er
Kennedy, Gavin Douglas, Sir David Lyndsay, Alexander Montgomery, William
Alexander (Earl of Stirling), Sir Robert Ayton, Robert Sempill, and
Drummond of Hawthornden, need not fear comparison with the contemporary
poetry of the sister land. The greatest name in the list, that of
William Dunbar, was undoubtedly the leading singer of his age in the
British Isles, but inacquaintance with his works has prevented his
genius obtaining that recognition it deserves. Sir Walter Scott
considered Dunbar in most qualities the peer, in some the superior, of
Chaucer, and his opinion will be endorsed by all those who are able to
read Dunbar with enjoyment. Though Spenser's genius may have had a
richer efflorescence than Dunbar's, if the mass of their work be
critically weighed, quality by quality, the balance, when struck, would
rest remarkably evenly between them. Drummond of Hawthornden is perhaps
the most richly-gifted writer in early Scottish literature, as an
all-round man of letters. But as a poet the palm must ever remain with
Dunbar.

The study of the breaks which occur in the poetic succession of any
literature is always interesting. In English literature such gaps
recur, though not with any definite regularity--for example, after the
death of Chaucer and Gower, when the prosaic numbers of Occleve and
Lydgate were the sole representatives of England's imaginative
pre-eminence; and the penultimate and ultimate decades of last century,
when Hayley was regarded as their acknowledged master by the younger
school of poets. In Scotland, it is to be noted, as Sir George Douglas
points out in his standard work, _Minor Scottish Poets_, that from 1617,
the date of the publication of Drummond's _Forth Feasting_, until 1721,
when Ramsay's first volume saw the light, no singer even of mediocre
power appeared in Scotland.

There were editions of many of the poems of James I., Dunbar, Stirling,
Drummond, and Sempill, which Ramsay may have seen. But he was more
likely to have gained the knowledge we know he possessed of the early
literature of his country from the recitals by fireside _raconteurs_,
and from the printed sheets, or _broadsides_, hawked about the rural
districts of Scotland during the closing decades of the seventeenth and
the initial ones of the eighteenth centuries. From specimens of these
which I have seen, it is evident that Henryson's _Robene and Makyn_,
Dunbar's _Merle and the Nightingale_ and the _Thistle and the Ros