ath of Mr. Addison; between _Robert, Richy, and Sandy_, on the
death of Matthew Prior; _Keitha_, on the death of the Countess of
Wigton; an _Ode with a Pastoral Recitative_, on the marriage of James
Earl of Wemyss to Miss Janet Charteris; _A Masque_, performed at the
celebration of the nuptials of James Duke of Hamilton and Lady Ann
Cochrane; _A Pastoral Epithalamium_, on the marriage of George Lord
Ramsay and Lady Jean Maule; _Betty and Kate_, a pastoral farewell to Mr.
Aikman; and finally, _The Gentle Shepherd_.

Of Ramsay's less important pastorals, the distinguishing characteristics
are their simplicity, their tenderness, and their freedom from aught
didactic. In conforming to the conventional idea of pastoral,--the idea,
that is, of the shepherd state being a condition of perfect peace and
Arcadian felicity and propriety,--in place of copying direct from
nature, they one and all differ from _The Gentle Shepherd_. The picture
of burly Sir Richard Steele and of crooked little Alexander Pope, clad
in shepherd's weeds, and masquerading with dogs and pipes and what not,
savours somewhat of the ludicrous. Then, in _Richy and Sandy_, he makes
Pope bewail the death of Addison, with whom he had been on anything but
friendly terms for years previous; while the following picture of the
deceased grave-visaged Secretary of State, in such a position as
described in the following lines, tends to induce us profane Philistines
of these latter days, to smile, if not to sneer--

'A better lad ne'er leaned out o'er a kent,
Nor hounded collie o'er the mossy bent:
Blythe at the bughts how oft hae we three been,
Heartsome on hills, and gay upon the green.'

This, however, was the fashion in vogue, and to it our poet had to
conform. In _Richy and Sandy_, in _Robert, Richy, and Sandy_, and in his
earlier pastorals generally, we seem to see the poet struggling to rid
himself of the conventional prejudices against painting rural nature in
the real, and in favour of 'a golden-age rusticity' purely imaginary.
Not by this is it implied that I claim for our poet the credit of first
insisting on reverting to nature for the study of scenes and character.
The same conviction, according to Lowell, was entertained by Spenser,
and his _Shepherds' Calendar_ was a manifestation, however imperfect and
unsatisfactory, of his desire to hark back to nature for inspiration. In
_Keitha_ the same incongruity, as noted above, is visible. The p