Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets

And pastoral poetry was the fashion of the time. Ramsay himself had made various other attempts before he lighted upon this quite legitimate strain. We read with a shudder of comic horror a dialogue "On the Death of Mr. Addison," in which the interlocutors are "Richy and Sandy," to wit, Sir Richard Steele and Mr. Alexander Pope! who bewail their loss, which is far worse than misfortune to their flocks, or the scorn of their lasses, being no less than this, that "Addie, that played and sang so sweet, is dead"! The poet received, indeed, a complimentary copy of verses upon this production, in which he is thus addressed—

"Well fare thee, Allan, who in mother tongueSo sweetly hath of breathless Addy sung:His endless fame thy nat'ral genius fired,And thou hast written as if he inspired.'Richy and Sandy,' who do him survive,Long as thy rural stanzas last, shall live."

The grotesque in poetry could scarcely go farther. Mr. Burchett, who addressed good Allan in these rhymes, was the refined gentleman who put the wigmaker's poems into English. "Richy and Sandy" was contained in a volume which Ramsay published by subscription, and which brought him in, to the immense admiration of his biographer, four hundred guineas sterling, which no doubt was a very admirable recompense indeed for so many foolish verses. This volume contained, among other things, Ramsay's bold continuation of "Christ's Kirk on the Green," which the same biographer describes as "King James the First's ludicrous poem," in which the poet of the High Street skilfully turns the poet-monarch's rustic revel into a vulgar village debauch. But these pieces of presumption and non-comprehension are happily all dead and gone, and Ramsay's reputation rests upon a happier basis. It is not a small matter to have pervaded a whole country with the simple measures of a rural idyll—a poem in which there are not perhaps five lines of poetry, but which is fragrant of the moors and fields, full of rustic good sense and feeling, and as free of harm or offence as the most severe moralist could desire. This latter quality is all the more remarkable as it belongs to an age not at all squeamish in these matters, and to which the frankest assaults upon a heroine's virtue were supposed to be quite adapted for the treatment of fiction. But there is no Lovelace in The Gentle Shepherd; the rustic love-making is ardent, but simple and without guile. The swains respect as much as they admire their nymphs: the nymphs are confident in their frank innocence, and fear no evil; the old fathers sit cheerful and sagacious at their doors and indulge in their cracks, not less pleased with themselves and their share of life than are the young ones with their livelier pleasures: the cows breathe balmy breath into the wild freshness of the pastoral scenery. There is scarcely anything affected, false, or even stilted in the poetical dialogues which, with a little licence for the verse and something for the sentiment, come naturally and simply from the wholesome, genial young shepherds and their sweethearts. To say this is to say as much as the most fastidious critic could desire from such a composition.

Nor is it spoiled by classic models or similes. How Ramsay succeeded in keeping Venus and Cupid out of it, in forgetting all eclogues and pastorals, Virgil or Theocritus, and indulging in nothing that was out of place in Scotland, it is hard to tell. The Mantuan bard, the oaten reed, Philomela and her songs, Hymen, Ganymede, Bacchus, and all the Olympian band disport themselves in his other verses: but The Gentle Shepherd is void of those necessary adjuncts of the eighteenth-century muse. The wimpling burn is never called Helicon nor the heathery braes Parnassus, and nothing can be more genuine, more natural, and familiar than the simple scenery of Habbie's Howe—in which the eager critics identified every scene, and the sensible poet enhanced his art by a perfect truth to nature. The Gentle Shepherd is perhaps the only so-called Pastoral of which this can be said, and it must have required no small amount of self-denial to dispense with all those accustomed auxiliaries. Even the sentiments are not too highflown for the locality. If they are perhaps more completely purified from everything gross or fleshly than would have been the case in fact, the poet has not been afraid to temper passion with those considerations which naturally rise to the mind of the young farmer in choosing his mate. His Peggy, though she has beauty enough to make up for every deficiency, has also "with innocence the wale of sense."

"In better sense without a flaw,As in her beauty, far excels them a'."

She, on her part, anticipates not raptures and blisses in her marriage, but the hallowed usages of life.

"I'll employ with pleasure all my artTo keep him cheerful, and secure his heart.At e'en, when he comes weary frae the hill,I'll have a' things made ready to his will;In winter when he toils through wind and rain,A bleezin' ingle, and a clean hearth-stane;And soon as he's flung by his plaid and staff,The seething pot's be ready to tak' aff."

Ramsay's sobriety here shines in comparison with all the fables and idylls of his age. It is entirely natural, living, and of his time. Patie plays upon a flute of "plum-tree made with ivory virls round," which he bought from the proceeds of "sax good fat lambs" sold at the West Port, instead of the rustic pipe or oaten reed, which in his heart of hearts no doubt our wigmaker thought much finer. Thus he secured his audience, who knew nothing about oaten reeds, and instead of the plaudits of the dilettanti secured the true fame of popular comprehension and knowledge. Burns was far higher and nobler in genius, and the worship awarded to him by his countrymen is one of the favourite subjects of gibe and jest among writers on the other side of the Tweed. But even Burns had not the universal acceptance, the absolute command of his audience, which belonged to honest Allan. There were politicians and there were ecclesiastics, and good people neither one nor the other, who shook their troubled heads over the ploughman who would not confine himself to the daisy of the field or the Saturday night's observances of the Cottar, but was capable of Holy Willie and the Holy Fair. But Ramsay had no gainsayer, and The Gentle Shepherd was the first of books in most Lowland homes. Its construction, its language and sentiments, are all as commonplace as could be imagined, but it is a wholesome, natural, pure, and unvarnished tale, and the mind that brought it forth (well aware of what pleased his public) and the public who relished and bought it, give us a better view of the honest tastes and morals of the period than anything else which has come to us from that time. There has always been a good deal of drinking, and other vices still less consistent with purity of heart, in Scotland. Now and then we are frightened by statistics that give us a very ill name; but it is difficult to believe that if the national heart had been corrupt The Gentle Shepherd could have afforded it such universal and wholesome delight.

It is curious to find two very ordinary and prosaic tradesmen thus in the front of popular literature in the beginning of the eighteenth century. There is no comparison between Allan Ramsay and Samuel Richardson in respect to genius. That humdrum old bookseller evoked by some miraculous art the most delicate and lovely of creations out of the midst of revolting and disgusting circumstances. Fielding was a far finer gentleman, a much more accomplished writer, even a greater genius; but there are none of his women who are fit to tie the shoes of Clarissa Harlowe, to whom indeed there exists no fit companion out of Shakspeare. Our good-humoured Allan had no such gift, but he had the art of producing one spotless and lifelike tale, absolutely true to nature and within the power of verification by any reader, which was accepted by a whole country with enthusiasm as the best rendering of its rural life. We doubt if there ever was a greater literary triumph.

Ramsay would not have been the true man he was to every tradition and inheritance of his class had he not shown a modest complacency in his own success. He was assailed, we are told, by nameless critics, who put forth "A Block for Allan Ramsay's Wigs," "Remarks on Ramsay's Writings," and so forth—and retaliated, not without dignity: "Dull foes," he says, "nought at my hand deserve."

"The blundering fellows ne'er forget,About my trade to sport their fancies,As if, forsooth, I would look blate,At what my honour most advances."Auld Homer sang for's daily bread;Surprising Shakspeare fin'd the wool;Great Virgil creels and baskets made;And famous Ben employed the trowel."Yet Dorset, Lansdown, Lauderdale,Bucks, Stirling, and the son of Angus,Even monarchs, and o' men the wale,Were proud to be enrolled amang us."

It is true that Homer and Shakspeare might be surprised to find themselves rubbing elbows with the wigmaker of the High Street. Still, he shows a fine spirit, and his very strut is respectable.

ALLAN RAMSAY'S HOUSE

In the end of his life, when the author of The Gentle Shepherd by all his trades, both as poet and shopkeeper, had amassed a fortune, he built himself a house in the most glorious position which poet could have chosen. It is on the crest of the hill, a little way below the castle, and is still to be seen from Princes Street—a distinct feature in the picturesque and varied line of building. He is said, though on what authority we are not told, to have applied to the Crown for ground enough to build a cage for his burd, meaning his wife: which is supposed to be the reason why he built his house in an octagonal shape like a cage: his wife, however, did not live long enough to inhabit it. Additions and emendations have been made, so that there is no great peculiarity in the form of the old square house on the summit of the green slope, just clear of the rocks of the castle, as it is visible to-day. When it was built the new town of Edinburgh was not yet dreamed of, and nothing disturbed the panorama of green fields that lay between Edinburgh and the Firth. The town wall was falling into ruin, yet still existed in fragmentary towers and ramparts here and there, and low down in the depths of the descent, which was not so precipitous there as under the castle, the high houses and green braes were reflected in the quiet waters of the North Loch. From thence the fields and scattered farmhouses, the Calton Hill in unadorned greenness, a church spire and a cluster of village roofs here and there, led the eye to the shining of the Scottish Sea, the great water with its islands, the coast of Fife with its dotted line of little fishing towns, the two green Lomonds standing softly distinct against the misty line of more distant hills. It was the same view that moved Fitz-Eustace to ecstasy, still but little changed in the eighteenth century from what it had been in the sixteenth. And picturesque as Edinburgh still continues to be in spite of many modern disadvantages, it was no doubt infinitely more picturesque then, crowning the rocky ridge, with straggling lanes and wynds dropping steeply down into the valley—opening here and there a glimpse of the green country and the shimmer of the Firth—while on the edge of the hill, from all the high windows, the wide landscape softened into distance on every side, into the far-off broken ranges of mountains and cloudy rolling vapours, and the far-retiring sweep of a horizon traversed by all the lights and all the storms—a wide world of air and space and infinite variety. The life of our busy modern world had scarcely yet invaded that city on the hill. It stood isolated on the height of its rock, reigning from that domination over all the tranquil country: while within its lines still thronged and clamoured an active noisy population cooped up and packed together as if it were still unsafe to stray away out of shelter of the walls, all the faculties and trades, all the wit and the wealth, one above another, with the concentration, the picturesqueness, the universal acquaintance and familiarity of a mediæval town. And beautiful as the prospect must have been from those high-built houses, it could scarcely have exceeded the sight of the old Edinburgh of the kings from without, standing high above the level of the soil, with the open crown of St. Giles's rising over its grey heights, its walls broken down by careless peace and wellbeing, its tall tenements standing up like a line of castles. And in the night with its glimmer of household lights at every window hanging high in mid air, repeated with a gleam in the waters beneath and in the stars above, which sparkled keen out of the northern blue, and the mist of habitation, the smoke of the fires and the lamps hanging over all—confusing outlines, yet revealing all the more brightly a higher and a higher altitude of human lights—what a wonderful sight rising sheer out of the green and silent champaign below!

Such was royal Edinburgh still, when the shopkeeper-poet, with his jokes and his quips, and his good-humoured self-esteem, and certainty of his own power, settled down in Ramsay Lodge. It would be well if all poets had as prosperous and as fair a retirement for their old age. He lived for some time in his quaint self-contained (according to the equally quaint Scotch phraseology) birdcage upon the top of the hill, and enjoyed his celebrity and his ease and the pleasant conviction that "I the best and fairest please." His only son, the second Allan Ramsay, was a painter of some reputation, and he had daughters to care for him and keep his home cheerful as long as he lived. A man more satisfied with his lot could not be. His chirrup of self-satisfaction, the flattery, yet familiarity, of his address to all the noble lords and lairds, the judges and advocates, his laugh of jovial optimism and personal content, belong perfectly to the character of the comfortable citizen, "in fair round belly with good capon lined," and the shopkeeper's rather than the poet's desire to please. One can better fancy him at the door of his shop looking down the High Street jocose and beaming, with a joke for the Lord President and for the Cadie alike, hand in glove with all the Town Council, with a compliment for every fair lady or smiling lass that tripped by under her tartan screen, delighted with himself and all around him—than retired in his garden on the Castle Hill, though with all the variations of the heavens and magnificence of the landscape before his eyes. He had no doubt the admiration of that landscape which is never wanting to an Edinburgh citizen, a part of the creed to which he is born; but the homely limits of the green glens and knowes, the wimpling burn, the washing-green, the laird's hospitable house behind, were more in Allan's way when he wanted any relaxation from the even more attractive town. The High Street and Habbie's Howe are the true centres of his soul.

It would be wrong not to note the collections of songs which made his name dear to all the pleasant singers both of drawing-room and cottage. It is a strange peculiarity in a nation possessing a characteristic and melodious popular music of its own like Scotland, to find how little place music as a science, or even in its more serious developments, has ever had in the country. Nothing can be more sweet, more touching, more tender, than the native growth of Scottish song—nothing more full of fun and spirit than the brilliant dance music which, like the song, seems to have sprung spontaneous from the soil. And no country has ever more loved both songs and strathspeys, or clung to them with greater devotion. It would be perhaps impossible for the most learned to decide between the rival claims of Scotland and Ireland in respect to the airs which seem native to both; but Ireland has always laboured under the disadvantage of being far less homogeneous than Scotland, and certainly, before the time of Moore at least, her native songs did not belong to all classes as in the sister country. And Scotland has always through all ages (previous to the present age) preferred her own songs to every other. During the eighteenth century, when Edinburgh was almost more completely the centre of society than ever before, the old tunes were sung by ladies as much as by maid-servants, and the delicate old spinets performed a soft accompaniment to ballads of the "Ewebuchting" and of the "Corn Rigs," and prolonged the pathetic notes of "Waly, waly" and the trembling wail of the "Flowers of the Forest" in the finest houses as in the humblest. Music, more properly so called, the art which has gradually made its way from being a modest handmaiden of poetry to full rivalship, if not a half-implied superiority, was already a scientific pursuit in England; and though the Italian opera aroused a violent opposition, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee called forth the gibes of the wits, there existed a vigorous English school of learned musicians, and Handel and Haydn found an audience not incapable of appreciating their best works. But while this development went on in London, Scotland still sang her ancient simple melodies, and contemned everything else with that audacious superiority which is born of ignorance. One might almost imagine that this was the penalty of a national inheritance so ample and so sweet, and that the comparative absence of traditionary music in England opened the heart of the country to strains more ambitious and classical. However it came about, there is no denying that so it was. If there was any Scottish composer at all, his productions were only imitations or modifications of the old airs. Music continued to be represented by the songs of immemorial attraction, the woodnotes wild of nameless minstrels, pure utterance of the soil. Perhaps the absence of music, except in the kindred shape of psalm tunes, which was but another form of popular song, in the Church, was one great prevailing cause of the national insensibility to all more lavish and elaborate strains. But this peculiarity and insensibility had at least one advantage—they kept in constant cultivation a distinct branch of national literature, and one that is always attractive and delightful. I do not think it is too strong an utterance of national partiality to say that the songwriters of Scotland are beyond comparison with those of either of the other united kingdoms. The simplest of the old ditties brought out of the ancient poets contain a grace of genuine poetry and real feeling far above the unmeaning jingle of verse which is the most common utterance of popular song; and the cultivation of this delightful gift has called forth the most tender and artless poems from gentle writers whom nothing but that inspiration could have made to produce what was in them. The pathetic wail of the poor lady who found to her cost that

"Love is bonnie, a little time when it is new,"

but that

"When love's auld it waxeth cauld,And fades away like morning dew";

and that touching lullaby in which the mother hushes the babe whose

"Father wrought her great annoy,"

with its tender and simple refrain—

"It grieves me sore to hear thee weep,"

breathe out of the ancient depths of human trouble with a reserve and simplicity of feeling that seem almost personal. But the kindred inspiration which called forth the two versions of the "Flowers of the Forest" and the ballad of "Auld Robin Gray," along with many more, shows how warm was the impulse to this expression of feelings, which were at once intensified and drawn out of the sphere of revelations too individual by the breath of the melody which carried them forth.

Allan Ramsay has the merit of being the first collector of Scottish song. He was remorseless, like his century, and made the wildest havoc with some of his originals, cutting and slashing as suited his fancy, and adding of his own whenever it pleased him so to do. But with the exception of a number of Strephons and Chloes, not always ungraceful, in the newer fashion, and a sprinkling of ruder verses in which there is more indecency than immorality, the first two volumes of the Tea-table Miscellany are full of merit, and include many delightful simple lyrics, songs which compare most advantageously with the insipid "words" which at this present advanced age are used as a sort of necessary evil to serve the purpose of the music. "Say that our way is only an harmonious speaking of many witty or soft thoughts after the poet has dressed them in four or five stanzas," says Ramsay, with the apology which is a veiled assertion of higher aims, "yet undoubtedly these must relish best with people who have not bestowed much of their time in acquiring a taste for that downright perfect music which requires none or very little of the poet's assistance." And he tells us in the same preface of a letter he has had from America informing him that there too his manual of song has gone, and that his

"Soft verse made to a Scottish airIs often sung by our Virginian fair."

The book is dedicated to the ladies—the Donne qui hanno intelletto d'amore, long supposed to be the final critics and judges of such productions: and is confidently recommended to these "fair singers" for whose "modest eyes and ears," according to the poet (but with notable exceptions, as has been said), they were prepared. The third volume consisted almost exclusively of English songs, among which are many classic verses. If it were but as a stepping-stone to those perfect lyrics, so full of natural truth and feeling, with which Burns afterwards brought to a climax the songs of his country, the Tea-table Miscellany would have a merit of its own.

Ramsay died in 1758, when the troubles of the country were over, the last seeds of insurrection stamped out, and the powerful revolution begun which made the clans loyal to Government and Scotch politicians faithful to the Union. He was buried in the Greyfriars Churchyard, where so many of the most notable of the citizens of Edinburgh were laid. A hundred years or so after, the enlightened community placed his statue in the gardens that lie between the old town and the new. And thus the poet's career was run; it was a prosperous one, full of the success that was most sweet to him; comfort and competence and reputation, at once that of a warm and well-to-do citizen and that of a poet. Few poets have lived to see their productions so popular. The Gentle Shepherd may be said to have been in every cottage in Scotland in its author's lifetime, and his songs were sung by everybody. Nor did this fame interfere with the citizen's well-earned and more substantial reward. The shop in which he began his prosperous career, and which was crowded so continually by eager messengers with their pennies in search of Allan Ramsay's last new piece—the most immediate and one of the most pleasant evidences of success—still exists, with its high steps and broad low windows, in the heart of the old town with which his name is so completely associated; and the quaint square house in which his later days of ease and retirement were spent still keeps its place on the east of the Castle Hill, surveying from its windows the enriched and amplified yet unalterable panorama so dear and beautiful to all Scottish eyes.

ALLAN RAMSAY'S MONUMENT

DOORWAY, LADY STAIR'S CLOSE

CHAPTER II

THE GUEST OF EDINBURGH

Royal Edinburgh, the city of the Scots kings and Parliament, the capital of the ancient kingdom, would seem to have become weary somewhere in the eighteenth century of dwelling alone upon her rock. There were, to be sure, reasons more prosaic for the construction of the New Town, the partner and companion of the old historical city. The population had increased, the desire for comfort and space, and many luxuries unknown to the early citizens of Edinburgh, had developed among the new. It was no longer agreeable to the lawyers and philosophers to be crowded up with the other inhabitants of a common stair, to have the din of street cries and commotion ever in their ears, and the lowest of the population always about their feet, as was inevitable when gentle and simple were piled together in the High Street and Canongate. The old houses might be noble houses when they were finally got at, through many drawbacks and abominations—though in those days there was little appreciation even of the stately beauty of old masonry and ornament—but their surroundings became daily more and more intolerable. And it was an anachronism to coop up a learned, elegant, and refined class, living under the Hanoverian Georges in peace and loyalty, within the circle of walls now broken down and useless, which had been adapted to protect the subjects of the old Scottish Jameses from continual attacks.