JOHN PINKERTON. 1786. "ALLAN RAMSAY. The convivial buffoonery of this writer has acquired him a sort of reputation, which his poetry by no means warrants; being far beneath the middling, and showing no spark of genius. Even his buffoonery is not that of a tavern, but that of an ale-house. "The _Gentle Shepherd_ all now allow the sole foundation of his fame. Let us put it in the furnace a little; for, if it be gold, it will come out the purer. Dr. Beattie, in his Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition, observes, that the effect of the Gentle Shepherd is ludicrous from the contrast between meanness of phrase, and dignity or seriousness of sentiment. This is not owing to its being written in the Scotish dialect, now left to the peasantry, as that ingenious writer thinks; for the first part of Hardyknute, written in that very dialect, strikes every English reader as sublime and pathetic to the highest degree. In fact this glaring defect proceeds from Allan Ramsay's own character as a buffoon, so evident from all his poems, and which we all know he bore in private life; and from Allan's total ignorance of the Scotish tongue, save that spoken by the mob of Mid Lothian. It is well known that a comic actor of the Shuter or Edwin class, though highly meritorious in his line, yet, were he to appear in any save _queer_ characters, the effect would even be more ludicrous than when he was in his proper parts, from the contrast of the man with his assumed character. This applies also to authors; for Sterne's sermons made us laugh, though there was nothing laughable in them: and, had Rabelais, or Sterne, written a pastoral opera, though the reader had been ignorant of their characters, still a something, a je ne sçai quoi, in the phraseology, would have ever provoked laughter. But this effect Ramsay has even pushed further; for, by his entire ignorance of the Scotish tongue, save that spoken by the mob around him, he was forced to use the very phraseology of the merest vulgar, rendered yet more ridiculous by his own turn to low humour; being himself indeed one of the mob, both in education and in mind. So that putting such _queer_ language into the mouth of respectable characters--nay, pretending to clothe sentiments, pathos, and all that, with such phraseology--his whole Gentle Shepherd has the same effect as a gentleman would have who chose to drive sheep on the highway with a harlequin's coat on. This radical defect at once throws the piece quite out of the class of good compositions. * * * * * "Allan was indeed so much a _poet_, that in his _Evergreen_ he even puts rhyming titles to the old poems he publishes; and by this silly idea, and his own low character, has stamped a kind of ludicrous hue on the old Scotish poetry, of which he pretended to be a publisher, that even now is hardly eradicated, though many editors of great learning and high respectability have arisen. * * * * *