ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub

"But now, good sirs, this day is lost
The best dog in the East-Neuk coast;
For never ane durst brag nor boast
Me, for their neck.

But now I must yield up the ghost,"
Quo' bonnie Heck,

"And put a period to my talking,
For I'm unto my exit making :
Sirs, ye may a' gae to the hawking,
And there reflect

Ye'll ne'er get sic a dog for maukin
As bonnie Heck.

I quick at

hunter's cry.

2 To carry themselves.

"But if my puppies ance were ready
Which I gat on a bonnie lady,

They'll be baith clever, keen, and beddy1,
And ne'er neglect

To clink it like their ancient daddy,

The famous Heck."

SIR JOHN CLERK.

1680-1755

One of the Commissioners of the Union, and a Baron of the Scots Exchequer, the second baronet of Pennicuik was one of the chief figures in the cultured society of Edinburgh during the first half of the eighteenth century. At his country-seat he entertained Allan Ramsay regularly every summer, and the deaths of his eldest son and of himself were among the most lamented events of that poet's life. A close friend of the English antiquary, Roger Gale, he was himself an ardent collector of antiques, and a member of several of the learned societies. Clerk's chief works are treatises of law, economics, and antiquities; but the composition by which his name is popularly remembered is a song. "O merry may the maid be," of which the first verse is earlier than Clerk's time, was printed first in the Charmer of 1751, and later, with a final fifth stanza from the author's hand, in Herd's Collection of Ancient and Modern Scots Songs. Another poetical composition, of which Clerk is but the reputed author, was addressed to Susanna, daughter of Sir Archibald Kennedy of Culzean, and afterwards Countess of Eglinton. It was to this lady that Allan Ramsay dedicated his "Gentle Shepherd." Clerk, it appears, was enamoured of Miss Kennedy, and sent her a flute. When she tried to blow this it would not sound, and unscrewing it, she discovered the lines inside. They are in the ordinary fashion of love verses of the time, and may be found printed in Anderson's Scottish Nation.

O MERRY MAY THE MAID BE.

O MERRY may the maid be

That marries wi' the miller,
For, foul day and fair day,
He's aye bringing till her.

I asked.

2 pleasant.

3 chest.

He's aye a penny in his purse
For dinner or for supper,

And, gin she please, a guid fat cheese,
And lumps o' yellow butter.

When Jamie first did woo me

I speer'd' what was his calling;
"Fair maid," says he, "O come and see,
Ye're welcome to my dwalling."
Though I was shy, yet I could spy
The truth o' what he told me,

And that his house was warm and couth2,
And room in it to hold me.

Behind the door a bag o' meal,
And in the kist3 was plenty
O' guid hard cakes his mither bakes,
And bannocks werena scanty.

A guid fat sow, a sleeky cow
Was standing in the byre,

Whilst lazy puss with mealy mouse

Was playing at the fire.

Guid signs are these, my mither says,

And bids me tak' the miller;

For, foul day and fair day,

He's aye bringing till her.

For meal and maut she doesna want,
Nor onything that's dainty;

And now and then a keckling hen,

To lay her eggs in plenty.

In winter, when the wind and rain Blaws o'er the house and byre, He sits beside a clean hearth-stane, Before a rousing fire.

With nut-brown ale he tells his tale, Which rows him o'er fu' nappy. Wha'd be a King-a petty thing,

When a miller lives so happy?

[blocks in formation]

No Scottish poet, probably, has been subjected at once to praise so much beyond his merits and to detraction so grossly unjust to his deserts, as Allan Ramsay. While by some it has been averred that he was merely a time-serving manufacturer of verse, who wrote what would sell, by others he has been extolled as not only the first but as one of the greatest of the singers of a new era. Burns himself spoke of Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd' as the "most glorious poem ever written.' Neither the eulogy nor the disparagement perhaps has been exactly just; but if indeed, as has been said of him, he appears to some to have been less a poet born than one made by circumstances, it must also at least be said that by what he did for the muse of his country he merits a place in Scottish_poetic history little behind that of the greatest makars, Barbour, Henryson, Dunbar, Lyndsay, and Burns.

Fourth in direct descent from a laird of Cockpen who was brother to Ramsay of Dalhousie, the poet was born at Leadhills, in the uplands of Lanarkshire on October 15, 1686. His father was manager of Lord Hopetoun's lead mines on Crawford Muir, and his mother, Alice Bower, was the daughter of an Englishman who had been brought thither from Derbyshire to introduce improved methods of mining. While Ramsay was still an infant his father died, and his mother married again. In the house of his stepfather, a small laird of the neighbourhood, of the name of Crichton, the poet grew up till the age of fifteen, about which time he lost his mother. Apparently the best was done for him that his stepfather could do when he was apprenticed to what was then the thriving trade of wig-making in Edinburgh. this business Ramsay must have thrived, for in 1712 he married the daughter of an Edinburgh writer, Christian Ross by name, by whom he became the father of a numerous family. About the same time he became a member of one of the literary and political coteries which were then the vogue in Edinburgh. To the members of this society-a set of young gallants of suspected Jacobite leanings-the poet composed a humorous address, and they in turn dubbed him a gentleman and a good fellow. The Easy Club, as it was called, was suppressed, with other Jacobite societies, after the outbreak of the Rebellion in 1715.

At

Ramsay's connection with this club secured him a more or less sympathetic audience for his poetical compositions, and to

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »