Allan Ramsay. [A biography.] - National Library of Scotland

126 FAMOUS SCOTS
honour to any poet. The characters are well drawn, the
incidents affecting, the scenery and manners lively and
just' And one of Dr. Blair's successors in the Chair of
Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of
Edinburgh,—a man and a Scotsman who, in his day, has
done more than any other to foster amongst our youth
a love of all that is great and good and beautiful in our
literature ; a teacher, too, whose students, whom he has
imbued with his own noble spirit, are scattered over the
world, from China to Peru,—Emeritus-Professor David
Masson, has observed in his charming Edinburgh Sketches :
'The poem was received with enthusiastic admiration.
There had been nothing like it before in Scottish
literature, or in any other : nothing so good of any kind
that could be voted even similar ; and this was at once
the critical verdict.'
To anyone who will carefully compare the /dy//s of
Theocritus, the Eclogues of Virgil, and the Aniinfa of
Tasso, with Ramsay's great poem, the conviction will be
driven home,—in the face, it may be, of many deeply-
rooted prejudices,—that the same inspiration which, like
a fiery rivulet, runs through the three former master-
pieces, is present also in the latter — that inspiration
being the perfect and unbroken homogeneity existing
between the local atmosphere of the poem and the
characteristics of the dramatis personce. This fact it is
which renders the Aminta so imperishable a memorial of
Tasso's genus ; for it is Italian pastoral, redolent of the
air, and smacking of the very soil of sunny Italy. The
symmetrical perfection of The Gentle Shepherd, in like
manner, is due to the fact that the feelings and desires
and impulses of the characters in the pastoral are those