Allan must have seen many curious sights from those windows. The riding of the Parliament, when in gallant order two by two—the commissioners of the boroughs and the counties leading the way, the peers following, through the guards on either side who lined the streets—they rode up solemnly from Holyrood to the Parliament House, with crown and sword and sceptre borne before them, the old insignia, without which the Acts of the ancient Parliaments of Scotland were not considered valid—marching for the last time to their place of meeting to give up their trust—would be one of the most remarkable. The commoners had each two lackeys to attend him, the barons three, the earls four, a blue-coated brigade, relic of the old days when no gentleman moved abroad without a following; and Lyon King-at-arms in his finery to direct the line. With lamentation and humiliation was the session closed; even wise men who upheld the Union consenting to the general pang with which the last Scots Parliament went its way. And the glare of the fire must have lighted up the poet's rooms, and angry sparks fallen, and hoarse roar of voices drowned all domestic sounds, when the Porteous Mob turned Edinburgh streets into a fierce scene of tragedy for one exciting night. It would be vain indeed to describe again what Scott has set before us in the most vivid brilliant narrative. Such a scene breaking into the burgher quietude—the decent households which had all retired into decorous darkness for the night waking up again with lights flitting from story to story, the axes crashing against the doors of the Tolbooth, the wild procession whirling down the tortuous gloom of the West Bow—was such an interruption of monotonous life as few towns in the eighteenth century could have equalled; and it is curious to remember the intense national feeling and keen patriotic understanding of how far the populace would or could endure interference, which made Duncan Forbes in his place in Parliament stand up as almost the defender of that wild outburst of lawlessness, and John of Argyle turn from the royal presence to prepare his hounds, as he said, against the Queen's threat of turning the rebellious country into a desert. These proud Scotsmen had supported the Union: they had perceived its necessity and its use: but there was a point at which all their susceptibilities took fire, and Whig lords and politicians were at one with every high-handed Tory of the early times.
Allan Ramsay must also have seen, though he says nothing of it, the brief occupation of Edinburgh by the unfortunate Prince Charles Edward, and at a distance the pathetic little Court in Holyrood, the Jacobite ladies in their brief glory, the fated captains of that wild little army, in which the old world of tradition and romance made its last outbreak upon modern prose and the possibilities of life. One would imagine that for a man who had lived through that episode in the heart of the old kingdom of the Stewarts, and whose house lay half-way between the artillery of the castle, where a hostile garrison sat grimly watching the invaders below, and the camp at Holyrood—there would have been nothing in his life so exciting, nothing of which the record would have been more distinct. But human nature, which has so many eccentricities, is in nothing so wonderful as this, that the most remarkable historical scenes make no impression upon its profound everyday calm, and are less important to memory than the smallest individual incident. The swarm of the wild Highlanders that took sudden possession of street and changehouse, the boom of the cannon overhead vainly attempting to disperse a group here and there or kill a rebel, and the consciousness which one would think must have thrilled through the very air, that under those turrets in the valley was the most interesting young adventurer of modern times, the heir of the ancient Scots kings, their undoubted representative—how could these things fail to affect the mind even of the most steady-going citizen? But they did, though we cannot comprehend it. Allan has a word for every little domestic event in town or suburbs, but there is not a syllable said either by himself or his biographers to intimate that he knew what was going on under his eyes at that brief and sudden moment, the "one crowded hour of glorious life," which cost so much blood of brave men, and which the hapless Prince paid for afterwards in the disenchanted tedium of many a dreary year.
SMOLLETT'S HOUSE
It was before this time, however, that Ramsay reached the height of his fame and of his productions in The Gentle Shepherd. He had written some years before "A Pastoral Dialogue between Patie and Roger," published as usual in a sheet for a penny, and no doubt affording much pleasure to the great popular audience to whom the "new piece" was as the daily feuilleton, that friendly dole of fiction which sweetens existence. It was evidently so successful that after a while the poet composed a pendant—a dialogue between Jenny and Peggy. These two fragments pleased the fancy of both the learned and the simple, and no doubt called forth many a flattering inquiry after the two rustic pairs and demands for the rest of their simple history, which inspired the author to weave the lovers into the web of a continuous story, adding the rural background, so fresh and true to nature, and the rustic and humorous characters which were wanted for the perfection of the pastoral drama. Few poems ever have attained so great and so immediate a success. It went from end to end of Scotland, everywhere welcomed, read, conned over, got by heart. Such a fame would be indeed worth living for. The fat little citizen in his shop became at once the poet of his country, as he had been of the Edinburgh streets. It was nearly two centuries since Dunbar and Davie Lyndsay had celebrated their romantic town: and though the name of the latter was still a household word ("You'll no find that in Davie Lyndsay" being the popular scornful dismissal of any incredible tale), yet their works had fallen into forgetfulness. The new poet was received accordingly with acclamation. People did not talk of sales and profits in those days, and we have no information as to the numbers issued, or the time they took to find a home in every cottage, as well as to receive the distinction of illustration and critical discussion, which proved that it was not only the people who interested themselves in the new poet, but a more highly trained and difficult audience as well. We have before us two goodly octavos in which the little rustical comedy is enshrined in hundreds of pages of notes; and where the argument as to its localities, identifying every spot, occupies chapter after chapter of earnest discussion, proving exactly where every cottage is situated, and that New Hall, the home of the Forbeses, was the mansion of the poem, with its little farm-steading round. Shakspeare could not have been more closely followed, and we doubt if the localities which he has made famous were ever discussed at such length. I can remember nearly fifty years ago investigating, with the eagerness of a child to whom books were the most precious objects in existence, the little shelf high on the wall at the bedhead, where a very old woman, an old nurse in her retirement, kept her treasures, and mounted high upon a chair, finding a much-thumbed unbound copy of The Gentle Shepherd in the dim twilight, ruddy with the glimmer of the fire, of the cottage room. In such places it was never absent; it was the one book which held its ground by the side of the Bible and perhaps a volume of old-world devotion, The Crook in the Lot, or The Saint's Rest. Such a distinction is a far more true and genuine triumph than the sale of many editions. It went straight into the heart of the peasant, who understood and appreciated every scene and line. And it was discussed by all the Edinburgh clubs, and by the literati who knew their Theocritus and could write dissertations on pastoral poetry. The greatest poet could have hoped for no more.
And pastoral poetry was the fashion of the time. Ramsay himself had made various other attempts before he lighted upon this quite legitimate strain. We read with a shudder of comic horror a dialogue "On the Death of Mr. Addison," in which the interlocutors are "Richy and Sandy," to wit, Sir Richard Steele and Mr. Alexander Pope! who bewail their loss, which is far worse than misfortune to their flocks, or the scorn of their lasses, being no less than this, that "Addie, that played and sang so sweet, is dead"! The poet received, indeed, a complimentary copy of verses upon this production, in which he is thus addressed—
"Well fare thee, Allan, who in mother tongue
So sweetly hath of breathless Addy sung:
His endless fame thy nat'ral genius fired,
And thou hast written as if he inspired.
'Richy and Sandy,' who do him survive,
Long as thy rural stanzas last, shall live."
The grotesque in poetry could scarcely go farther. Mr. Burchett, who addressed good Allan in these rhymes, was the refined gentleman who put the wigmaker's poems into English. "Richy and Sandy" was contained in a volume which Ramsay published by subscription, and which brought him in, to the immense admiration of his biographer, four hundred guineas sterling, which no doubt was a very admirable recompense indeed for so many foolish verses. This volume contained, among other things, Ramsay's bold continuation of "Christ's Kirk on the Green," which the same biographer describes as "King James the First's ludicrous poem," in which the poet of the High Street skilfully turns the poet-monarch's rustic revel into a vulgar village debauch. But these pieces of presumption and non-comprehension are happily all dead and gone, and Ramsay's reputation rests upon a happier basis. It is not a small matter to have pervaded a whole country with the simple measures of a rural idyll—a poem in which there are not perhaps five lines of poetry, but which is fragrant of the moors and fields, full of rustic good sense and feeling, and as free of harm or offence as the most severe moralist could desire. This latter quality is all the more remarkable as it belongs to an age not at all squeamish in these matters, and to which the frankest assaults upon a heroine's virtue were supposed to be quite adapted for the treatment of fiction. But there is no Lovelace in The Gentle Shepherd; the rustic love-making is ardent, but simple and without guile. The swains respect as much as they admire their nymphs: the nymphs are confident in their frank innocence, and fear no evil; the old fathers sit cheerful and sagacious at their doors and indulge in their cracks, not less pleased with themselves and their share of life than are the young ones with their livelier pleasures: the cows breathe balmy breath into the wild freshness of the pastoral scenery. There is scarcely anything affected, false, or even stilted in the poetical dialogues which, with a little licence for the verse and something for the sentiment, come naturally and simply from the wholesome, genial young shepherds and their sweethearts. To say this is to say as much as the most fastidious critic could desire from such a composition.
Nor is it spoiled by classic models or similes. How Ramsay succeeded in keeping Venus and Cupid out of it, in forgetting all eclogues and pastorals, Virgil or Theocritus, and indulging in nothing that was out of place in Scotland, it is hard to tell. The Mantuan bard, the oaten reed, Philomela and her songs, Hymen, Ganymede, Bacchus, and all the Olympian band disport themselves in his other verses: but The Gentle Shepherd is void of those necessary adjuncts of the eighteenth-century muse. The wimpling burn is never called Helicon nor the heathery braes Parnassus, and nothing can be more genuine, more natural, and familiar than the simple scenery of Habbie's Howe—in which the eager critics identified every scene, and the sensible poet enhanced his art by a perfect truth to nature. The Gentle Shepherd is perhaps the only so-called Pastoral of which this can be said, and it must have required no small amount of self-denial to dispense with all those accustomed auxiliaries. Even the sentiments are not too highflown for the locality. If they are perhaps more completely purified from everything gross or fleshly than would have been the case in fact, the poet has not been afraid to temper passion with those considerations which naturally rise to the mind of the young farmer in choosing his mate. His Peggy, though she has beauty enough to make up for every deficiency, has also "with innocence the wale of sense."
"In better sense without a flaw,
As in her beauty, far excels them a'."