The time had come for Ramsay’s finest and most characteristic performance. More than once, in his miscellanies hitherto, he had tried the pastoral form in Scotch, whether from a natural tendency to that form or induced by recent attempts in the English pastoral by Ambrose Philips, Pope, and Gay. Besides his pastoral elegy on the death of Addison, and another on the death of Prior, he had written a pastoral dialogue of real Scottish life in 162 lines, entitled _Patie and Roger_, introduced by this description:— “Beneath the south side of a craigy bield, Where a clear spring did halesome water yield, Twa youthfu’ shepherds on the gowans lay, Tending their flocks ae bonny morn of May: Poor Roger graned till hollow echoes rang, While merry Patie hummed himsel a sang.” This piece, and two smaller pastoral pieces in the same vein, called _Patie and Peggy_ and _Jenny and Meggie_, had been so much liked that Ramsay had been urged by his friends to do something more extensive in the shape of a pastoral story or drama. He had been meditating such a thing through the year 1724, while busy with his two editorial compilations; and in June 1725 the result was given to the public in THE GENTLE SHEPHERD: A SCOTS PASTORAL COMEDY. Here the three pastoral sketches already written were inwoven into a simply-constructed drama of rustic Scottish life as it might be imagined among the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, at that time, still within the recollection of very old people then alive, when the Protectorates of Cromwell and his son had come to an end and Monk had restored King Charles. The poem was received with enthusiastic admiration. There had been nothing like it before in Scottish literature, or in any other; nothing so good of any kind that could be voted as even similar; and this was at once the critical verdict. It is a long while ago, and there are many spots in Edinburgh which compete with one another in the interest of their literary associations; but one can stand now with particular pleasure for a few minutes any afternoon opposite that decayed house in the High Street, visible as one is crossing from the South Bridge to the North Bridge, where Allan Ramsay once had his shop, and whence the first copies of THE GENTLE SHEPHERD were handed out, some day in June 1725, to eager Edinburgh purchasers.