Between 1712 and 1718, or between Ramsay’s twenty-sixth and his thirty-third year, just when the reign of Queen Anne was passing into that of George I., the Edinburgh public became more and more alive to the fact that they had a poet among them in the guise of a wig-maker. A number of little pieces of verse, with Ramsay’s name attached, came out in succession in the form of humbly printed leaflets, some of them with the sanction of “The Easy Club,” as having been originally written for that convivial fraternity, but others independently, when that club had ceased to exist. On examining these earliest pieces of Ramsay, one finds that, while some of them are satires or moralisings in a rather crude English, in imitation of the London poetry then in vogue, the best are occasional poems in the colloquial Scotch of Ramsay’s own day, suggested by local incidents, characters, and humours. In these he was evidently connecting himself as well as he could with the broken chain of those older vernacular poets to whom he looked back with so much interest. We can even detect those predecessors of his in this broken chain whom he took more immediately for his models. They were the two later Semples of Beltrees,—Robert Semple (1595–1659), the author of “The Piper of Kilbarchan,” and his son Francis Semple (died about 1685), author of “Fye, let us a’ to the bridal,” “Maggie Lauder,” and other Scottish songs. Not that these were poets of anything like the dimensions of the older Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Lindsay, but that they had exhibited the literary capabilities of the Scottish tongue in that more recent and less archaic stage from which one might make a fresh start. That he had still a hankering, however, after the greater and older Scots was shown by the boldest, and in point of length most considerable, of his attempts at authorship during the time now under notice. This was the publication, in 1717, of a new edition of the old Scotch poem, in complex rhyming stanzas, called _Christ’s Kirk on the Green_, attributed by some to King James V., and by others, with utter improbability, to the poet-king James I. To the original of this old poem of Scottish humour, the language of which is so difficult that it had puzzled previous editors, there was added a continuation by himself, in the form of a second canto, carrying on the story; and, the demand having been such that another edition was called for in the following year, he then added a third canto. Ramsay was no philologist, and his edition of the old poem was of no value for scholars; but his appreciation of the poetic merit of the old piece must have been beyond the common, and his two cantos of continuation were something of a feat. “Nothing so rich,” says a modern critic, “had appeared since the strains of Dunbar or Lindsay”; and of the opening of the third canto the same critic says that it is “an inimitable sketch of rustic life,—coarse, but as true as