sh contemporaries, Pope, Swift and Addison.
No better evidence of the unfitness of contemporary opinion to gauge the
real and ultimate position of any author in the hierarchy of genius
could be cited than the case now before us. The critical perspective is
egregiously untrue. The effect of personality and of social qualities is
permitted to influence a verdict that should be given on the attribute
of intellectual excellence alone. Only through the lapse of time is the
personal equation eliminated from the estimate of an author's relative
proportion to the aggregate of his country's genius.

Nor were his countrymen aware of the extravagance of their estimate when
such a man as Ruddiman styled him 'the Horace of our days,' and when
Starrat, in a poetical epistle, apostrophises him in terms like these--

'Ramsay! for ever live; for wha like you,
In deathless sang, sic life-like pictures drew?
Not he wha whilome wi' his harp could ca'
The dancing stanes to big the Theban wa';
Nor he (shame fa's fool head!) as stories tell,
Could whistle back an auld dead wife frae hell.'

James Clerk of Penicuik considered Homer and Milton to be the only
worthy compeers of the Caledonian bard; and Sir William Bennet of
Marlefield insisted the Poet-Laureateship should be conferred on Ramsay,
as the singer who united in himself the three great qualifications--genius,
loyalty, and _respectability_! Certainly honest Allan would have been a
Triton amongst such minnows as Nicholas Rowe, who held the bays from
1714-18, or Laurence Eusden, whose tenure of the office lasted from 1718
to 1730, but of whose verse scarce a scrap remains.

Compliments reached Ramsay from all quarters of the compass. Burchet,
Arbuckle, Aikman, Arbuthnot, Ambrose Philips, Tickell, and many others,
put on record their appreciation of his merits as a poet. But of all the
testimonies, that which reached him from Pope was the most valued, and
drew from Allan the following lines, indicative of his intense
gratification, while also forming a favourable example of his skill in
epigram--

'Three times I've read your Iliad o'er:
The first time pleased me well;
New beauties unobserved before,
Next pleased me better still.

Again I tried to find a flaw,
Examined ilka line;
The third time pleased me best of a',
The labour seem'd divine.

Henceforward I'll not tempt my fate,
On dazzling rays to stare