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

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FAMOUS SCOTS
supreme though his genius was over his predecessors,
nor Scott, revelling as he did in patriotic sentiments as
his dearest possession, can rival Ramsay in the absolute
truth wherewith he has painted Scottish rustic life. He
is at one and the same time the Teniers and the Claude
of Scottish pastoral—the Teniers, in catching with subtle
sympathetic insight the precise 'moments' and inci-
dents in the life of his characters most suitable for repre-
sentation ;
the Claude, for the almost photographic truth
of his reproductions of Scottish scenery.
That Ramsay was influenced by the spirit of his age
cannot be denied, but he was sufficiently strong, both
intellectually and imaginatively, to yield to that influence
only so far as it was helpful to him in the inspiration of
his great work, but to resist it when it would have
imposed the fetters of an absurd mannerism upon the
' machinery ' and the ' atmosphere ' of his pastoral. The
last decades of the seventeenth, and the first two or
three of the eighteenth centuries, were periods when
pastoral poetry was in fashion. Italian and French
literary modes were supreme. Modern pastoral may
be said to have taken its rise in the Adnietus of
Boccaccio; in the introductory act of the Orfeo of
Politian, written in 1475, ^^d termed Pastorale, and in
the Arcadia of Jacopo Sanazzara. But, according to Dr.
Burney, the first complete pastoral drama prepared for
the stage was the Sacrijicio Favola Pastorale of Agostino
de Beccari, afterwards published in II Pariiasso Italiaiio.
They followed the Aminta of Tasso and the Filli di
Scii'O of Bonarelli in the beginning of the seventeenth
century. In Italy and France, thereafter, pastoral
became the literary mode for the time being ;
to Clement