warks sall never dee,
_Timor mortis non turbat me_.'

In the _Evergreen_ Ramsay published two of his own poems, _The Vision_
(in which the author bewails the Union and the banishment of the
Stuarts) and _The Eagle and the Robin Reid-breist_ (likewise a Jacobite
poem), wilfully altering the spelling in both, and introducing
archaicisms into the thought, so as to pass them off as 'written by the
ingenious before 1600.' He also inserted _Hardyknute_, a fragment, which
subsequent research has proved to have been written by Lady Elizabeth
Wardlaw, a contemporary of Ramsay's. Although the _Evergreen_ did much
to revive popular interest in early Scottish poetry, and thus prepare
the way for Lord Hailes and Bishop Percy, from a critical point of view
it was worse than worthless, inasmuch as many of the errors and
alterations appearing in Ramsay's specimens of our early Scots literary
remains, have not been corrected even to this day.

But though Ramsay, in the estimation of stern literary antiquarians, has
been guilty of an offence so heinous,--an offence vitiating both the
_Tea-Table Miscellany_ and the _Evergreen_,--on the other hand, from the
point of view of the popular reader, his action in modernising the
language, at least, was not only meritorious but necessary, if the
pieces were to be intelligible to the great mass of the people.
Remembered, too, it must be, that Ramsay lived before the development of
what may be styled the antiquarian 'conscience,' in whose code of
literary morality one of the cardinal commandments is, 'Thou shalt in no
wise alter an ancient MS., that thy reputation and good faith may be
unimpugned in the land wherein thou livest, and that thou mayest not
bring a nest of critical hornets about thine ears.'

In his _Reminiscences of Old Edinburgh_, Dr. Daniel Wilson thus
succinctly states the case: 'Ramsay had much more of the poet than the
antiquary in his composition; and had, moreover, a poet's idea of
valuing verse less on account of its age than its merit. He lived in an
era of literary masquerading and spurious antiques, and had little
compunction in patching and eking an old poem to suit the taste of his
Edinburgh customers.' He was no Ritson,--and, after all, even Plautus
had, for three hundred years after the revival of learning, to await his
Ritschl!

CHAPTER VII

'THE GENTLE SHEPHERD'; SCOTTISH IDYLLIC POETRY; RAMSAY'S
PASTORALS--1725-30

In the quarto of 1721, not the l