A revival came at last. It came in the beginning of the eighteenth century, just after the union of Scotland with England in the reign of Queen Anne, when the literary succession to Dryden in England was represented by such of the Queen Anne wits and their Georgian recruits as Defoe, Matthew Prior, Swift, Congreve, Steele, Addison, Gay, and Pope. It was then that, from a group of lingering Scottish literary stagers of the antique type, such as Bishop Sage, Dr. Pitcairn, Pennicuik, Fletcher of Saltoun, Wodrow, and Ruddiman, there stepped forth the shrewd Edinburgh periwig-maker who was to be for so many years the popular little Horace of Auld Reekie, not only supplying the lieges with such songs and poems as they had not had the like of for many a day, but actually shaking them again into some sense of the importance of popular books and of a taste for lightsome reading. Yes, it was Allan Ramsay,—the placid little man of the night-cap that one sees in the white statue of him in Princes Street,—it was he that was the real reviver of literature and of literary enthusiasm in Scotland after their long abeyance. He was conscious of his mission:— “The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox. Hae reared up great poetic stocks Of _Rapes_, of _Buckets_, _Sarks_, and _Locks_, While we neglect To shaw their betters. This provokes Me to reflect On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell: Our country then a tale could tell: Europe had nane mair snack and snell In verse or prose: Our kings were poets too themsell, Bauld and jocose.”