This, however, was the fashion in vogue, and to it our poet had to conform. In _Richy and Sandy_, in _Robert, Richy, and Sandy_, and in his earlier pastorals generally, we seem to see the poet struggling to rid himself of the conventional prejudices against painting rural nature in the real, and in favour of 'a golden-age rusticity' purely imaginary. Not by this is it implied that I claim for our poet the credit of first insisting on reverting to nature for the study of scenes and character. The same conviction, according to Lowell, was entertained by Spenser, and his _Shepherds' Calendar_ was a manifestation, however imperfect and unsatisfactory, of his desire to hark back to nature for inspiration. In _Keitha_ the same incongruity, as noted above, is visible. The poem in question, with that on the _Marriage of the Earl of Wemyss_, can neither be ranked as conventional pastoral nor as pure pastoral, according to Ramsay's later style. We note the 'Colins' and 'Ringans,' the 'shepherd's reeds' and 'shepherd's weeds,' and the picture of ----'the singing shepherd on the green Armyas hight, wha used wi' tunefu' lay To please the ear when he began to play,' --an imitation of Milton's immortal lines in _Comus_, which are too well known to need quotation. All of a piece this with the 'golden-age pastoral.' In the same poems, however, occur intimations that the incongruity was perceived by the author, but that, as yet, he did not see any means of remedying the uniform monotony of the conventional form. The leaven was at work in Ramsay's mind, but so far it only succeeded in influencing but the smallest moiety of the lump. In the _Masque_, written in celebration of the marriage of the Duke of Hamilton, the sentiments expressed are wholly different. Written subsequently to _The Gentle Shepherd_, Ramsay exhibited in it his increased technical deftness, and how much he had profitted by the experience gained in producing his great pastoral. The _Masque_, albeit professedly a dramatic pastoral, entirely abjures the lackadaisical shepherds and shepherdesses of conventional pastoral, and, as a poem of pure imagination, reverts to the ancient mythology for the _dramatis personæ_. All these pieces, however, though they exhibit a facility in composition, a fecundity of imagination, a skilful adaptation of theme to specific metrical form, a rare human sympathy, and a depth of pathos as natural in expression as it was genuine in its essence, are only, so to speak, the preludes to _The Gentle Shepherd_. In the latter, Ramsay's matured principles of pastoral composition are to be viewed where best their relative importance can be estimated, namely, when put into practice.