Pattison’s poem is of real importance, because its early date[228] ranks it as probably the first of the eighteenth-century poems that treat of Nature in the romantic, sentimental, fervid fashion afterward brought to its culmination by the Wartons. Allan Ramsay’s education was of the most limited sort, so that, in early life at least, the development of his genius was unbiased by a knowledge of Latin and Greek or even English models. After he was fifteen he lived in Edinburgh and there began to be infected by the pseudo-classicism of his day. The poems in which country scenes and people were most fully represented were, however, pretty clear and unadulterated records of his early experiences in the secluded mountainous district of Lanarkshire where he was brought up. The best poems of this sort are the pastoral dialogues, “Patie and Roger,” 1721, and “Jenny and Meggy,” 1723, or rather, “The Gentle Shepherd,” 1725, which is a combination of the two pastorals thrown into completer dramatic form. A second edition of “The Gentle Shepherd” appeared in the same year as Thomson’s “Winter.”[229] It is worthy of note that the service rendered by Gay to English poetry is in many respects paralleled by Allan Ramsay’s contributions to Scottish song. There are in Ramsay’s pastorals similar closely studied scenes from peasant life, wherein are minutely described the superstitions,[230] the household customs,[231] the out-door occupations,[232] the trials,[233] and the pleasures[234] of the homely folk among the hills of Scotland. But there are important differences. What Gay did lightly and without serious intent was with Ramsay a service of love. He was not laughing in his sleeve at the very truth he so capitally portrayed. Throughout his work there is, in general, an air of sincerity. It is as if Gay wrote from the point of view of an outsider with an unfailingly keen eye, and a quick sense of humor. But Ramsay wrote from a life that he had known and loved, and that he thoroughly respected.[235] There are occasional false notes in his pastorals. He gives his shepherds flutes and reeds; his comparisons, especially his cumulative similes, are conventional; he makes rather stiff use of personification; and his desire to make his hero and heroine well born interferes with the pastoral simplicity of the drama. But these are extraneous and hardly affect the real texture of the work. We find in Ramsay’s poems occasional hints that his presentation of homely Scottish scenes and people was not merely instinctive, but that it was in some measure a deliberate choice. In “Tartana,” written in 1721, he said that his chosen muses were those that wandered through the clover meadows and the groves along the smooth meandering Tweed or by the gentle Tay, or where the haughty Clyde roared over lofty cataracts.