. . . . .
Contented I have sic a skair,
As does my business to a hair;
And fain would prove to ilka Scot,
That pourtith's no the poet's lot.'
During the years in question Ramsay produced in rapid succession his poem On Wit, the Club being again responsible for this clever satire; and also two humorous Elegies, one on John Cowper, the Kirk-Treasurer's-Man, whose official oversight of the nymphes de pave furnished the poet with a rollickingly ludicrous theme, of which he made the most; the other, an Elegy on Lucky Wood, alewife in the Canongate, also gave Ramsay full scope for the exercise of that broad Rabelaisian humour, of his possession of which there was now no longer to be any doubt.
Finally, in 1716, he achieved his great success, which stamped him as unquestionably one of the greatest delineators that had as yet appeared, of rural Scottish life amongst the humbler classes. As is well known, a fragment is in existence consisting of one canto of a poem entitled Christ's Kirk on the Green. Tradition and internal evidence alike point to King James I. as the author. The theme is the description of a brawl at a country wedding, which breaks out just as the dancing was commencing. 'The king,' says Ramsay, 'having painted the rustic squabble with an uncommon spirit, in a most ludicrous manner, in a stanza of verse, the most difficult to keep the sense complete, as he had done, without being forced to bring in words for crambo's sake where they return so frequently, I have presumed to imitate His Majesty in continuing the laughable scene. Ambitious to imitate so great an original, I put a stop to the war, called a congress, and made them sign a peace, that the world might have their picture in the more agreeable hours of drinking, dancing, and singing. The following cantos were written, the one in 1715 (O.S. corresponding to January 1716), the other in 1718, about three hundred years after the first. Let no worthy poet despair of immortality,—good sense will always be the same in spite of the revolutions of fashion and the change of language.'
The task was no easy one, but Ramsay succeeded with remarkable skill in dovetailing the second and third cantos into the first, so that they read as the production of one mind. For faithful portraiture of Scottish rural manners, for a fidelity, even in the minutest details, recalling Teniers and his vividly realistic pictures of Dutch rustic life, the cantos are unrivalled in Scottish literature, save by the scenes of his own Gentle Shepherd.
CHAPTER V
THE FAVOURITE AT THE 'FOUR-OORS'; FROM WIGMAKER TO BOOKSELLER; THE QUARTO OF 1721—1717-21
Ramsay's fame as a poet, writing in the Scots vernacular, was now thoroughly established. Though the patronage of the Easy Club could no longer be extended to him, as the Government of the Elector of Hanover—lately crowned King of England under the title of George I.—had directed its suppression, the members of it, while in a position to benefit him, had laid the basis of his reputation so broad and deep that virtually he had now only to build on their foundation.
He was distinctly the favourite of the 'auld wives' of the town. In quarto sheets, familiarly known as broadsides, and similar to what had been hawked about the country in his youth, his poems had hitherto been issued. It became the fashion, when four o'clock arrived, to send out their children, or their 'serving-lass,' with a penny to procure Allan Ramsay's latest piece, in order to increase the relish of their 'four-oors' Bohea' with the broad humour of John Cowper, or The Elegy upon Lucky Wood, or The Great Eclipse.
During the year or two immediately preceding the publication of the quarto of 1721 this custom greatly increased. Of course, a supply had to be forthcoming to meet such a demand, but of these, numberless pieces, on topics of political or merely ephemeral interest, were never republished after their appearance in broadside form. By an eminent collector of this species of literature the fact is stated, that there are considerably over two score of poems by Ramsay which have thus been allowed to slip into oblivion. Not that such a fate was undeserved. In many cases their indelicacy would debar their admission into any edition nowadays; in others, their lack of permanent general interest. Such subjects as The Flytin' of Luckie Duff and Luckie Brown, A Dookin' in the Nor' Loch, and A Whiggish Lament, were not the kind of themes his calmer and maturer judgment would care to contemplate being handed down to posterity as specimens of his work.