Allan Ramsay

by William Henry Oliphant Smeaton

Patie's joy is now complete, and the two lovers, their prospective union blessed by Sir William, fall into one another's arms; while the happiness of the shepherds and rustics is consummated when Sir William, restored to his possessions, announces his intention never more to leave them. To Symon and Glaud he assigns their mailings (farms) in perpetual feu, while Roger is made his chamberlain. As the curtain then descends over general happiness, Sir William pronounces the usual moral admonition, without which no pastoral of the time was complete—

'My friends, I'm satisfied you'll all behave,
Each in his station as I'd wish and crave.
Be ever virtuous, soon or late ye'll find
Reward and satisfaction to your mind.
The maze of life sometimes looks dark and wild,
And oft when hopes are highest we're beguiled;
Oft when we stand on brinks of dark despair
Some happy turn with joy dispels our care.'

The relative proportions of the various characters have been preserved with rare skill, and the individuality of each is as firmly and clearly differentiated in a few rapid incisive strokes, as though he had expended pages of description on each, like Pope and Gay. Patie's cheery bonhomie and vivacious nature, his love of learning and his wise views of life and its duties, find an excellent foil in the slow, bashful, phlegmatic Roger, whose very 'blateness' denies him the bliss he covets in Jenny's love. Peggy is altogether charming,—a lovely, pure-souled, healthful, sport-loving maiden, with enough of her sex's foibles in her to leave her a very woman, yet with as few faults as it is possible for faulty human nature to be without. One of the most delightful heroines in pastoral poetry is Peggy. Jenny's prudish airs and affected dislike to the sterner sex are delicately yet incisively portrayed, while the staunch fidelity of Symon, the cheery chirpiness of Glaud, the bucolic ignorance and superstition of Bauldy, the cankered impatience of Madge—a spinster against her will, and the pathetic, age-worn weariness of Mause, are depicted with the assured hand of a master. Many of the lyrics interspersed throughout the pastoral are gems of rustic song; not high-class poetry, otherwise they would have been as out of place as would the Johnsonian minnows, talking, as Goldsmith said, like whales.

Only to one other production of Ramsay's genius will attention be called under this head, namely, his continuation of James the First's poem, Christ's Kirk on the Green. Of this, the first canto only was written by its royal author. Ramsay, therefore, conceived the design of completing it, as was remarked before. The king had painted with great spirit the squabble that arose at a rustic wedding at Christ's Kirk, in the parish of Kinnethmont, in that part of the county of Aberdeen near Leslie called the Garioch. Ramsay seems to have mistaken it for Leslie in Fife. Two cantos were added by our poet to the piece, in the one of which he exhibited the company, their differences ended, as engaging in feasting and good cheer; in the other, their appearance the following morning, after they had slept off the effects of the orgies, and when they proceed to the bridegroom's house to offer gifts. The skill wherewith Ramsay dovetailed his work into that of his royal predecessor, and developed the king's characters along lines fully in accord with their inception, is very remarkable. There is a Rabelaisian element in the headlong fun and broad rough-and-tumble humour Ramsay introduces into his portion of the poem, but it is not discordant with the king's ideas. The whole piece is almost photographic in the vividness of the several portraits; the 'moment' of delineation selected for each being that best calculated to afford a clue to the type of character. The following picture of the 'reader,' or church precentor in Roman Catholic times, has often been admired, as almost Chaucerian, for its force and truth—

'The latter-gae of haly rhime,
Sat up at the boord head,
And a' he said 'twas thought a crime
To contradict indeed.
For in clerk lear he was right prime,
And could baith write and read,
And drank sae firm till ne'er a styme
He could keek on a bead
Or book that day.'

The coarseness of the pieces cannot be denied. Still, withal, there is a robust, manly strength in the ideas and a picturesque force in the vocabulary that covers a multitude of sins. His picture of morning has often been compared with that of Butler in Hudibras, but the advantage undoubtedly lies with Ramsay. Butler describes the dawn as follows—

'The sun had long since in the lap
Of Thetis taken out his nap,
And, like a lobster boil'd, the morn
From black to red began to turn.'

Ramsay, in his description, says—

'Now frae th' east neuk o' Fife the dawn
Speel'd westlines up the lift;
Carles wha heard the cock had crawn,
Begoud to rax and rift;
And greedy wives, wi' girning thrawn,
Cry'd "Lasses, up to thrift";
Dogs barkèd, and the lads frae hand
Bang'd to their breeks like drift,
Be break o' day.'

It must be remembered, the poem was addressed to rustics, who would neither have understood nor appreciated anything of a higher or less broadly Hogarthian nature. In Christ's Kirk on the Green we have stereotyped to all time a picture of manners unsurpassed for vigour and accuracy of detail, to which antiquarians have gone, and will go, for information that is furnished in no other quarter.