Robert Burns - How To Know Him by William Allan Neilson
page 72 of 334 (21%)
page 72 of 334 (21%)
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Wi' Allan, or wi' Gilbertfield,
The braes o' fame; [hills] Or Fergusson, the writer-chiel, [lawyer-fellow] A deathless name. He knew Ramsay's collection and had a perhaps exaggerated admiration for _The Gentle Shepherd_. This poem, published in 1728, not only holds a unique position in the history of the pastoral drama, but is important in the present connection as being to Burns the most signal evidence of the possibility of a dignified literature in the modern vernacular. Hamilton and Ramsay had exchanged rhyming epistles in the six-line stanza, and in these Burns found the model for his own epistles. Hamilton's _Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck_--a favorite grey-hound--had been imitated by Ramsay in _Lucky Spence's Last Advice_ and the _Last Speech of a Wretched Miser_, and the form had become a Scottish convention before Burns produced his _Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie_. As important as any of these was the example set by Ramsay and bettered by Burns of refurbishing old indecent or fragmentary songs. Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was regarded by Burns still more highly than Ramsay, and his influence was even more potent. In his autobiographical letter to Doctor Moore he tells that about 1782 he had all but given up rhyming: "but meeting with Fergusson's _Scotch Poems_, I strung anew my wildly-sounding, rustic lyre with emulating vigour." In the preface to the Kilmarnock edition he is still more explicit as to his attitude. "To the poems of a Ramsay, or the glorious dawnings of the poor, unfortunate Fergusson, he, with equal unaffected sincerity, declares, that, even in the highest pulse of vanity, he has not the most distant pretensions. These two justly admired Scotch |
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