soon in a second edition. Meanwhile his metrical eulogies and occasional satires and moral discourses attracted influential patrons. He also entered into verse correspondence with poetical friends, notably with William Hamilton (1665?–1751) [q. v.] When at length he published his collected poems with an Horatian epilogue in 1721, he secured a strong list of subscribers, as well as the assistance of various friendly poets, whose commendatory verses increased his popularity. In his preface he thrusts with satirical pungency at certain detractors; their cavillings, he asserts, ‘are such that several of my friends allege I wrote them myself to make the world believe I have no foes but fools.’ His portrait by Smibert, ‘the Scottish Hogarth,’ was prefixed to the volume. The work realised four hundred guineas. It was followed in 1722 by ‘Fables and Tales,’ which was reissued with additions in 1730, with a preface in which Ramsay acknowledges indebtedness to La Fontaine and La Motte, but says nothing of what he owed to the ‘Freiris of Berwick’ (assigned to Dunbar) in his ‘Monk and Miller's Wife,’ the masterpiece of the collection. A ‘Tale of Three Bonnets’ of 1722 is a spirited if somewhat unpolished political allegory. In 1723 he published ‘The Fair Assembly,’ a poem of considerable independence of thought and expression, and in 1724 he dedicated to the Earl of Stair a well-conceived and vigorous piece on ‘Health,’ written in heroic couplets.
In 1724–7 Ramsay published three volumes of miscellaneous poems under the title of ‘The Tea-table Miscellany.’ A fourth volume is of doubtful origin. The ‘Miscellany’ includes several English and Scottish traditional ballads, lyrics by various Caroline singers, along with a number of songs and miscellaneous pieces by Ramsay himself and his friends the Hamiltons and others. Notable among Ramsay's songs for freshness and grace are ‘The Yellow-haired Laddie,’ ‘The Lass o'Patie's Mill,’ and ‘Lochaber no more.’ During the same years (1724–7) he published in two volumes, mainly from the Bannatyne MS., ‘The Evergreen,’ which reached a second edition in 1761. This anthology, which he describes as ‘Scots poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600,’ represents the author of ‘Chrysts-Kirke,’ Dunbar, and other Scottish ‘makaris;’ and contains one remarkable political satire, ‘The Vision,’ which, though disguised, is no doubt Ramsay's own, and is his best sustained lyric.
A pastoral entitled ‘Patie and Roger,’ inscribed to his patron and friend Josiah Burchet, prominently figured among his poems of 1721 along with other efforts in a like direction—romantic and elegiac pastorals, a pastoral ode, and a pastoral masque. His friends urged him to elaborate a systematic pastoral poem. In a letter of 8 April 1724, addressed to William Ramsay of Templehall, he dwelt on his reminiscences and love of the country, and stated that he was engaged on a ‘Dramatick Pastoral,’ which, if successful, might ‘cope with “Pastor Fido” and “Aminta”’ (Chambers, Biogr. Dict. of Eminent Scotsmen). The result was the appearance in 1725 of his pastoral drama, ‘The Gentle Shepherd,’ which achieved instant success. It reached a second edition in 1726, and a tenth in 1750. In 1729 it was represented in Edinburgh after ‘The Orphan,’ Ramsay furnishing an epilogue. It is better adapted for the study than the stage, in large measure because ideal actors for it are simply impossible. The action is slow and languid, and the interest aroused is mainly sentimental. At first it was without songs, and the lyrics afterwards interspersed are not brilliant. The poem is remarkable for its quick and subtle appreciation of rural scenery, customs, and characters; and, if the plot is slightly artificial, the development is skilful and satisfactory. In its honest, straightforward appreciation of beauty in nature and character, and its fascinating presentation of homely customs, it will bear comparison with its author's Italian models, or with similar efforts of Gay. Ramsay, as Leigh Hunt avers, ‘is in some respects the best pastoral writer in the world’ (A Jar of Honey, chap. viii.).
In 1726 Ramsay removed from the High Street to a shop in the Luckenbooths, where he displayed as his insignia models of the heads of Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden. Here he flourished as a bookseller, and started a circulating library, the first institution of the kind in Scotland.
In 1728 he published a second quarto volume of his poems, including ‘The Gentle Shepherd,’ and a masque with resonant lyrics on the ‘Nuptials of the Duke of Hamilton.’ An octavo edition of this work appeared in 1729, and it was reprinted with a new issue of the ‘Poems’ of 1721 in London in 1731 and in Dublin in 1733. A collection of Scots proverbs appeared in 1737. Meanwhile his shop was a favourite meeting-place for men of letters. He was visited by Gay when in Scotland with the Duke of Queensberry, and explained to him the hard Scotticisms in the ‘Gentle Shepherd,’ in order to assist Pope in reading the work, of which ‘he was a great admirer’ (Chalmers, Life of Ramsay). With Gay and Pope he thenceforth corresponded, and the Hamil-
