WE go back to the beginning of the eighteenth century in
order to pick up the northern threads in the first verse of
Allan Ramsay. One almost needs to have spent some years
in the north country to do justice to him and the effect he had
on his next successors. He had humour, vigour, and some
sense of the realities of poetry. He wrote from the life and
to the life. His power is seen in the first sketch for his Gentle
Shepherd, the eclogue he printed in 1720. There we have the
rudeness of the old carole and the peasants' unabashed love-
rhyme. It was traditional in the north, and Allan Ramsay
had every chance of knowing the popular songs in country
and town. His Edinburgh wig-maker's shop was as good as
a London tavern for collecting humours; his first songs and
ballads were sent out in broad-sheets, and he did service in
publishing an edition of Christ's Kirk at the Green with a canto
of his own added (he wrote yet another canto for a later re-
issue). Then for his book of nurture, he had Watson anthology
of Scots Songs, Ancient and Modern, which spurred him, like
other northern rhymers, to write. In his writings he brings
actual life back to the pastoral, but he wants imagination.
Burns was wise in preferring Fergusson to him. The Tea
Table Miscellany is, no more than some other eighteenth-
century collections, an unmixed pleasure to the reader of to-day.
Parts of it read like uninspired Burns; but in other parts the
melody, especially where it is built on an older foundation, is
genuine and inspiriting. The song of Peggy in the Gentle
Shepherd moves one like one of the old Scotch airs--

"My Peggy is a young thing,
Just enter'd in a teens,

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