Perhaps Fergusson’s fame rests as much upon his unhappy life and early death, and upon the fact that he was a true forerunner of Scotland’s greatest son of genius, as upon the essential merits of his verse. Burns read carefully Fergusson’s poems, admired them greatly, and called the author his “elder brother in the muses.” The higher critics declare that his influence on the poems of Robert Burns, such as “The Holy Fair,” “The Brigs of Ayr,” “On Seeing a Butterfly in the Street,” and “To a Mouse,” is undoubted. Even “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” when read alongside of “The Farmer’s Ingle,” of Fergusson, shows that Burns’s exquisite picture in verse of homely peasant life in Scotland is a firelight reflection of the older original, at which Burns warmed his genius. With less of an immediate intellectual debt, Burns was certainly obligated to an older cultivator of Scottish poetry; who, in large measure, must be credited with the revival of public appreciation of the bards of Caledonia and who helped powerfully to create the climate in which Burns’s genius could blossom and bear fruit. Among the effigies in Edinburgh, city of statues, is that of Allan Ramsay, the poet (1686–1758). When we first saw this work of art, it was comparatively new, having been erected in 1865, by which time national appreciation had ripened. Ramsay must ever hold the gratitude of Scottish people, because he, more than any one else, made the wonderful world of Scottish music known in England and to the nations. He brought together, in “The Tea-Table Miscellany,” a collection of the choicest Scottish songs. He himself was a poetaster, rather than a great lyrist, and throughout his career proved himself a canny business man. In literary history Allan Ramsay achieved two great triumphs. He contributed thus early to the naturalistic reaction of the eighteenth century against the slavery to classicism. As an editor, he furnished the connecting link between the “Makars,” as verse-writers were called in the Scotland of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the poets Fergusson (1751–74) and Burns (1759–96). Ramsay did much to revive interest in vernacular literature. He certainly stimulated an ignorant public to fresh enjoyment. This reaction in Scotland was followed by one in England, for which the publication of Bishop Percy’s “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” furnished a sure foundation. Scotland honored herself when she honored her poet Ramsay. Happy is the nation that appreciates her sons who bid her people look within to find enduring treasure. To Ramsay, the prophet’s words apply: “And they that be of thee shall build the old waste places; thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations and thou shalt be called ... the restorer of paths to dwell in.”