r. Blair's successors in the Chair of Rhetoric and
English Literature in the University of Edinburgh,--a man and a Scotsman
who, in his day, has done more than any other to foster amongst our
youth a love of all that is great and good and beautiful in our
literature; a teacher, too, whose students, whom he has imbued with his
own noble spirit, are scattered over the world, from China to
Peru,--Emeritus-Professor David Masson, has observed in his charming
_Edinburgh Sketches_: 'The poem was received with enthusiastic
admiration. There had been nothing like it before in Scottish
literature, or in any other: nothing so good of any kind that could be
voted even similar; and this was at once the critical verdict.'

To anyone who will carefully compare the _Idylls_ of Theocritus, the
_Eclogues_ of Virgil, and the _Aminta_ of Tasso, with Ramsay's great
poem, the conviction will be driven home,--in the face, it may be, of
many deeply-rooted prejudices,--that the same inspiration which, like a
fiery rivulet, runs through the three former masterpieces, is present
also in the latter--that inspiration being the perfect and unbroken
homogeneity existing between the local atmosphere of the poem and the
characteristics of the _dramatis personae_. This fact it is which renders
the _Aminta_ so imperishable a memorial of Tasso's genus; for it is
Italian pastoral, redolent of the air, and smacking of the very soil of
sunny Italy. The symmetrical perfection of _The Gentle Shepherd_, in
like manner, is due to the fact that the feelings and desires and
impulses of the characters in the pastoral are those distinctively
native and proper to persons in their sphere of life. There is no
dissidence visible between what may imperfectly be termed the _motif_ of
the poem and the sentiments of even the most subordinate characters in
it. Therein lies the true essence of literary symmetry--the symmetry not
alone of mere form, though that also was present, but the symmetry
resulting from the harmony of thought with its expression, of scene and
its characters, of situation and its incidents. Such the symmetry
exhibited by Homer's _Iliad_, by Dante's _Inferno_, by Milton's
_Paradise Lost_, by Cervantes' _Don Quixote_, by Camoens' _Lusiad_, by
Scott's _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, by Tennyson's _Idylls_.

Frankly, it must be admitted that only in his _Gentle Shepherd_ does
Ramsay attain this outstanding excellence. His other pieces are
meritorious,--highly