CHAPTER VII
'THE GENTLE SHEPHERD'; SCOTTISH IDYLLIC POETRY; RAMSAY'S PASTORALS—1725-30
In the quarto of 1721, not the least remarkable of its contents had been two Pastoral Dialogues, the one between Richy (Sir Richard Steele) and Sandy (Alexander Pope), and based on the death of Addison: the other between Patie and Roger, and concerning itself solely with a representation of rural life. Amongst the best pieces in the volume both undoubtedly ranked. In 1723 appeared another metrical dialogue, Jenny and Meggy, betraying obvious kinship with Patie and Roger. So delighted were his friends, the Clerks and the Bennets, Professors Drummond and Maclaurin, and many others, with the vraisemblance to Scottish rural life, and with the true rustic flavour present in the two dialogues, that they entreated him to add some connecting links, and to expand them into a pastoral drama. Doubtful of his ability to execute a task demanding powers so varied, and so supreme, Ramsay for a time hesitated. But at length, induced by their advice, he threw himself into the undertaking with enthusiasm. In a letter to his kinsman William Ramsay of Templehall, dated April 8, 1724, he writes: "I am this vacation going through with a Dramatick Pastoral, whilk I design to carry the length of five acts, in verse a' the gate, and, if I succeed according to my plan, I hope to tope [rival] with the authors of Pastor Fido and Aminta."
On the scenes wherewith he had become acquainted during his manifold rambles over the hills and the vales, the glens and glades, of fair Midlothian, he now drew, as well as from the quaint and curious types of character—the Symons, the Glauds, the Bauldies, the Rogers, the Madges, and the Mauses—wherewith he had come into contact during such seasons. That he stinted either time or trouble in making the drama as perfect as possible is evident from the prolonged period over which its composition was spread, and the number of drafts he made of it. Some of the songs, he informed Sir David Forbes, had been written no fewer than six times. At length, early in July 1725, prefaced by a dedication in prose from himself to the Right Hon. Susannah, Countess of Eglinton, and by a poetical address to the same beautiful patroness, from the pen of William Hamilton of Bangour, the poet, The Gentle Shepherd made its appearance.
Its success from the very outset was unparalleled in Scottish literature up to that date. It seemed literally to take the country by storm. By all ranks and classes, by titled ladies in their boudoirs, as well as by milkmaids tripping it to the bughts with leglins and pails, the poem was admiringly read, and its songs sung. Its performance on the stage in 1726, only served to whet the public appetite. By the leading poets of the day, Pope, Swift, Gay, Tickell, Ambrose Philips, and Lord Lansdowne, as well as by the most influential critics, Dennis, Theobald, and Dr. Ruddiman, the work was hailed as one of the most perfect examples of the pastoral that had appeared since the Idylls of Theocritus. No less eminent a judge of poetry than Alexander Pope considered it in many respects superior to the Shepherds' Calendar; while Gay was so enthusiastic in his admiration that he sent the work over to Swift, with the remark, 'At last we have a dramatic pastoral, though it is by a Scot.'
The first edition of The Gentle Shepherd was exhausted in a few months, and in January 1726 Ruddiman printed the second, while the third and a cheaper one was called for towards the close of the same year. The enormous sale of the poem may be estimated by the fact that the tenth edition was printed in 1750 by R. & A. Foulis of Glasgow. So great was the accession of popularity accruing to Ramsay through the publication of The Gentle Shepherd, and so rapid the increase in his bookselling business, that he found it absolutely necessary to shift his place of business, or Scotice dictu, to 'flit' to larger premises, in the first storey of the eastern gable-end of the Luckenbooths, a block of towering lands or tenements which, until 1817, stood in the very centre of the High Street, obstructing the thoroughfare, and affording a curious commentary on the expedients to which the burgesses of Edinburgh were compelled to resort, to eke out to the utmost the space enclosed within the charmed circle of the Flodden Wall.
At his 'flitting,' also, he changed his sign, and, thinking the 'Flying Mercury' no longer applicable to his new pursuits, he adopted the heads of Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden, a sign which in local parlance gradually grew to bear the title of 'The Twa Heids.' In his new premises also, Ramsay extended the scope of his business, adding to the other attractions of his establishment a circulating library, the first of its kind in Scotland. He entered his new shop in May 1726. Sixty years after, the ground-floor of the same land, together with the flat where formerly Ramsay was located, were in the occupancy of William Creech, the first of the great Edinburgh Sosii that were yet to include the Constables, the Blackwoods, the Chambers, the Blacks, and others of renown in their day. With the Luckenbooths' premises it is that The Gentle Shepherd is always associated. From them Ramsay dated all his editions subsequent to the first two, and there he reaped all the gratifying results of its success.
The poem, which takes its name from the 12th eclogue of Spenser's Shepherds' Calendar, whose opening runs as follows—
'The Gentle Shepherd satte beside a spring,
All in the shadow of a bushy brere,'—
may certainly be ranked in the same category with the Idylls of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, the Aminta of Tasso, the Pastor Fido (faithful shepherd) of Guarini, and Spenser's great poem referred to above. In The Gentle Shepherd Ramsay rises to a level of poetic strength, united to a harmony between conception and execution, so immeasurably superior to anything else he accomplished, that it has furnished matter for speculation to his rivals and his enemies, whether in reality the poem were his own handiwork, or had been merely fathered by him. Lord Hailes, however, pricks this bubble, when dealing with the ill-natured hypothesis raised by Alexander Pennecuik—the doggerel poet, not the doctor—that Sir John Clerk and Sir William Bennet had written The Gentle Shepherd, when he remarks, 'that they who attempt to depreciate Ramsay's fame, by insinuating that his friends and patrons composed the works which pass under his name, ought first to prove that his friends and patrons were capable of composing The Gentle Shepherd.' Not for a moment can the argument be esteemed to possess logical cogency that, because he never equalled the poem in question in any of his other writings, he was therefore intellectually incapable of composing that masterpiece which will be read after his other productions are forgotten, as long, in fact, as Scots poetry has a niche in the great temple of English literature.