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

22 FAMOUS SCOTS
English literature such gaps recur, though not with
any definite regularity—for example, after the death
of Chaucer and Gower, when the prosaic numbers of
Occleve and Lydgate were the sole representatives
of England's imaginative pre-eminence ; and the penultimate
and ultimate decades of last century, when
Hayley was regarded as their acknowledged master by
the younger school of poets. In Scotland, it is to be
noted, as Sir George Douglas points out in his standard
work, Minor Scottish Poets, that from 1617, the date
of the publication of Drummond's Forth Feasting, until
1 721, when Ramsay's first volume saw the light, no
singer even of mediocre power appeared in Scotland.
There were editions of many of the poems of James I.,
Dunbar, Stirling, Drummond, and Sempill, which Ramsay
may have seen. But he was more likely to have gained
the knowledge we know he possessed of the early
literature of his country from the recitals by fireside
7'aconteurs, and from the printed sheets, or broadsides,
hawked about the rural districts of Scotland during the
closing decades of the seventeenth and the initial ones
of the eighteenth centuries. From specimens of these
which I have seen, it is evident that Henryson's Robene
and Makyn, Dunbar's Merle and the Nighti?igale and the
Thistle and the Rose, with several of Drummond's and
Stirling's poems, were circulated in this way, thus becom-
ing famiharly known in rural districts where the volumes
of these authors never could have penetrated. On these
broadsides, then, it must have been that the dormant
poetical gifts of the youthful Ramsay were fed, and in after
years he showed his liking for this form of publication by
issuing his own earlier poems in the same way.