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 _Admetus_ of Boccaccio; in the introductory act of the _Orfeo_ of Politian, written in 1475, and 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 _Sacrificio Favola Pastorale_ of Agostino de Beccari, afterwards published in _Il Parnasso Italiano_. They followed the _Aminta_ of Tasso and the _Filli di Sciro_ 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 Marot, with his _Complaint of Louise of Savoy_, belonging the honour, as Professor Morley says, of producing the first French pastoral. It invaded all the fine arts,--music, painting, sculpture, romance, were all in turn conquered by it. From France it spread to England and to Scotland, and thereafter a flood of shepherds and shepherdesses, of Strephons and Chloes, of Damons, Phyllises, and Delias, spread over literature, of which the evidences in England are Spenser's _Shepherds' Calendar_, Sidney's _Arcadia_; and in Scotland, Robert Henryson's _Robene and Makyne_. Nor did Milton disdain this form for his _Lycidas_; Pope also affected it, as well as Ambrose Philips; while, under the title of _The Shepherd's Week_, Gay produced one of the most charming of his many charming works, in which our age, by consigning them to oblivion, has deliberately deprived itself of genuine poetic enjoyment. To the extent of the name, and of that only, was Ramsay influenced by his time. As regards all else he struck out a new line altogether.