entive
negatives of his mind the varied scenes of rural life, the labours
incidental to the alternating seasons, which he was to employ with
effect so rare in his inimitable pastoral. During the winter months,
when the snow lay deep on hill and glen, over scaur and cleugh among
the lonely Lowthers, when the flocks were 'faulded' and the 'kye' housed
in the warm byres, when the furious blasts, storming at window and door,
and the deadly nipping frost, rendered labour outside impracticable,
doubtless in David Crichton's household, as elsewhere over broad
Scotland, the custom prevailed of sitting within the _lum-cheek_ of the
cavernous fireplaces, or around the _ingle-neuk_, and reciting those
ancient ballads of the land's elder life, that had been handed down from
True Thomas and the border minstrels; or narrating those tales of moving
accidents by flood or field, of grim gramarye, and of the mysterious
sights and sounds of other days, whose memory floated down the stream of
popular tradition from age to age. In days when books were so costly as
to be little more than the luxury of the rich, the art of the fireside
rhapsodist was held in a repute scarcely less high, than in that epoch
which may justly be styled the period of Grecian romance--the days of
'the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle.' At that spring there is
abundant evidence that young Allan Ramsay had drunk deep.

To another well, also, of genuine inspiration he must by this time have
repaired--that of our native Scottish literature. Though some years had
yet to elapse before he could read Hamilton of Gilbertfield's poem, the
'Dying Words of Bonnie Heck,' which he afterwards praised as stimulating
him into emulation, there is little doubt he had already caught some
faint echoes of that glorious period in Scottish literature, which may
be said to have lasted from the return of the poet-king (James I.) in
1424, from his captivity in England, to the death of Drummond of
Hawthornden in 1649. Without taking account of Barbour's _Bruce_ and
Blind Harry's _Wallace_, which partake more of the character of rhyming
chronicles than poems,--though relieved here and there by passages of
genuine poetic fire, such as the familiar one in the former, beginning--

'Ah! fredome is a nobill thynge,
Fredome maks men to haiff liking,'

--the literary firmament that is starred at the period in question with
such names as King James I., Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Walt