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

88 FAMOUS SCOTS
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 Lucken-
booths' 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 accom-
pHshed, 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