Robert Burns - How To Know Him by William Allan Neilson
page 71 of 334 (21%)
page 71 of 334 (21%)
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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 Anne Lindsay. Of this fact Burns was perfectly aware, and he was not only candid but generous in his acknowledgment of his debt to his immediate predecessors. My senses wad be in a creel, [head would be turned] Should I but dare a hope to speel, [climb] |
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