lbarchan_, by Sir Robert Sempill of Beltrees
(1595?-1661?), set a model for the humorous elegy on the living which
reached Burns through Ramsay and Fergusson, and was followed by him in
those on Poor Mailie and Tam Samson. The stanza in which it is written
is far older than Sempill, having been traced as far back as the
troubadours in the twelfth century, and being found frequently in both
English and French through the Middle Ages; but from the time of
Sempill on, it was cultivated with peculiar intensity in Scotland, and
is the medium of so many of Burns's best-known pieces that it is often
called Burns's stanza.

Lament in rhyme, lament in prose,
Wi' saut tears tricklin' down your nose;
Our Bardie's fate is at a close,
Past a' remead;
The last, sad cape-stane o' his woe's--
Poor Mailie's dead!

The seventeenth century was a barren one for Scottish literature. The
attraction of the larger English public and the disuse of the
vernacular among the upper classes already discussed, drew to the
South or to the Southern speech whatever literary talent appeared in
the North, and it seemed for a time that, except for the obscure
stream of folk poetry, Scottish vernacular literature was at an end.
In the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, interest began to
revive. In 1706-9-11 James Watson published the three volumes of his
_Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems_, and in the third
decade began to appear Allan Ramsay's _Tea Table Miscellany_
(1724-40). These collections rescued from oblivion a large quantity of
vernacular verse, some of it drawn from manuscripts of pre-Reformation
poetry, some of it contemporary, some of it anonymous and of uncertain
date, having come down orally or in chap-books and broadsides. The
welcome given to these volumes was an early instance of that renewed
interest in older and more primitive literature that was manifested
still more strikingly when Percy published his _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_ in 1765. Its influence on the production of vernacular
literature was evident at once in the original work of Ramsay himself;
and the movement which culminated in Burns, though having its roots
far back in the work of Henryson and Dunbar, was in effect a Scottish
renascence, in which the chief agents before Burns were Hamilton of
Gilbertfield, Ramsay himself, Robert Fergusson, and song-writers like
Mrs. Cockburn and Lady Ann