Difficult it is to make any exact classification of Ramsay's works, inasmuch as he frequently applied class-names to poems to which they were utterly inapplicable. Thus many of his elegies and epistles were really satires, while more than one of those poems he styled satires were rather of an epic character than anything else. By the reader, therefore, certain shortcomings in classification must be overlooked, as Ramsay's poetical terminology (if the phrase be permissible) was far from being exact.

As I have previously remarked, Ramsay's studies in poetry, in addition to the earlier Scottish verse, had lain largely in the later Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods. In these, Milton, Cowley, Dryden, and Pope were his favourites, and their influence is to be traced throughout his satires. To Boileau he had paid some attention, though his acquaintance with French literature was more through the medium of translations, than by drawing directly from the fountainhead. Ramsay's satires exhibit all the virtues of correct mediocrity. Their versification is smooth, and they generally scan accurately: the ideas are expressed pithily, at times epigrammatically and wittily. The faults and foibles satirised in most cases are those that richly merited the satiric lash. Yet, all these merits granted, the reader feels something to be lacking. The reason is not far to seek. Ramsay never felt at home in what may be termed 'polished satire.' He was as much out of place as would a low comedian on being suddenly called upon to undertake 'drawing-room comedy.' Perpetually would he feel the inclination to rap out one of the rousing, though vulgar, jokes that inevitably evoked a roar of applause from the gallery, and sooner or later he would give way to it. Ramsay was in precisely the same position. The consequence is that in the Morning Interview, professedly an imitation of Pope's Rape of the Lock, there are incongruous images introduced, for the purpose of relieving the piece by humorous comparisons, which offend the taste even of the most cursory reader. Such allusions as that to 'soft fifteen on her feet-washing night,' and others of a cognate character, are entirely out of place in 'polished satire.' If he attempted the type of composition, he ought to have conformed to its rules.

Of course, Ramsay wrote certain satires, The Last Speech of a Wretched Miser and the like, in the Scots vernacular, and addressed to the lower classes in the community, where his genius is seen at its best, because dealing with 'low-life satire' and the types of character he loved most of all to paint. But his Wealth or the Woody, his Health—a poem addressed to Lord Stair, his Scribblers Lashed, The General Mistake, The Epistle to Lord Ramsay, and the Rise and Fall of Stocks in 1720, exhibit Ramsay's genius moving in fetters. His touch lacks piquancy and epigrammatic incisiveness,—lacks, too, that determinate deftness so characteristic of Horace, as well as those subtle nuances of double-meaning wherein Pope and Arbuthnot excelled, and of which the latter's terrible 'Epitaph on Colonel Chartres' is a favourable example. Ramsay hits with the hammer of Thor, when he should tap as lightly as 'twere reproof administered by a fair one with her fan. Witness his portrait of Talpo in Health—a poem in many respects one of Ramsay's best. With what airy satiric touches Pope or Gay would have dashed off the character. Note the laboured strokes wherewith Ramsay produces his picture—

But Ramsay's distinguishing and saving characteristic in satire was the breadth and felicity of his humour. To satire, however, humour is less adapted than wit, and of wit Ramsay had, in a comparative sense, but a scanty endowment. He was not one of those who could say smart things, though he could depict a humorous episode or situation as felicitously as anyone of his age. Like Rabelais, he was a humorist, not a wit, and his satires suffered accordingly. Perhaps the best of his satires is The Last Speech of a Wretched Miser, wherein his humour becomes bitingly sardonic. The wretch's address to his pelf is very powerful—

Different, indeed, is the case when we come to consider Ramsay as a song-writer and a lyrist. To him the former title rather than the latter is best applicable. This is not the place to note the resemblances and the differences between the French chanson, the German lied, the Italian canzÓne, and the English song or lyric. But as indicating a distinction between the two last terms, Mr. F. T. Palgrave, in the introduction to his invaluable Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, regards a 'lyric' as a poem turning on 'some single thought, feeling, or situation'; Mr. H. M. Posnett, in his thoughtful volume on Comparative Literature, remarks that the lyric has varied from sacred or magical hymns and odes of priest bards, only fulfilling their purpose when sung, and perhaps never consigned to writing at all, down to written expressions of individual feeling from which all accompaniments of dance or music have been severed. But approximately defined, a lyric may be said to be a poem—short, vivid, and expressive of a definite emotion, appealing more to the eye than with any ultimate view of being set to music; a song, as a composition appealing more to the ear, wherein the sentiments are more leisurely expressed, with the intention of being accompanied by music. Mr. E. H. Stoddard, in the preface to his English Madrigals, defines a lyric 'as a simple, unstudied expression of thought, sentiment, or passion; a song, its expression according to the mode of the day.' The essence of a lyric is point, grace, and symmetry; of a song, fluency, freedom, and the expression of sympathetic emotions.

Ramsay, according to this basis of distinction, was, as has been said, rather a song-writer than a lyrist. The works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, abound in lyrics, but contain comparatively few songs, in the modern sense of the word, in which we speak of the songs of Burns, Moore, and Barry Cornwall. Ramsay, in his songs, sacrificed everything to mode. In nine cases out of ten he had the tune for the song in his mind when he was writing the words. In Scotland, as is well known, there is an immense body of music, some of it ancient, some of it comparatively modern, though none of it much later than the Restoration. That was the mine wherein Ramsay dug long and deep for the music for his Tea-Table Miscellany. To those ancient tunes he supplied words—words that to this day remain as a memorial of the skill and sympathy wherewith he wedded the spirit of the melodies to language in keeping with their national character.

To a soupÇon of diffuseness the poet must, however, plead guilty—guilty, moreover, because of the invincible temptation to pad out a line now and then 'for crambo's sake' when the ideas ran short. Ramsay possessed all the qualities constituting a song-writer of great and varied genius. His work exhibits ease and elasticity of rhythm, liquid smoothness of assonance, sympathetic beauty of thought, with subtle skill in wedding sense to sound. Though his verse lacked the dainty finish of Herrick and Waller, the brilliant facet-like sparkle of Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace, the tender grace of Sedley, and the half-cynical, half-regretful, but wholly piquant epicureanism, of Rochester and Denham, yet Ramsay had a charm all his own. Witness the 'Lass o' Patie's Mill'; is it not entirely sui generis?

Take also 'Bessy Bell and Mary Gray'; what a rich fancy and charming humour plays throughout the piece, united to a keen knowledge of the human heart—

or that verse in his 'Scots Cantata,' with what simplicity, yet with what true pathos, is it not charged?—

George Withers' famous lines, 'Shall I, wasting in despaire,' are not a whit more pathetic. Then if we desire humour pure and unadulterated, where can be found a more delightful lilt than 'The Widow'?

Or if you affect a dash of satire in your songs, what more to your taste than—

Or if the reader desire the wells of his deepest sympathies to be stirred, what more truly pathetic than his 'Auld Lang Syne,' which supplied Burns with many of the ideas for his immortal song; or his version of 'Lochaber No More'—

—a song than which to this day few are more popular among Scotsmen. As a song-writer Ramsay appeals to all natures and all temperaments. He was almost entirely free from the vice of poetic conventionality. He wrote what seemed to him best, undeterred by the dread of offending against poetic canons, or the principles of this, that, or the other school of poetry. He was a natural singer, not one formed by art—a singer, voicing his patriotic enthusiasm in many a lay, that for warmth of national feeling, for intense love of his species, for passionate expression of the tenderer emotions, is little behind the best of the songs of Robert Burns. Granted that his was not the power to sweep, like Burns, or BÉranger, or Heine, with masterful hand over the entire gamut of human passions; that to him was not given, as to them, the supremely keen insight into the workings of the human heart, and the magical witchery of wedding sense to sound so indissolubly, that alter but a word in the texture of the lines and the poem is ruined. Yet, in his province, Ramsay was dowered with a gift but little less notable, that of portraying so faithfully the natural beauties of his country, and the special characteristics of his countrymen, that, in a greater degree even than Burns,—were Ramsay's songs only recognised as his, in place of being ascribed to others,—he has a right to the proud title of Scotland's national song-writer. Not for a moment do I seek to place Ramsay on a pedestal co-equal with Burns—that were an error worse than folly; not for a moment do I seek to detract from the transcendent merit of our great national poet. But though I do not rate Burns the less, I value Ramsay the more, when I say that, had there been no Ramsay there might have been no Burns nor any Fergusson—at least, the genius of the two last named poets would not have found an adequate vehicle of expression lying readymade to their hand. Ramsay it was who virtually rendered the Scots vernacular a possible medium for the use of Burns; and this service, unconsciously rendered by the lesser genius to the greater, is generously acknowledged by the latter, who could not but be aware that, as his own star waxed higher and yet higher from the horizon line of popularity, that of his elder rival waned more and more. Therefore his noble panegyric on Ramsay is but a tribute to his 'father in song'—