Historically the Scottish language is to English what Provençal is to French and Catalan to Spanish--an ancient and independent local dialect which had developed its own literature at least as early as had the more central region which afterwards took the lead. The speech of Lowland Scotland was the direct descendant of that Northumbrian dialect of Old English which Bede and Caedmon spoke. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance Scotland maintained amid her poverty as rich a literary tradition as England did. In fact, from the death of Chaucer until the beginning of the Elizabethan era the student of British literature must look north of the Tweed to find, in the writings of King James I, Robert Henryson, Gawain Douglas and William Dunbar, anything worthy the name of poetry. The decay of Scots as a literary language was started by the Reformation and finished by the Union. By introducing the Geneva version of the English Bible the Reformation made Southern English the language of the church, in idiom if not in pronunciation. The accession of James VI to the English throne made Southern English also the language of the court. King James himself wrote in Scots; his subject, William Drummond of Hawthornden, wrote in English. Drummond’s example was followed by all the prose writers and most of the poets of Scotland from his day to ours. After the Union even the poets who used Scots did so consciously and not because such expression was wholly spontaneous. Of these poets, Allan Ramsay, whose productive period covers roughly the three decades from 1711 to 1740, was the most popular. And Scots poetry, as practised by Ramsay and by his friend and contemporary William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, tended more and more to what Samuel Johnson would have described as the easy and vulgar, and therefore the disgusting. Their work exhibits humour, and something of the conversational quality of the familiar essay, but dignity and deep poetic emotion are notably absent. Moreover, the dialect in which they wrote tended more and more to become a synthetic and standardized language, embodying words and idioms common to a large section of southern Scotland but without firm roots in any one region. The Aberdeenshire dialect used by Alexander Ross in his _Helenore_ is almost the last fresh transcription of the speech of a definite section of the country. Written Scots was rapidly becoming what nineteenth-century English and American authors made other dialects--a semi-literary vernacular employed for humorous effect or for an affectation of colloquial ease. Even Burns himself at times gave artificial Scottish flavour to his verse by using English idioms in Scottish spelling. Since the end of the eighteenth century no writer of Scots verse has succeeded in introducing any new elements. At its best, such writing sounds like imitations of Burns; at its worst, like imitations of his imitators.