He combined, as we see here, the two passions of a patriotic and antiquarian fondness for the native old literature of Scotland, the all but forgotten old Scottish poetry of the sixteenth century, and an eager interest in what his English contemporaries in the south, the “chiels of London,”—to wit, Prior, Addison, Pope, Gay, and the rest,—had recently done, or were still doing, for the maintenance of the great literary traditions of England. How strong was his interest in those “chiels of London,” how much he admired them, appears not only from their influence upon him in his own special art of a resuscitated Scottish poetry in an eclectic modification of the old vernacular, but also in the dedication of so much of his later life to the commercial enterprise of an Edinburgh circulating library for the supply of his fellow-citizens with all recent or current English books, and in his less successful enterprise for the introduction of the English drama by the establishment of a regular Edinburgh theatre. In short, before Allan Ramsay’s death in 1758, what with his own example and exertions, what from the stimulus upon his countrymen independently of the new sense, more and more consciously felt since the Union, of an acquired partnership with England in all that great inheritance in the English speech which had till then belonged especially to England, and in the common responsibilities of such partnership thenceforward, Scotland was visibly holding up her head again. Before that date there had appeared, in Ramsay’s wake, some of the other forerunners of that famous race of eighteenth-century Scottish writers who, so far from giving cause for any continuance of the imputation of the literary inferiority of Scotland to England, were to command the respect of Europe by the vigour of their co-operation and rivalry with their English coevals.