Poor Mailie's dead!
The seventeenth century was a barren one for Scottish literature. The attraction of the larger English public and the disuse of the vernacular among the upper classes already discussed, drew to the South or to the Southern speech whatever literary talent appeared in the North, and it seemed for a time that, except for the obscure stream of folk poetry, Scottish vernacular literature was at an end. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, interest began to revive. In 1706-9-11 James Watson published the three volumes of his Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, and in the third decade began to appear Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany (1724-40). These collections rescued from oblivion a large quantity of vernacular verse, some of it drawn from manuscripts of pre-Reformation poetry, some of it contemporary, some of it anonymous and of uncertain date, having come down orally or in chap-books and broadsides. The welcome given to these volumes was an early instance of that renewed interest in older and more primitive literature that was manifested still more strikingly when Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. Its influence on the production of vernacular literature was evident at once in the original work of Ramsay himself; and the movement which culminated in Burns, though having its roots far back in the work of Henryson and Dunbar, was in effect a Scottish renascence, in which the chief agents before Burns were Hamilton of Gilbertfield, Ramsay himself, Robert Fergusson, and song-writers like Mrs. Cockburn and Lady Anne Lindsay.
Of this fact Burns was perfectly aware, and he was not only candid but generous in his acknowledgment of his debt to his immediate predecessors.
My senses wad be in a creel, head would be turned
Should I but dare a hope to speel, climb
Wi' Allan, or wi' Gilbertfield,
The braes o' fame; hills
Or Fergusson, the writer-chiel, lawyer-fellow
A deathless name.
He knew Ramsay's collection and had a perhaps exaggerated admiration for The Gentle Shepherd. This poem, published in 1728, not only holds a unique position in the history of the pastoral drama, but is important in the present connection as being to Burns the most signal evidence of the possibility of a dignified literature in the modern vernacular. Hamilton and Ramsay had exchanged rhyming epistles in the six-line stanza, and in these Burns found the model for his own epistles. Hamilton's Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck—a favorite grey-hound—had been imitated by Ramsay in Lucky Spence's Last Advice and the Last Speech of a Wretched Miser, and the form had become a Scottish convention before Burns produced his [Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie]. As important as any of these was the example set by Ramsay and bettered by Burns of refurbishing old indecent or fragmentary songs. Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was regarded by Burns still more highly than Ramsay, and his influence was even more potent. In his autobiographical letter to Doctor Moore he tells that about 1782 he had all but given up rhyming: “but meeting with Fergusson's Scotch Poems, I strung anew my wildly-sounding, rustic lyre with emulating vigour.” In the preface to the Kilmarnock edition he is still more explicit as to his attitude.