farmer's Ingle' is a finer poem than Burns's 'The Cotter's Saturday Night', which, in spite of some magnificent passages, is confused in tone, motive and diction. Fergusson's very title indicates the superiority: Burns's title sounds as though he is about to show off some model rustics to benevolent genteel observers, whereas Fergusson is describing, with knowledge and affection, what he sees. Here at last is a full-blooded Scots poem, written by the whole man, rich and musical and assured:

The second stanza describes the gudeman coming home, the third shows the gudewife making everything ready for his arrival, the fourth moves to an unforced moralizing on the superior healthfulness of hard work and simple fare to idleness and drugs, and the fifth develops this into a tribute to the achievements of Scotsmen of old, brought up on simple fare. Then, in the sixth stanza, he turns again to the scene before him:

And so the evening wears on. In the tenth stanza we have an attractive picture of the gudeman relaxing, and in the eleventh he is shown discussing the next day's work with the lads. In the twelfth they all retire to bed, and the final stanza asks a blessing on them all:

The ending is perfectly modulated, in contrast to the more rhetorical conclusion of 'The Cotter's Saturday Night'.

'The Farmer's Ingle' is a Scots poem, but this does not mean that it derives entirely and solely from Scottish literary traditions. On the contrary, the stanza form, the tone and even the subject show English influence; the significant point is that these influences have been thoroughly assimilated, and are used in an assured Scots way. The strength of a national art does not lie in its refusal to borrow from other national arts, but in its ability to domesticate its borrowings properly in its own medium. This is what Fergusson does in 'The Farmer's Ingle', and it is something that no Scottish poet in the eighteenth century had yet done.

'The Ghaists: a Kirkyard Eclogue' is a dialogue between the ghosts of George Heriot and George Watson (Edinburgh merchants who had left bequests to found 'hospitals'—now schools—in the city), who deplore the effect in Scotland of the proposed 'Mortmain Bill' introduced in Westminister. The bill (which, owing to Scottish opposition, was eventually restricted in scope to apply to England only) was intended to enable charitable foundations in Britain to realize their assets and invest the proceeds in three per cent. funds, which would be the future source of their income. This would have impoverished certain Scottish foundations, and Scottish national feeling was aroused. Fergusson's poem was a contribution to the debate, and at the same time a defence of the national integrity of Scotland. The verse is the heroic couplet, handled with deliberate gravitas:

This kind of patriotic poetry, dealing boldly with contemporary affairs, is both more poetic and more effective than the oblique pseudo-historical contrivances of Ramsay.

The next two poems, 'On Seeing a Butterfly in the Street' and 'Hame Content, a Satire' (like the 'Ode to the Bee', which had appeared earlier), are moral pieces in octosyllabic couplets, starting from a particular situation and moving outwards to illustrate what it means in terms of the way people live. They are vigorous enough, and show Fergusson's competence and confidence if not the height of his genius. 'Leith Races', which appeared in July, is in the mood and stanza form of 'Hallow Fair'. It is another of Fergusson's Edinburgh poems, and the model for Burns's 'The Holy Fair'. A short quotation cannot suggest its quality; it is the carefully handled sequence of scenes that builds up into an impressive poem. 'Ode to the Gowdspink', in the same general style as the butterfly poem, appeared in August, and 'The Election', another Edinburgh poem with all the life and speed of 'Hallo Fair' and 'Leith Races', in September. 'To the Principal and Professors of the University of St. Andrews, on their superb treat to Dr. Johnson' is a skilful and high-spirited fling at the doctor in octosyllabic couplets. After describing the elaborate foreign dishes at the feast, he says that if he had been there he would have filled the anti-Scottish lexicographer with humble Scottish fare, which he proceeds to catalogue. It is a satire, which emerges as a patriotic poem.

The 'Elegy on John Hogg' also appeared in September: it is perhaps the most brilliant, certainly the most technically accomplished, of all the mock elegies in the 'Habbie Simson' tradition. 'A Drink Eclogue', a dialogue in heroic couplets between 'Landlady, Brandy and Whisky', is a piece of skilful flyting between the two liquors, with the landlady intervening at the end. Finally, 'To my Auld Breeks' (25 November), a ruefully comic address to his worn-out trousers in octosyllabic couplets, brings the Weekly Magazine series of Fergusson's Scots poems to a close.

There are a few other Scots poems by Fergusson which did not appear in the Weekly Magazine. They include another 'Hallow Fair', a song this time. There is also an accomplished Scots translation of an ode of Horace (I. xi), which first appeared in the 1779 edition of his poems. But most important of all the poems first published outside the Weekly Magazine is 'Auld Reekie', published separately in 1773 and included, in a later version, in the 1779 volume. It is the Edinburgh poet's fullest and most accomplished celebration of his city. The octosyllabic couplets, shifting in tempo in accordance with the particular scene before the poet's eye, carry the expressive Scots forcefully to the ear, while the imagery, fixing the scene with its most significant component or appropriate symbol, builds up the Edinburgh sights, sounds and smells. This is more than a Dickensian exploration of urban oddities or the search for the striking scene or incident: the whole poem is set in a framework of acceptance—acceptance of the whole of life, with its colour, gaiety and debauchery, dreariness and pretentiousness and weakness, companionship, loneliness and sheer unadulterated humanity. He is not exhibiting Edinburgh to a sniggering or an admiring audience; he is savouring its full quality because he enjoys doing so. The whole Edinburgh scene passes under his eye. Gossips, schoolboys, housemaids, lawyers, thieves, whores, tavern-haunters, Sunday walkers, corrupt politicians, each against their appropriate background, are picked out and described; and there is an undercurrent of satire directed against those who through laziness or selfishness neglect the city's welfare or actively contribute to its harm. The contrasts are frequent and impressive:

Near some lamp-post, wi' dowy [melancholy] face,
Wi' heavy ein, and sour grimace,
Stands she that beauty lang had kend,
Whoredom her trade, and vice her end.
But see whare now she wuns her bread
By that which nature ne'er decreed;
And sings sad music to the lugs, [ears],
'Mang bourachs [clusters] o' damn'd whores and rogues….

And here is another:

In afternoon, a' brawlie buskit, [grandly dressed up],
The joes and lasses [sweethearts] loe to frisk it:
Some tak a great delight to place
The modest bon-grace [bonnet] o'er the face;
Tho' you may see, if so inclin'd,
The turning o' the leg behind.
Now Comely-garden, and the Park,
Refresh them, after forenoon's wark;
Newhaven, Leith, or Canon-mills,
Supply them in their Sunday's gills….

The conclusion, where the poet retires across the Forth to look at his city whole, across the water from Fife, rounds the poem off perfectly:

Reikie, farewell I ne'er cou'd part
Wi' thee but wi' a dowy heart;
Aft frae the Fifan coast I've seen,
Thee tow'ring on thy summit green;
So glowr the saints when first is given
A fav'rite keek o' glore [glory] and heaven;
On earth nae mair they bend their ein,
But quick assume angelic mein;
So I on Fife wad glowr no more,
But gallop'd to Edina's shore.

Perhaps the measure of Fergusson's technical success as a Scots poet is that he can (requiring the brevity and formality) call Edinburgh 'Edina' in the last line of this poem, and get away with it: Burns, in 'Edina! Scotia's darling seat', could not. If there is something of John Gay in this poem, it is not, as it often is in Ramsay, a vulgar aping of a metropolitan wit beyond his ken, but an influence happily assimilated.

Was Fergusson's Scots a homogeneous literary language? It was certainly more than a regional dialect, for it contained, in addition to its Edinburgh base, elements from Fife and from Aberdeenshire as well as from older literary Scots. Does this mean that Fergusson raised the status of Scots from a vernacular to a literary language? Hardly; because it takes more than a single poet to achieve such a task. Fergusson was the only Scots poet of his century to be able to look contemporary civilization in the eye. He knew where he stood and what he wanted to do. But he founded no school. The future lay with Burns and the rustic tradition.