No More Learning

? Fasti, u. s. , vol. II, p. 28.


## p. 345 (#369) ############################################

6
Anthony Wood
345
he spent, practically, his whole life there, and died, in 1695, in the
house in which he was born. During his undergraduate days, he
did not show any particular aptitude for academic studies; but his
natural bent towards those antiquarian pursuits which afterwards
claimed his whole energies soon declared itself, and at seventeen
years of age he had begun to take notes of inscriptions. His
graduation as B. A. , in 1652, secured for him admission to the
Bodleian library, 'which he took to be the happiness of his life,
and into which he never entred without great veneration”. '
There he browsed at large, and gave himself up to his beloved
studies of English history, antiquities, heraldry, and genealogies,
with music as his chief recreation.
But it seems to have been Dugdale's Warwickshire that gave
his studies a special objective. It fired him to attempt a similar
work for his own county, and, with this object, he began tran-
scribing the monumental inscriptions and arms in the various
churches. As his researches and collections progressed, the scope
of his undertaking was enlarged; and, presently, his original idea
of preserving a record of extant monuments developed into that
of a comprehensive survey which should include the antiquities
of the city, a history of the university and colleges, and the
biographical records contained in his Athenae and Fasti. In
pursuance of this object, he explored all accessible sources : the
manuscripts in the Bodleian, including the collections of John
Leland, of which he made much use, the archives of the university,
to which he was allowed free access, and the muniments of the
several colleges; he also visited London for the purpose of working
in the libraries there.
At length, in 1669, the university treatise being completed,
the university press offered to publish the work, stipulating that
the author should consent to its being translated into Latin 'for
the honour of the University in forreigne countries. ' Dr John
Fell, dean of Christ Church, the prime mover in this design,
undertook at his own charge the translating and printing.
Richard Peers and Richard Reeve were commissioned to make
the Latin version, and Fell took the editing into his own hands.
His high-handed methods caused the author much heart-burning,
and he thus (11 August 1670) graphically describes the situation :
All the proofs that came from the press went thro the Doctor's hands, which
he would correct, alter, or dash out or put in what he pleased, which created
i Life, 4. 8. , vol. 1, p. 182.
9 As to Fell, of, ante, vol. VII, p. 457.


## p. 346 (#370) ############################################

346
Scholars and Antiquaries
a great trouble to the composer and author: but there was no help. He was
a great man, and carried all things at his pleasure.
Wood's diary, at this period, contains many complaints about
the liberties taken with his book; and for the misdoings of
Peers he cannot find words hard enough. But, in spite of his
declaration that he would scarce own the book, he was not able
to suppress a natural pride in the two handsome volumes which,
in 1674, made their appearance under the title Historia et
Antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis. Nevertheless, Wood's
dissatisfaction with the Latin version was quite genuine, and, very
soon afterwards, he began an English transcription of the whole
work, continuing the general history to the year 1660. This
recension was not printed in Wood's lifetime ; but he bequeathed
the manuscript to the university, and it was eventually published
by John Gutch in 1786–96.
The other section of Wood's work on Oxford, Survey of the
Antiquities of the City, or, as it was entitled in Peshall's
edition, The Antient and Present State of the City of Oxford,
was probably begun before the idea of a separate work on the
university took definite form, and a considerable portion of it
was written between 1661 and 1663. At this point, his interest
seems to have been absorbed by the university treatise, and,
though he worked on the manuscript to the end of his life,
continually revising it and adding fresh notes, the scheme was
never actually completed. While a certain lack of form and pro-
portion in the work may, therefore, be disregarded, there can be no
question about its value as a minute record and reconstruction
of the past, the details of which were industriously garnered from
a great variety of sources and carefully collated with personal
investigation of the localities.
When pursuing his researches among the university archives,
Wood must have come across the papers of Brian Twyne, a
diligent Oxford antiquary who had done much pioneer spade-
work in the same field; but his diaries are curiously reticent
on the subject. This silence may have been unintentional; but,
as a matter of fact, he drew extensively upon this store; indeed,
his latest editor goes so far as to say that 'there was no originality
in his work, for he merely put into shape Twyne's materials. '
But, whatever the extent of his indebtedness, no fraudulent
motive need be attributed to Wood, for he makes constant
* Andrew Clark, in Dict. of Nat. Biog. , vol. win, art. Wood.


## p. 347 (#371) ############################################

Wood's Athenae Oxonienses
347
reference to Twyne, and, in freely using such materials as came
in his way, he was only following the custom of the day.
At the request of the authorities, Wood had written, as an
addition to the Historia, notices of the lives of Oxford writers,
to be appended to the accounts of the respective colleges, and
it may have been this task which suggested to him the idea of
compiling a counterpart to the history, in the shape of an
account of all the writers who had received their education at
the university. This undertaking was probably even more akin
to his peculiar genius than the Historia itself, and for some years
he worked energetically at it. He searched registers and all
kinds of records, made enquiries far and near, wrote letters
innumerable, and received contributions from many friends and
correspondents. When Athenae Oxonienses, the monumental
work upon which his chief fame rests, at length made its
appearance, its outspoken criticisms caused no little resentment
in various quarters. This reception was, no doubt, anticipated,
for the book was issued without the author's name, and, in the
preface, endeavours were made to justify ‘harsh expressions' and
severe reflections,' on the ground 'that faults ought no more
to be conceald than virtues, and that, whatever it may be in a
painter, it is no excellence in an historian to throw a veil on
deformities. ' But these precautions did not serve to protect the
author from the consequences of reckless charges, as he found
to his cost. The libel suit which was prosecuted against Wood in
the vice-chancellor's court at Oxford for statements reflecting
upon Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon, ended against him ;
he was expelled the university, and his book was publicly burned.
It has been aptly remarked of Wood that he was ‘unquestionably
one of the most useful of our distinguished writers,' and this
applies in special measure to Athenae. With its wealth of in-
formation concerning English authors, it is still of the highest
importance, and, in its particular sphere, possibly The Dictionary
of National Biography is the only work that, in the course of two
centuries, has taken a place beside it.
It is hardly possible to consider Athenae apart from the
personality of the man to whom its existence is due and the
impress of whose character it bears. To enormous industry and
an insatiable appetite for research, Wood united a naturally
ungenerous temperament and asperity of disposition, increased,
in later years, by close application to study and the narrow-
ing effects of a too exclusively academic life. Peevish and


## p. 348 (#372) ############################################

348
Scholars and Antiquaries
quarrelsome, disliked and mistrusted, he withdrew more and more
from intercourse with his fellows and immersed himself in his
self-imposed task. One can picture him in the seclusion of his
garret study, penning, with keen satisfaction, severe judgments
and spiteful comments upon the lives and achievements of those
who did not meet with his approval. He can hardly be acquitted
of malice in his animadversions, even if the saying attributed
to him concerning his projected third volume of Athenae be
apocryphal : When this volume comes out, I'll make you laugh
again. ' But it must, in fairness, be observed that he did not allow
the friction caused by the disposal of Sheldon's manuscripts to
warp his estimate of Dugdale, and that he speaks eulogistically
of bishop Fell, in spite of his high-handed mode of editing the
Historia. His claim to a desire for truth must also be conceded
to him; but truth was sometimes apt to mean an overscrupulous
care lest any weight should be omitted from the adverse scale.
Wood was not only a chronicler of the past, but a recorder,
also, of the passing hour, and in his autobiography and diaries
we meet him at close quarters. The record is minute, at times
even trivial. It embodies much interesting detail of university
life; but, except for his youthful reminiscences of the civil war,
glimpses of the outside world are few. He notes that Dryden
was soundly cudgelled by three men one night near Will's coffee-
house in Covent garden; but he seldom gives pictures like that
of his meeting with Prynne, who was at that time keeper of the
records and had promised to take him to the Tower. Wood, with
a soupçon of his accustomed acidity, says that he
went precisely at the time appointed, and found Mr Prynne in his black
taffaty-cloak, edgʻd with black lace at the bottom. They went to the Tower
directly thro the City, then lying in ruins (oocasion'd by the grand conflagra-
tion that hapned in 1666); but by his meeting with several citizens and prating
with them, it was about 10 of the clock before they could come to the same
place.
That he is careful to place his own doings in a favourable light
is only natural; but he finds pleasure in recording incidents and
opinions unfavourable to others, and seems entirely devoid of
both sense of humour and the milk of human kindness. We
like him better and can forgive him, in a measure, when he tells
of his solicitude over Dodsworth's manuscripts, and the pains
he took in spreading them out on the leads to dry when they
were in danger of perishing from damp. So far as Wood him-
self is concerned, one is tempted to think it a pity that the
· Life, u. s. , vol. II, p. 110.
.


## p. 349 (#373) ############################################

Thomas Hearne
349
autobiography has been preserved, for it leaves the impression that
he was a disagreeable person and that, for all his great work, he
was a little soul.
-
79
IRS
Thomas Hearne, too, was a diarist; but his services to
literature and learning were of a different nature from those of
Wood. From his earliest youth he showed a genius for scholar-
ship, and, shortly after taking his degree at Oxford, was appointed
assistant keeper in the Bodleian library, where his energies were
devoted to completing the catalogues of the printed books, the
manuscripts, and the coins. One of his first essays in publication
was, very fitly, commemorative of the founder of the library :
Reliquiae Bodleianae, or Some genuine remains of Sir Thomas
Bodley (1703). Next, as the outcome of his early interest in
classical studies, appeared an edition of Pliny's Epistolae et
Panegyricus, which was followed by other classical texts. Ductor
Historicus, or A short system of Universal History and an intro-
duction to the study of it, which he brought out in 17045,
indicated the direction which his activities would soon take.
From the original manuscripts in the Bodleian, he published, for
the first time, John Leland's Itinerary (1710—12) and Collectanea
(1715) an undertaking which has indissolubly linked his name
with that of the father of English antiquities.
In 1716, Hearne entered upon his important service to historical
study, the production of that admirable collection of early English
chronicle histories which, beginning with Historia Regum Angliae
of John Rous (or Ross), came from the press in an almost
uninterrupted series, down to the Henry II and Richard I of
Benedict, abbot of Peterborough, which bears date 1735, the year
of Hearne’s death. Hardly less interesting than the chronicles
themselves is the extraordinary gathering of tractates appended
as supplements to the several volumes. Drawn from a variety
of sources, they deal with many curious and interesting matters,
often in no way related to the main subject of the volume.
Among them are a number of manuscript pieces from the
collection formed by Thomas Smith, the learned librarian of the
Cottonian library, who had bequeathed his books and manuscripts
to Hearne. The speed with which these volumes came out hardly
admitted of their bearing the character of critical editions ; and,
;
possibly, the wealth of material which lay ready to his hand and
called for publication operated against deliberate and scholarly
work, such as might have claimed for him the title of historian,
La
៖
T


## p. 350 (#374) ############################################

350
Scholars and Antiquaries
in place of the more modest epitaph of his own choosing — who
studied and preserved antiquities. '
Wood made extensive preparations for a third volume of
Athenae, which, in order to avoid interference from censors or
friends, he purposed to have had printed in Holland. But this
scheme he did not live to carry out, and, on his death-bed, he,
'with great ceremony,' gave the two manuscript volumes of this
continuation to Thomas Tanner, afterwards bishop of St Asaph,
'for his sole use, without any restrictions. ' In so doing, it is
probable that Wood had in view the publication of this volume
by his legatee ; but, whether through being occupied with schemes
of his own, or because he did not care to take the risk of
publishing so compromising a work, Tanner took no steps in the
matter.
In the same year, 1695, Tanner, then a young man in his
twenty-second year, brought out the first of his two notable
compilations. Notitia Monastica, founded mainly on the Monas-
ticon of Dodsworth and Dugdale, gives in brief form the founda-
tion, order, dedication, and valuation of the various religious
houses in England and Wales, with references to manuscript
and printed sources for fuller information. This useful manual,
the idea of which was doubtless suggested by the author's own
needs, did not allow any scope for original work; but a long
preface afforded an opening for noticing the scanty existing
literature of the subject, and adding some account of the several
orders, with a sketch of the progress of monasticism in England.
Tanner's insistence on the value of monastic records in the study
of local history and genealogy, and his defence of monks and
their learning against the wholesale blackening to which they had
been subjected since the dissolution of monasteries, indicates
the advance made in the general attitude towards this subject
since the days when Camden and Weever had felt it necessary
to apologise for making mention of monasteries. At the time
of his death, the bishop had nearly completed the transcript of a
revised and enlarged edition, and this was brought out by his
brother, John Tanner, in 1744.
Tanner's other important work, Bibliotheca Britannico-
Hibernica, after being in hand for forty years, at length appeared
in 1748, under the editorship of David Wilkins, of Concilia fame.
i This additional material eventually appeared in the second edition of Athenae,
published, in 1721, by Jacob Tonson, who had acquired the copyright of the work.


## p. 351 (#375) ############################################

John Aubrey
351
This book, in which an attempt is made to give an account of all
the writers of the three kingdoms down to the beginning of the
seventeenth century, long remained the best authority in its own
province, and its usefulness is not yet exhausted.
Two of the chief contributors to Wood's Athenae were his
friends Andrew Allam and John Aubrey. The former of these,
though well versed in sectarian controversial writings and highly
esteemed by Wood, has left nothing of his own which has found
a place in literature. John Aubrey's genial and disinterested but
erratic spirit did not lend itself to finished schemes, and it seems
to have been his fate that his work should be incorporated
in that of others. His Perambulation of Surrey, begun in 1673,
was, eventually, included in The Natural History and Antiquities
of Surrey, which Richard Rawlinson published in 1719; and his
Wiltshire collections he turned over to Tanner, who was engaged
upon the same subject ; but the only outcome was the supply of
some material for Gibson's edition of Camden.
The chief assistance Aubrey gave to Wood took the form of
a series of Brief Lives of eminent persons, which, as he said
in a characteristic covering letter, had been put in writing
'tumultuarily, as they occur'd to my thoughts or as occasionally
I had information of them. ' These much-quoted, haphazard,
gossiping notes are full of vivid and intimate touches concern-
ing character, actions, and personal appearance, often freely
expressed but always kindly and without malice. In some of
the portrait sketches, notably that of Venetia Stanley, he displays
the insight of an artist; eyes have an especial attraction for
him, and, occasionally, he describes them in words which are in
themselves a portrait. His wide acquaintanceship enabled him
to write at first hand of many of his contemporaries; and the
sketches of men of an earlier generation, such as Shakespeare,
Ben Jonson, Ralegh, and Bacon, may be taken to represent
reports and anecdotes, more or less authentic, which were in
current circulation. The longest and most important of these
lives, that of Aubrey's friend Thomas Hobbes, was written at
length, to furnish material for Blackburne's Latin biography of
the philosopher. The only book which Aubrey himself published,
Miscellanies (1696), reveals that susceptible side of his character
which probably called down upon him Wood's epithets of
credulous' and 'magotieheaded' Besides being an entertaining
volume of stories, it contains much current folklore concerning
omens, ghosts, secondsight and other supernatural beliefs.
6


## p. 352 (#376) ############################################

352
Scholars and Antiquaries
Following upon the pioneer labours of Leland, Stow, Camden
and Speed, and the early local monographs of Lambarde, Carew
and others, progress in the study of local history and topography is
marked by William Burton's Description of Leicester Shire (1622),
and that model for county historians the Warwickshire of Dug-
dale. The second half of the seventeenth century found authors
and compilers hard at work and a fever of schemes in the air;
but, too often, the collector sank under the burden of his task,
and the materials he amassed remained a mere mountain of
notes, instead of growing into the fair and monumental edifice
planned at the outset. Many of these attempts have survived
in manuscript, some have been worked into later and more
successful schemes, while others have served as useful quarries;
and the few which achieved the distinction of print are of very
varying degrees of merit and value.
One of the most extensive of these schemes was that of Robert
Plot, at one time secretary to the Royal society and first keeper
of the Ashmolean museum, who planned a comprehensive tour
through England and Wales for the discovery and recording of
antiquities, customs, and natural and artificial curiosities. So
ambitious a project was, of course, never realized, but his Natural
History of Oxfordshire (1677) and Natural History of Stafford
shire (1686) brought him much credit, though the credulity which
they display has not maintained his reputation in a more critical
age. Dr William Stukeley, antiquary and exponent of Druidism,
who took an active part in the foundation of the Society of Anti-
quaries in 1717—8, and acted as its secretary for several years,
published some of the results of his antiquarian excursions, in
1724, under the title of Itinerarium Curiosum, an account of
antiquities and remarkable curiosities in nature or art observed
in travels through Great Britain. Alexander Gordon's Itine-
rarium Septentrionale (1726), which dealt chiefly with Roman
remains, was the outcome of a similar journey in Scotland and
the north of England.
A book which opens with the phrase 'England, the better
part of the best Island in the World,' could hardly fail to secure
popularity; but the extraordinary success of Edward Chamber-
layne's Angliae Notitia was, possibly, due less to this felicitous
sentiment than to the practical utility of the work as a convenient
handbook to the social and political state of the kingdom. No
fewer than nineteen revisions were called for between 1669 and
1702; and, after the author's death in 1703, it continued in vogue


## p. 353 (#377) ############################################

11
County Histories
353
in an enlarged form, as Magnae Britanniae Notitia, under the
editorship of his son, John Chamberlayne. Its success provoked
the appearance of a piratical rival, by Guy Miege, under the
title The New State of England; and this, also, went through
several editions.
Among other considerable topographical undertakings of this
period was the edition of Camden's Britannia (1695) trans-
lated and edited by Edmund Gibson, bishop of London, Tanner's
friend and fellow-worker, which included contributions by many
contemporary antiquaries, and Magna Britannia et Hibernia
antiqua et nova (1720—31), which, apparently a booksellers'
venture, did not claim originality, but was an able compilation
edited by Thomas Cox from published sources. Its six volumes
contain only English counties.
The notes which Elias Ashmole began collecting in 1667 for
The Antiquities of Berkshire were not printed till 1719, more than
a quarter of a century after his death. Robert Thoroton published
his Antiquities of Nottinghamshire in 1677, and James Wright's
meagre History and Antiquities of Rutland came out in 1684.
Sir Henry Chauncy's Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire
(1700) was followed, on the same plan, by Sir Robert Atkyns's
Ancient and present state of Glocestershire (1712); but neither of
them was a conspicuously meritorious work. Peter Le Neve's
great collections for Norfolk antiquities and genealogy served as
the ground work of the History of Norfolk which Francis Blome.
field began issuing in 1739, in monthly numbers printed at his
own private press. After his death, the work was completed in
1775 in an inferior manner. Richard Rawlinson, who had a gift
for editing other men's work, and who acted as foster-parent to
many orphaned books, designed a parochial history of the county
of Oxford, which was to have included Wood's account of the city;
and the materials collected both for this work and for his projected
continuation of Wood's Athenae form part of the immense collec-
tion of manuscripts which he bequeathed to the Bodleian library,
In addition to printing Aubrey's Surrey (1719), Rawlinson also
brought out Tristram Risdon’s Survey of Devon (1714), and
fathered separate histories of several cathedral churches, which
are not especially valuable.
Individual towns received a due share of attention; among the
more successful essays being William Somner's Canterbury (1640),
Ralph Thoresby's Leeds (1715), and Francis Drake's York (1736).
Stow's Survey of London, first published in 1598, had been already
23
13
*
E. L. IX.
CH. XIII.


## p. 354 (#378) ############################################

354
Scholars and Antiquaries
several times 'augmented,' before John Strype once more edited
and brought it down to date in 1720. Strype's chief work, how-
ever, was in the field of ecclesiastical history and biography; but
his books, ill-arranged and uncritical, are distinguished less for
their literary value than for the remarkable amount of curious
detail which they contain. The diocese of London found
a chronicler in Richard Newcourt, who, in 1708—10, published
his valuable Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense.
Wood's Oxford has already been referred to. Thomas Baker, non-
juring fellow of St John's college, Cambridge, added to accurate
and wide knowledge the character of unselfish readiness to com-
municate to others his stores of learning. He made extensive
collections towards a history of the university of Cambridge,
including an Athenae Cantabrigienses ; but, with the exception
of the admirable history of his college, published, with large
additions, by J. E. B. Mayor in 1869, the forty-two folio volumes
in Baker's remarkable hand-writing still remain in manuscript.
His Reflections on Learning, which appeared anonymously in
1700 and went through seven editions, brought him considerable
credit at the time, but is now happily forgotten. William Cole,
the friend of Horace Walpole, ably followed Baker in the same
path, and, though he published nothing, his hundred folio volumes
of manuscript collections and transcripts attest his industry, and
many contributions from his pen appeared in the works of con-
temporary writers.
In monastic antiquities, the writings of Dugdale and Tanner stand
preeminent among the books of this period, as does Dugdale's
St Paul's among works devoted to particular ecclesiastical founda-
tions. With these may be mentioned Simon Gunton's History of
the Church of Peterborough (1686) and James Bentham's History
of Ely Cathedral (1771). Browne Willis's History of the Mitred
Abbies (1718), and Survey of the Cathedrals were useful, if not
particularly accurate, compilations.
Among the more ancient monuments of antiquity, Stonehenge,
from the latitude it afforded for ingenious speculation, formed the
subject of various theories. Aubrey, in his oft-quoted but never
printed Monumenta Britannica, assigns to it a druidical origin.
In 1655 Inigo Jones, in his monograph on the subject, sought
to trace a Roman original; while Walter Charleton, in Chorea
Gigantum (1663), endeavoured to restore' it to the Danes, and
William Stukeley, in 1740, produced his Stonehenge, a temple
restor'd to the British Druids.


## p. 355 (#379) ############################################

Old English Studies
355
Roman antiquities attracted comparatively small attention,
though such books as William Burton's Commentary on An-
toninus, his Itinerary (1658), and John Horsley's Britannia
Romana (1732), with the writings of Thomas and Roger Gale,
Nathaniel Salmon, Alexander Gordon, and others, suffice to show
that the study was not entirely neglected.
The efforts of archbishop Parker in the sixteenth century to
further Old English studies, found a successor, among others, in
Sir Henry Spelman, who, besides producing numerous learned
works of his own, was ever ready to encourage the studies of
others. Neither the short-lived lectureship which he founded at
Cambridge, nor Rawlinson’s abortive similar project at Oxford
more than a century later, succeeded in giving the study an
academic status. Nevertheless, the subject did not lack votaries,
among whom are to be counted William Somner, whose Dictio-
narium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum was issued in 1659, Francis
Junius, George Hickes, bishop Gibson, editor of the Old English
Chronicle, William Elstob, and his learned sister Elizabeth, who
published a Homily on the Birthday of St Gregory and a
Grammar of the language.
It is not surprising to find that legal antiquities and the
history of various offices of state interested many of the able
men who either held office or engaged in the business of law, and
the results include some of the most successful essays in the
antiquarian literature of the time. Of such was The History and
Antiquities of the Exchequer of the Kings of England (1711) by
Thomas Madox, historiographer royal, whose other works include
Formulare Anglicanum, a series of ancient charters and docu-
ments arranged in chronological sequence from the Norman
conquest to the end of the reign of Henry VIII. This book, with
its learned introduction, is important as a contribution to the
study of diplomatic, a subject long neglected in this country.
Elias Ashmole and John Anstis, both members of the College of
Arms, each produced a work on the Order of the Garter. The
numerous additions to the literature of heraldry comprised, besides
writings by Selden, Dugdale, Nisbet, and others, The Academy
of Armory (1688), by Randle Holme (third of that name), with
its extraordinary glossaries of terms used in every conceivable
art, trade, and domestic employment.
Two books are noteworthy as ventures into new regions of
research that have since become fields of modern activity. Henry
Bourne's Antiquitates Vulgares, or The antiquities of the common
23-2


## p. 356 (#380) ############################################

356
Scholars and Antiquaries
people (1725) foreshadowed the study of local customs and tra-
ditions, now called folklore ; and the account of English printers
and printing which Joseph Ames issued in 1749, under the title
of Typographical Antiquities, is the foundation stone of the
history of printing in England.
With the growth of the literature of antiquarian studies con-
sequent upon this increased activity, there arose the need of
guides through the labyrinth of existing materials and of working
books designed to facilitate research ; and, accordingly, such aids
begin to appear, though they were not always the outcome of a
deliberate intention to furnish the tool-chest of the student of
antiquities. Some of these books, such as Tanner's Bibliotheca
Britannica and Notitia Monastica, and the indispensable Athenae
Oxonienses, have already been mentioned, Sir Henry Spelman's
Glossarium Archaiologicum represents another class of aids;
while Thomas Rymer's Foedera, and David Wilkins's Concilia
(founded on the work of Spelman and Dugdale), though perhaps
belonging more properly to the domain of history, may also
be noted here. The English, Scotch, and Irish Historical
Libraries of that industrious but too impetuous antiquary, arch-
bishop William Nicolson, was a new departure which, whatever its
shortcomings, continued to be for long after its appearance a
useful, and the best existing, conspectus of the literature with
which it dealt.
The stores of original sources whence this army of antiquaries
quarried material included the various archives of state papers
and records, and the chief public and private libraries. A key to
the manuscript treasures of the more important libraries, including
the extensive collection formed by John Moore, bishop of Ely, was
provided, in 1697, by the publication of the Catalogi Librorum
Manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae, a compilation which has
not even yet ceased to be useful, and which must, in its own day,
have been invaluable. In this work the editor, Edward Bernard,
was assisted by many scholars, including Humfrey Wanley, cele-
brated for his skill in palaeography and for his catalogue of the
Harleian manuscripts, upon which he was at work when overtaken
by death.
Of state papers and records the most important depository was
the Tower, where, at the beginning of the eighteenth century,
something was done towards reducing them to order under
the keepership of William Petyt, author, among other works,


## p. 357 (#381) ############################################

Osborne and Oldys
357
of Jus Parliamentarium, a treatise on the ancierit power, juris-
diction, rights, and liberties of parliament. Among public libraries,
the Bodleian, with its continuous accession of large and important
gifts and bequests, had no rival; and almost every antiquary
who essayed original work was indebted to the resources of the
Cottonian or the Harleian library.
The former of these two wonderful collections, brought together
by Sir Robert Cotton, scholar and antiquary, was justly celebrated
as much for the liberality with which the founder and his suc-
cessors made its riches accessible, as for the extraordinary historical
value of its contents, largely composed, as they were, of salvage
from the archives and libraries of the dispossessed monasteries.
The Harleian library, no less remarkable in its way, was collected
by Robert Harley, first earl of Oxford, and his son the second earl,
friend of Pope and patron of letters. On the death of the second
earl, the printed books (upwards of 20,000 volumes) were pur-
chased by Thomas Osborne, a bookseller who has had fame
thrust upon him through having been castigated at the hands of
Johnson and satirised by the pen of Pope, but who has a much
better claim to being remembered as the publisher of The Harleian
Miscellany (1744–6). This reprint of a selection of tracts from
the Harleian library was edited by William Oldys and Johnson,
who also worked together for some time upon a catalogue of the
whole collection. Oldys, who deserved a better fate, spent a large
part of his life in hack-work for booksellers. To the edition of
.
Ralegh’s History of the World, edited by him in 1736, he prefixed
an elaborate life of the author, perhaps his most important work.
The British Librarian, which he issued in six monthly numbers,
in 1737, is merely an analytical contents of a selection of books,
new and old; but his annotations in copies of various books,
especially Langbaine's Dramatic Poets-, have been largely used
by later commentators.
About the year 1572 there had been founded in London, chiefly
through the instrumentality of archbishop Parker, a Society of
Antiquaries. For nearly twenty years, this society met at the
house of Sir Robert Cotton ; but, on the accession of James I, it
was, for some not very apparent reason, suppressed. It seems to
have been fully a century later before there was any revival of
such reunions ; but in 1707 a few persons "curious in their re-
searches in antiquity' arranged to meet weekly for the discussion
of such subjects, and, after ten years of these more or less informal
1 As to Langbaine, cf. ante, chap. v.


## p. 358 (#382) ############################################

358
Scholars and Antiquaries
meetings, the present Society of Antiquaries was regularly con-
stituted in January 1717—18, with Peter Le Neve as president, and
Dr Stukeley as secretary. The list of founders included Roger
and Samuel Gale, Humfrey Wanley, Browne Willis, and other
wellknown names. In 1770, the society began to print selections
from its papers under the title of Archaeologia. This publication
formed a convenient repository for minor studies, a function which
had previously been performed to some extent by the Philosophical
Transactions, which the Royal society, instituted in 1660, began
to issue five years later.
A period of new activities like that under review is scarcely
expected to be productive of definitive work, and few, if any, of
the books that have been named in this section attained the
degree of exhaustiveness and niceness of accuracy demanded in
the present age of work in the same field. Much, however, was
done, by collecting data, examining material and making in-
ventorial records, to prepare the way for succeeding workers; and
the general results of this period are well summed up in the words
of Tanner, which, written in 1695, are applicable with even more
force at the close of the time covered by this brief survey.
The advances, that all parts of Learning have within these few
years made in England, are very obvious; but the progress is visible in
nothing more, than in the illustrations of our own History and Antiquities.
To which end we have had our ancient Records and Annals published from
the Originals, the Chorographical Description of these Kingdoms very much
improved, and some attempts made toward a just body of English History.
For those also that are more particularly curious, we have had not only
the Histories both Natural and Civil of several Counties, the descriptions of
Cities, and the Monuments and Antiquities of Cathedral Churches accurately
collected; but even the memoirs of private Families, Villages, and Houses,
compiled and published 1.
1 Notitia Monastica, preface.


## p. 359 (#383) ############################################

CHAPTER XIV
SCOTTISH POPULAR POETRY BEFORE BURNS
DURING a large portion of the sixteenth, and nearly the whole
of the seventeenth century a blight had fallen on secular verse in
Scotland ; so great a blight that very little of the best and most
characteristic verse of the 'makaris' would have come down to us
but for its preservation in MSS. One or two pieces by Henryson
and Dunbar were printed at Edinburgh by Chepman and Myllar
in 1508; Henryson's irreproachable Morall Fables were printed
by Lekprevick at St Andrews in 1570; but it was in London, and
after his death, that even the Vergil of Gavin Douglas appeared in
1553 and his Palice of Honour in 1579. Lyndsay's poems, printed
in London and elsewhere before the reformation, were probably
circulated privately in Scotland, where, after the reformation,
many editions were published; and they retained their excep-
tional popularity during the seventeenth century. But, Lyndsay
excepted, the old 'makaris' were never much known outside the
circle of the court or the learned classes; and, though James VI
himself wrote verse and patronised Montgomerie and other poets,
the old poetic succession virtually perished with the advent of
Knox.
Although, however, the age had become inimical to art of every
kind, it is very difficult to tell what was the actual effect of the kirk's
repressive rule on the manners, morals, habits and ancient predi-
lections of the people, or how far the hymnary of The Gude and
Godly Ballatis great as may have been the immediate vogue of
the anti-papal portion of it-superseded the old songs which
many of them parodied. While the relentless rigidity of the new
ecclesiasticism is sufficiently disclosed in its official standards and
its enactments, tractates, contemporary histories and session and
presbytery records, the actual efficacy of its discipline is another
matter. It had to deal with a very stubborn, selfwilled and
retentive people, and there is at least evidence that the old songs, if


## p. 360 (#384) ############################################

360 Scottish Popular Poetry before Burns
their popularity was, for a time, impaired, were by no means killed.
Doubtless, many were certain, in any case, to lose their vogue and be
gradually forgotten; but there is apparent evidence of the survival
in Scotland of some verses which were parodied in The Gude and
Godly Ballatis. How old are various songs in Ramsay's Tea-Table
Miscellany (1724, etc. ), marked by him as 'ancient'-such as
Muirland Willie, Scornfu' Nansie, Maggie's Tocher, My Jocky
blyth, Jocky said to Jeany, The Auld Guidman, In January last,
John Ochiltree, Todlen Butt and Todlen Ben and Jocky met with
Jenny fair—there is no definite means of knowing, though Fient
a crum of thee she faws is a semi-modernisation of Alexander
Scott's When his Wife Left him, and may serve as a specimen of
the liberties Ramsay took with the songs he termed 'ancient'
Probably, however, most of them belong to the seventeenth
century, and it may be that few are so old as The Auld Wife
ayont the Fire, Jocky Fou and Jenny Fain, Jeany where has
thou been and Auld Rob Morrig-which Ramsay terms old songs
with additions, the addition, sometimes, absorbing all the old song
except fragments of stanzas or the chorus-nor so old as others for
which he substituted an entirely new song under the old title. Next
to Ramsay's--and better in several respects than Ramsay's—is the
collection of David Herd, who, having amassed old songs from
broadsides, and written down fragments of others from recital,
without any attempt to alter or add to them, published a selection
of them in 1769, an enlarged edition in two volumes appearing in
1776, and the remainder of the songs in his MSS, edited by Hans
Hecht, in 1904. Some of these songs had been utilised by Burns,
who sent others, modified by himself, to Johnson's Scots Musical
Museum (1787–1803): and various old songs, of an improper
kind, are preserved with more modern ones in The Merry Muses,
of the original and authentic edition of which only one or two
copies now survive.
From the accession of James VI to the English throne, the
rigidity of the kirk's authority was coming to be more and more
undermined; and, especially among the better classes, the puritan
tendencies, never, in most cases, very deep, began to be greatly
modified. It is to this class we evidently owe many of the old songs
preserved by Ramsay. None of the old lyrical verse, though it has,
and especially to us of a later generation, a popular aspect, is really
of popular origin. When closely examined, it gives evidence of
some cultured art; though exceedingly outspoken, it is never
vulgar; nor is its standpoint that of the people, but similar, as


## p. 361 (#385) ############################################

Relations between English and Scottish Song 361
its tone, with a difference, is similar, to that of the 'makaris':
for example, to that of the author of The Wife of Auchter-
mychty and Rob's Jok cam to woo our Jenny, preserved in the
Bannatyne Ms. But, while also intensely Scottish in tone and
tenor, many of these songs are yet, in metre and style, largely
modelled upon the forms of English verse, which, from the time
of Alexander Scott, had begun to modify the old Scottish dialect
and the medieval staves. The language of most of them is only
semi-Scots, as is also most of the lyric verse of Scotland from
Ramsay onwards.
The relations between English and Scottish popular music and
song were, even at an early period, somewhat intimate, and there
was a specially close connection between southern Scotland and
the north of England, the people on both sides of the Borders
being largely of the same race and speaking the same northern
dialect of Early English. Chappell, in his Popular Music of the
olden Time, and in notes to the earlier volumes of the Roxburghe
Ballads, Ebsworth, in his notes to the later Roxburghe and other
ballads, and Furnivall, in introductions to various publications,
have pointed out the trespasses of various Scottish editors such as
Ramsay, Thomson (Orpheus Caledonius 1725), Oswald (Scots Airs
1740) and Stenhouse (Notes to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum
1853)-in rapaciously appropriating for Scotland various old popular
English tunes and songs; but, on the other hand, the case against
the Scottish origin of certain tunes and songs is not so clear as
these editors sometimes endeavour to make out; and, in not a few
instances, they can be proved to be in error. Several tunes and
songs had an international vogue at so early a period that it is
really impossible to determine their origin; moreover, the Scottish
court, especially during the reign of the five kings of the name of
James, was a great centre of all kinds of artistic culture, and
probably, through its musicians and bards, exercised considerable
influence on music and song in the north of England.
That various English tunes are included in the Scottish MS
collections of the seventeenth century is undeniable: they merely
represent tunes, Scots or English, that came to be popular in
Scotland, but a large number, even of the doubtful variety, may
well have been of Scots origin; and, in any case, the titles of many
indicate that they had become wedded to Scottish words. Chappell
has affirmed that the religious parodies, such as Ane Compendious
Booke of Godly and Spirituall Songs, are commonly upon English
songs and ballads. Now, when the book was first published--and,
>


## p. 362 (#386) ############################################

362 Scottish Popular Poetry before Burns
since an edition so early as 1567 survives, there is reason to
suppose that it was first published between 1542 and 1546—this
was not at all likely, for it immediately succeeded what may be
called the golden age of old Scottish verse, and, at the date of its
publication, Scottish verse was little, if at all, affected by the
new school of English poetry. Indeed, English songs, at least
those not in the northern dialect, could hardly, before this, have
had any popular vogue in Scotland; but it should be observed
that Chappell did not know of the early date of the book, and
supposed it not to have appeared till 1590. Thus, after printing
the air ‘Go from my Window,' he adds that, on 4 March 1587—8,
John Wolfe had licence to print a ballad called 'Goe from the
window,' which ‘may be the original'; and he then proceeds
gravely to tell us: 'It is one of the ballads that were parodied
in Ane Compendious Booke of Godly and Spirituall Songs. .
printed in Edinburgh in 1590 and 1621'; whereas, if Wolfe's be
the original English ballad, then 'Go from my Window' must be
of Scottish origin—though whether it is or not is uncertain.
Similarly, Chappell was unaware that the compendium was a
much earlier authority for John come kisse me than any cited
by him; and the fact that there is an answer to it in Scots in the
same measure-preserved in a Dublin university MS-favours the
supposition that the original song was in Scots; while an actual
verse of the song may very well be that published by Herd in 1769
along with the original chorus. Again, with regard to The Wind
Blaws Cauld, Hay Now the Day daws and The Hunt's Up, it
would be easy to point out earlier Scottish than English references
to them. Later, it is also indisputable that, while Ramsay and
others were indebted to English broadsides for suggestions and,
sometimes, for more, various English broadsides are mere travesties,
and others reminiscent, or more than reminiscent, of old Scottish
songs. Chappell's theory that the original name for the tunes to
which some of these ballads were set was 'northern'- synonym,
in his opinion, for ‘rustic'—and that, after the accession of
Charles II, such tunes were gradually denominated 'Scotch,' while
it is the only theory consistent with his conclusions, is not in
itself a very feasible one, and, besides, the evidence such as
exists—is all against it. Shakespeare likens wooing to a 'Scotch
jig,' 'hot and hasty' and 'full as fantastical'; Dryden compares
Chaucer's tales for their rude sweetness' to a 'Scotch tune'; and
Shadwell, in The Scowrers, makes Clara describe'a Scotch song'as
‘more hideous and barbarous than an Irish cronan. No one can


## p. 363 (#387) ############################################

Original Scots Songs 363
credit that the jigs, tunes and songs thus referred to were really
not 'Scotch’ but ‘northern,' or 'rustic’; but, unless we interpret
Scotch' in the very special sense that Chappell would attach to it
from the time of Charles II in its relation with broadside tunes and
ballads, we can arrive at no other conclusion than that tunes and
songs recognised to be 'Scotch' in the usual sense of that term
were well known in London from at least the time of Shakespeare.
Moreover, since we find ballads of the early seventeenth century
written to tunes which are described as 'Scotch,' we must suppose
that these and subsequent ballad-writers, whether they were under
a delusion or not, really supposed that the tunes to which they
referred were 'Scotch'; and we must assume that the reason for
the hypothesis was that they knew them as sung to 'Scotch'
words. In several instances, also, internal evidence clearly shows
the dependence of the Anglo-Scots version on a Scots original. It
is very manifest in D'Urfey's Scotch Wedding, where ‘Scotch' can
scarcely stand for 'rustic, since the piece is merely an amazing
version of The Blythesome Bridal. Then, what but a Scots
original could have suggested ballads with such titles as Johny's
Escape from Bonny Dundee or 'Twas within a Furlong of
Edinburgh Town, or The Bonny Scotch Lad and the Yielding
Lass, set to the tune of The Liggan Waters, i. e. Logan Water (an
old air well known to Burns, the original words of which are
evidently those partly preserved in the Herd MS and, with a
difference, in The Merry Muses); or The Northern Lass 'to a
pleasant Scotch tune called the Broome of Cowden Knowes';
or, indeed, any other broadside ballads concerned with Scottish
themes or incidents ? Even in cases where a modern Scottish
adaptation of an old song may be later than an English broadside
on the same theme, we cannot always be certain that it is borrowed
from the broadside. Thus, the English broadside Jenny, Jenny
bears both external and internal evidence of being founded on an
old Scots original, whether or not this original was known to
Ramsay. Again, Ramsay's Nanny O is later than the broadside
Scotch Wooing of Willy and Nanny, and may have been sug-
gested by it, for it has a very similar chorus; but Chappell has
been proved wrong in his statement that the tune to which the
broadside is set is English, and the Scots original may well have
been, with differences caused by recitation, the version in the
Herd MS, A8 I came in by Edinburgh town, a line of which was
possibly in the mind of Claverhouse, when he declared his willing-
ness to take ‘in her smoak’ the lady he afterwards married. In


## p. 364 (#388) ############################################

364 Scottish Popular Poetry before Burns
some instances where the English broadside may be the original,
there is, it must be admitted, a striking superiority in the Scottish
version. This is very marked, for example, in The Jolly Beggar
and Helen of Kirkconnel; but, occasionally, as in Robin's Courtship,
which is merely a Scottish reading of The Wooing of Robin and
Joan—but not, of course, the work of Herd or any co-conspirator
of his, as Ebsworth vehemently supposed--there is deterioration;
and, indeed, many vulgar Scottish chapbook songs are mere Scottish
perversions of English broadsides.
A lyric in The Tea-Table Miscellany of outstanding excellence
and entirely Scottish in sentiment and style, Were na my Heart
licht, was written by Lady Grizel Baillie, who also is known to have
written various other songs, though none have been recovered
except the mournfully beautiful fragment The Ewe-buchtin's
bonnie, which may have been suggested by the peril of her
father- Patrick Hume, afterwards earl of Marchmont-when in
hiding, in 1684, in the vault of Polwarth because of implication in
the Rye house plot. Lady Wardlaw is now known to be the author
of the ballads Hardyknute and Gilderoy. Willie was a Wanton
Wag-suggested by the English O Willy was 80 blythe a Lad in
Playford's Choice Ayres (1650), but a sparkling, humorous and
original sketch of a Scottish gallant-was sent by William Hamilton
of Gilbertfield to Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany; and the lyrics
now mentioned with those of Ramsay himself, and others consisting
of new-and mostly English-words by different hands, whose
identity, with few exceptions, cannot now be determined, are the
first indication, now visible to us, of the new popular lyrical revival
in Scotland; though mention may here be made of the Delectable
New ballad, intituled Leader-Haughs and Yarrow (c. 1690), the
work, according to a line of the ballad, of 'Minstrel Burn,' which
seems to have set the fashion for later Yarrow ballads and songs,
and was republished by Ramsay in his Miscellany.
Meanwhile, the old poetic methods of the 'makaris' had been
preserved or revived by Robert Sempill, of Beltrees, Renfrewshire,
in his eulogy of the village piper of Kilbarchan, Habbie Simson.
Sempill has also been speculatively credited with the authorship
of Maggie Lauder, on account of its mention of Habbie, but
nothing is known of the song previous to its preservation by
Herd, and it might just as well have been the work of Hamilton of
Gilbertfield, the scene of whose Bonnie Heck, like that of Maggie
Lauder, is laid in Fife. More probable is Sempill's authorship
of The Blythesome Bridal, which has also been attributed


## p. 365 (#389) ############################################

Habbie Simson
365
to his son Francis Sempill, author of a vernacular piece of no
great merit, in the French octave, The Banishment of Povertie.
The Blythesome Bridal, though a little rancid in its humour, is the
cleverest of those seventeenth century pieces with the exception of
Maggie Lauder. Its portrayal of the village worthies who went
to the bridal, if more cynical than flattering, is terse and realistic:
but the simple, semi-humorous, semi-pathetic eulogy of the piper
was to exercise a much more pregnant and permanent influence on
the future of Scottish verse. Ramsay, in one of his poetical epistles,
refers to it as 'Standard Habbie,' and with even greater reason
than it was possible for him to know, though he could hardly
exaggerate what he himself owed to it as an exemplar for some
of his most characteristic verse. It is written in a six-line stave in
rime couée, built on two rimes, which can be traced back to the
French troubadours, and was common in England in the thirteenth,
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The stave appears anonymously
in the Bannatyne MS, but, possibly, was introduced into Scotland,
not from France, at an early, but from England at a comparatively
late, period, for Sir David Lyndsay is the earliest of the 'makaris'
who is known to have made use of it, though, after him, Montgomerie,
Scott and Sir Richard Maitland all had recourse to it Since it is
the stave of one of the Gude and Godly Ballatis, and appeared,
also, in Sir David Lyndsay's Pleasant Satyre, Sempill's knowledge
of it is easy to explain; but it had never previously been employed
for elegies, and to have recourse to it for this purpose was, on his
part, if not an inspiration of genius, at least a very happy thought.
If The Life and Death of Habbie Simson is but a moderately
good achievement, it is hardly exaggeration to affirm that, but for
it, the course of Scottish vernacular verse would, in certain almost
cardinal respects, have been widely different from what it turned
out to be. It set a fashion which was to dominate, in quite a
singular way, its whole future. Not only were most future ver-
nacular elegies beginning with the epitaph of Sanny Briggs, the
butler of the Sempills and Habbie's nephew, which was either by
Robert Sempill or his son Francis-modelled on it, generally down
to the adoption of the refrain ending in 'dead'; but the stave,
which almost writes itself, proved peculiarly adapted for the Scoto-
English which had become the prevailing speech in Scotland, and
suitable for the expression of almost any variety of sentiment, from
homely and familiar humour, the prevailing mood of the vernacular
muse, to cutting satire, delicate, tender or highwrought emotion,
graphic and impressive description, or moving appeal.


## p. 366 (#390) ############################################

366 Scottish Popular Poetry before Burns
Habbie Simson, already well known as a broadside, was included
in Watson's Choice Collection, together with an anonymous epitaph
in the same stave and manner on the famous traveller William
Lithgow, and a variation, The Last Dying Words of Bonnie Heck,
by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, on which Ramsay modelled
his Lucky Spence's Last Advice, and The Last Speech of a Wretched
Miser, and which, though not in the same stave, suggested Burns's
Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie. Hamilton and Ramsay
also set another fashion for the use of the stave by utilising it for
a series of poetical epistles that passed between them. Other
modern pieces in Watson's Collection were The Blythesome Bridal,
The Banishment of Povertie, The Speech of a Fife Laird and The
Mare of Collington. The most notable of the old pieces were Christis
Kirk and Montgomerie's The Cherrie and the Slae, both of which
had long previously appeared in printl; and it is worthy of note
that it was in the staves of Habbie and these two poems that
the most characteristically Scottish non-lyrical verse found expres-
sion. The lyrical verse of the revival was not so uniformly Scottish
as the other, and much of that which was truly Scottish in tone and
method was not so consistently vernacular in its language. In the
non-lyrical verse, the influence of the old 'makaris' is predominant.
The outstanding figure of the vernacular revival was Allan
Ramsay, who was an unknown journeyman wigmaker, when, in 1706,
Watson published his Choice Collection. The greatness of Ramsay's
pioneer work it is difficult for us to appreciate; and, if his early cir-
cumstances be considered, a parallel to his strenuous and successful
literary career in very unpromising surroundings would be hard to
find. Though of gentle descent, he was, through the early deaths of
his father (a manager of lead-mines at Leadhills, Lanarkshire) and
mother, left wholly dependent on his own exertions for a living.
At the age of fourteen, he became apprentice to a wigmaker in
Edinburgh, and, in the year after the appearance of Watson's
Collection, he opened a shop of his own. If we are to credit his
own account, in one of his epistles to Hamilton, it was the perusal
of the poet's Bonnie Heck that 'pierced' him with poetic emula-
tion; and his earlier pieces were written in the stave of it and
Habbie, and were elegiac—some, half-humorous half-pathetic,
others, wholly satirical-in aim. They began with an elegy on
Maggie Johnstone, who had a small farm and there sold ale to
the golfers on Bruntsfield-links, a similar elegy on Lucky Wood,
the landlady of a Canongate alehouse, and one on Pat Birnie, the
Cf. , as to these, ante, vol. II, pp. 130 and 135—6.
! !
1


## p. 367 (#391) ############################################

Allan Ramsay
367
fiddler of Kinghorn in Fife. Almost purely satirical are those on
John Cowper or, rather, on his office of kirk-treasurer's man, or
tyrant of the cutty-stool, the disreputable Lucky Simpson's Last
Advice and The Last Speech of a Wretched Miser. This series of
mock-elegies, with those by Alexander Pennecuick, are unique in
Scottish, and, perhaps, in any, literature. From the nature of the
subjects, the humour is broader and more incisive than that of
their elegiac predecessors in Watson's Collection, and some of the
more caustically satirical pieces more than foreshadow those of
Burns. With other pieces in similar vein, on street characters
and incidents, they were sold as halfpenny or penny broadsides,
and those now preserved form together a wonderfully realistic
representation of some of the outstanding characteristics of a
certain phase of Edinburgh life in the eighteenth century.
But, by his two cantos added to Christis Kirk, one to an
edition which he published in 1716 and the other to a second
edition in 1718, Ramsay claimed much more serious attention as
a vernacular bard. There was a certain presumption in his thus
seeking to link his name with this fine old classic, and the experi-
ment was not justified by the character of his success ; for neither
was his poetic training nor genius, if genius, as Burns affirmed, he
had, akin to that of the author—the supposed royal author of the
ancient poem, nor was the Edinburgh or Scotland of Ramsay's day
precisely similar to the rude undisciplined Scotland of the fifteenth
century; but, nevertheless, his descriptions have the merit of being
graphically and literally representative of the tone and manners of
the common people of his own time; and the constant play of
humour that pervades them partly atones for their excessive
squalidity. In several of his fables and tales, he further showed
himself master of a lighter, and, generally, quite irreproachable,
vein of comic humour, and The Monk and the Miller's Wife is a
wonderfully good modern travesty of The Freiris of Berwick.
Whether or not he had any similar antique original for The Vision,
his own description of it—as 'compylit in Latin by a most lernit
clerk in Tyme of our Hairship and oppression, anno 1300, and
translatit in 1524'-is, manifestly, fictitious. It seems rather to be
a kind of Jacobite effusion, voicing the general discontent at the
union and its consequences. Written in the stave of The Cherrie
and the Slae, it also gives evidence of the results of Ramsay's fuller
acquaintance with the works of the old 'makaris’ through the
perusal of them in the Bannatyne MS, and, here and there, they
seem to have inspired him with the courage to attempt poetic


## p. 368 (#392) ############################################

368 Scottish Popular Poetry before Burns
flights rather beyond the common scope of his vernacular muse,
although his low comedy genius occasionally plays havoc with his
more ambitiously imaginative descriptions.
But Ramsay's crowning poetical achievement is, probably, the
pastoral drama entitled The Gentle Shepherd. Here, his comic
vein is generally restrained within the bounds of propriety, the
pervading tone of the poem being lightly humorous. Yet, not-
withstanding a certain stilted artificiality borrowed from English
eighteenth century models, nature and reality on the whole
triumph, and, if he depicts rustic life robbed of its harshness and
of many of its more vulgar and grosser features, his idealisation is
of a kind quite legitimate in art.
As a lyrist, his actual achievements are a little difficult to
appraise, for it is impossible to know precisely how much of the
several songs he contributed to The Miscellany was his own, how
much that of the original author's ; but, from what we do know of
certain of them, it is plain that he had no claim whatever to gifts
as an amender or transformer bearing any distant similarity to
those of Burns. In fact, in 'purifying' the old songs, he generally
transmuted them into very homely and ordinary productions ; and,
while preserving some of the original spirit of the more humorous
among them, the more romantic and emotional appear to have
suffered not a little from his lack of ardent feeling and high poetic
fancy. This, for example, is very evident in his transmutation of
the pathetic ballad of Bessy Bell and Marie Gray into a very
commonplace semi-sentimental, semi-comic song, as thus :
Dear Bessy Bell and Mary Gray,
Ye unco sair oppress us:
Our fancies gae between you twae,
Ye are sic bonney lasses.
Commonplace, truth to tell, is the dominating note of all his songs,
though, in the best of them, My Peggy is a young thing, it
appears, by some happy chance, in a guise of tender simplicity that
completely captivates. He never did anything in lyric verse to
compare with it. True, Lochaber no more may be instanced as, at
least in parts, much superior to this simple ditty ; but it is by
no means so faultless ; indeed, it seems to deteriorate with each
succeeding stanza, and the peculiar pathetic beauty that gleams
through its defects it may owe to an original now lost; while it is
at least worth mention that, in a note on Lochaber in Johnson's
Museum, captain Riddell states : The words here given to Lochaber
were composed by an unfortunate fugitive on account of being


## p. 369 (#393) ############################################

182
Ramsay's Literary and Patriotic Services 369
de concerned in the affair of 1715'; and, if the song be by Ramsay,
the could hardly have hit on such a theme without some special
poetic suggestion. The more purely English lyrics attained to
great vogue in ‘Mary'bone' gardens and similar haunts; and he
was one of the most popular song-writers of his day in England
as well as Scotland. His more ambitious English verse cannot
be said to merit much attention. While the mere versification
hai is fluent and faultless, he has succeeded in aping rather the
El poetic offences than the excellences of his eighteenth century
models. Even his satires, when he had recourse to English, almost
lost their sting. His Scribblers lashed, for example, is a very poor
imitation of Pope. Again, his elegies on the great, throughout in
stately English, are woefully stilted productions and compare badly
with his robust and animated vernacular productions, as witness
that on Lady Margaret Anstruther, which begins thus :
All in her bloom, the graceful fair
Lucinda leaves this mortal round.
Ramsay's strong devotion to literature and his increasing poetic
repute, combined with the acquaintance he had formed in the Easy
club-access to which he owed, presumably, rather to his 'auld
descent' than to his business prosperity, but of which he was,
later, chosen poet-laureate with various learned and intellectual
Edinburgh citizens, suggested to him, in 1719, to abandon the wig-
making trade for that of a bookseller. He also started a circulating
a
library, lending out books at a penny a night: not the old theo
logical treatises which had hitherto formed the main intellectual
pabulum of the burgher Scot, but what Wodrow, in a woeful
private lament, terms, 'all the villainous, profane and obscene
books as printed in London. ' Ramsay, certainly, was not squeamish
in his tastes; but, by his courageous defiance of the narrow
puritanism of his time, he effectually removed the old Scottish ban
on secular English literature and did more, perhaps, than any other
man to further the intellectual revival of which, towards the close
of the century, Edinburgh became the centre. Apart from this,
by the publication of his own verse, of The Tea-Table Miscellany
(1724—32), and of The Evergreen (1724) a selection of the
verse of the old 'makaris' obtained chiefly from the Bannatyne
MS—he disseminated a love of song and verse among the people,
both high and low, which, consummated by the advent of Burns,
still remains a marked characteristic of Scotland. How utterly
the good old bards of Scotland,' as Ramsay terms them, had been
forgotten, is witnessed in his introduction to The Evergreen.
24
6
E. L. IX.
CH. XIV.


## p. 370 (#394) ############################################

370 Scottish Popular Poetry before Burns
>
Writing of them as if they had belonged to a remote age or a
distant foreign land, he says: 'It was intended that an account of
the authors of the following collection should be given, but not
being furnished with such distinct information as could be wished
for that end, at present, the design is delayed,' etc. To have been
the first to seek to do justice to these forgotten masters in verse is
a sufficient title on Ramsay's part to the permanent gratitude of
his countrymen ; but, in addition, his work as a literary pioneer in
the combined capacity of writer, editor, publisher and librarian
was, largely because of the literary dearth of the preceding century
in Scotland, of far greater importance than that of many with whose
literary achievements his own can bear no comparison.
A contemporary and a kind of poetic rival of Ramsay was
Alexander Pennecuick (d. 1730), the thriftless, drunken and down-
at-heel nephew of Dr Alexander Pennecuik (1652—1722) of
Romanno, author of a Description of Tweeddale and other English
verse, published posthumously in 1817. The vernacular verses of
the nephew, who is often confounded with his uncle, appeared, like
the early experiments of Ramsay, as penny broadsides, and, like
Ramsay, he also essayed verse in stilted English, publishing, in
1713, Britannia Triumphans, in 1720, Streams from Helicon
and, in 1726, Flowers from Parnassus. If, in low humour, he
is not quite so affluent as Ramsay, he, in The Merry Wives of
Musselburgh at their meeting together to welcom Meg Dickson
after her loup from the Ladder (1724), (Meg, a Musselburgh fish-
wife, had escaped execution through the breaking of the rope),
depicts the incidents of the semi-grotesque semi-awesome occasion
with a grim and graphic satiric mirth rather beyond him. Other
vernacular achievements of Pennecuick are Rome's Legacy to the
Church of Scotland, a satire on the kirk's cutty-stool in heroic
couplets, an Elegy on Robert Forbes, a kirk-treasurer's man like
Ramsay's John Cowper, and The Presbyterian Pope, in the form
of a dialogue between the kirk-treasurer's man and his female
informant, Meg. In his descriptions, Pennecuick shows greater
aptitude for individual portraiture and for the realisation of
definite scenes than does Ramsay, whose John Cowper might be
any kirk-treasurer's man. Pennecuick shows us the 'pawky face'
of Robert Forbes 'keeking thro' close-heads' to catch a brace of
lovers in confabulation, or piously shaking his head when he hears
the tune of Chevy Chace, and, with his ‘Judas face,' repeating
preachings and saying grace.
Robert Crawford, son of the laird of Drumsoy, Renfrewshire,
6


## p. 371 (#395) ############################################

William Hamilton. George Halkett 371
contributed a good many songs to The Miscellany. His Bush
Aboon Traquair has one or two excellent lines and semi-stanzas,
the best being, probably, that beginning "That day she smiled and
made me glad’; but it evidently owes its repute mainly to its
title, and is not by any means so happy an effort as the more
vernacular, and really excellent, Down the Burn Davie ; while
Allan Water and Tweedside are more or less spoiled by the intro-
duction of the current artificialities of the English eighteenth
century muse.
Another contributor to The Miscellany was William Hamilton of
Bangour, whose one notable composition is the imposingly melodious
Braes of Yarrow, beginning ‘Busk ye, busk ye, my bony bride,' which,
written in 1724, and circulated for some time in MS, appeared
uninitialled at the close of the second volume of The Miscellany.
It is probably a kind of fantasia on a fragmentary traditional
ballad and may even have been suggested by the anonymous Rare
Willie drowned in Yarrow, which appeared in the fourth volume
of The Miscellany, and, consisting of only four stanzas, is by far
the finest commemoration of the supposed Yarrow tragedy. If
Hamilton wrote both of them, it is all the more regrettable that
he mainly confined his poetic efforts to the celebration, in bombastic
conventional form, of the charms of fashionable ladies. In the
'45, he followed prince Charlie, and he wrote a Jacobite Ode to
the battle of Gladsmuir, which was set to music by the Edinburgh
musician, M'Gibbon.
Sir John Clerk, of Penicuik, is the reputed author of Merry
may the Maid be that Marries the Miller, which first appeared
in 1752 in The Charmer, a volume of partly Scots and partly
English verse, edited by I. Gair, the first edition of which appeared
in 1749. George Halkett, schoolmaster of Rathen, Aberdeenshire,
is credited by Peter Buchan with the authorship of Logie O'Buchan,
which appeared, c. 1730, in a broadside, and a Jacobite ballad
Wherry Whigs Awa, included in Hogg's Jacobite Relics, but
termed by Hogg a confused ballad, the greater part of the twenty
copies in his possession being quite different from one another,
and visibly 'composed at different periods and by different hands. '
Halkett, it is also supposed, may have been the author of the
Dialogue between the Devil and George II, which caused the
duke of Cumberland, in 1746, to offer a reward of £100 for the
author, living or dead. Halkett's Occasional Poems on Various
Subjects, published in 1727, strongly militate against Buchan's
statements, even if Wherry Whigs Awa, in the extended fashion
6
24-2


## p. 372 (#396) ############################################

372 Scottish Popular Poetry before Burns
printed by Hogg, existed in the time of Halkett. Logie O'Buchan
may well, however, have been a veiled Jacobite ballad, lamenting
the fortunes of the old pretender.
Alexander Ross, a graduate of Aberdeen university, who became
schoolmaster at Lochlee in Forfarshire, acquired much fame in
the northern counties by his pastoral Helenore or the Fortunate
Shepherdess, which, with a few of his songs, was published at
Aberdeen, in 1768, a revised edition appearing in 1778. Linguisti-
cally, it is of special interest as a specimen of the Aberdeenshire
dialect; but it is a rather wearisome production, and cannot com-
pare with Ramsay's pastoral, on which it is largely modelled,
though the plot is of quite a different and much more romantic
character. Its prosy commonplace strikingly contrasts with the
wit and vivacity of Ross's songs, such as The Rock and the Wee
Pickle Tow, Wooed and Married and a' and The Bridal O't,
which, apart from lyric effectiveness, are really admirable sketches
of Scottish peasant life in the olden time. Quite the equal, and,
indeed, the superior, of Ross, as a song-writer, was John Skinner,
episcopalian minister of Longside, Aberdeenshire, the irresistible
sprightly cheerfulness of whose Tullochgorum so captivated Burns
that he pronounced it to be the best Scots song Scotland ever
saw. ' In much the same vein are Tune your Fiddle and Old Age;
but a much finer achievement than any of these is the Ewie wi
the Crookit Horn. Though suggested by the older elegies of
Sempill and Hamilton, it is in a different stanza, one of three lines
riming together, with a refrain ending in ‘a'' throughout the poem,
and it altogether surpasses them in pathetic humour. To it, Burns
owed more than the suggestion for Poor Mailie's Elegy, following
not merely its general drift but partly parodying its expressions,
more particularly those in the last stanza, beginning 'O all ye
bards benorth Kinghorn. '
Alexander Geddes, an accomplished catholic priest—who con-
tributed a Scots translation of the first eclogue of Vergil and the
first idyll of Theocritus to the transactions of the Scottish Society
of Antiquaries and wrote in English Linton, a Tweedside Pastoral,
and a rimed translation of the first book of The Iliad-is one
of the few known authors of contemporary Jacobite songs. His
Lewie Gordon, under the title The Charming Highlandman, first
appeared in the second edition of The Scots Nightingale, 1779:
and he is also credited with the inimitably droll Wee Wifukie,
relating the experiences of a rustic Aberdeenshire dame on her
way homewards from the fair, after she had got 'a wee bit
-


## p. 373 (#397) ############################################

Graham. Mrs Cockburn and Jane Elliot 373
a
'?
a
drappukie. ' Murdoch MÄLennan, minister of Crathie, Aberdeen-
shire, narrated the affair of Sheriffmuir in the clever but absolutely
impartial Race of Sheriffmuir, with the refrain, “and we ran and
they ran awa man. ' John Barclay celebrated the same engagement
in the versified Dialogue betwixt William Lickladle and Thomas
Cleancogue, modelled upon the anonymous ballad of Killiecrankie ;
and a similar ballad, Tranent Muir, on the battle of Prestonpans,
is attributed to Adam Skirving. Skirving has, also, been usually
credited with the authorship of the song Johnnie Cope; but a
manuscript note by Burns in an interleaved copy of Johnson's
Museum seems to indicate that the song, as published there, is
by Burns : ‘the air,' he says, 'was the tune of an old song, of
which I have heard some verses, but now only remember the title
which was: “Will ye go to the coals in the morning ? ”. Two sets
are published in Hogg's Relics, from Gilchrist's Collection.
Dougal Graham, a wandering chapman who followed the army
of prince Charlie and afterwards became bellman and town crier
of Glasgow, wrote, in doggerel rime, A full and Particular Account
of the Rebellion of 1745–6, to the tune of The Gallant Grahams;
he is credited with a rather witty skit The Turnpike, expressing, in
Highland Scots, the mingled contempt and wonder with which the
roads of general Wade were regarded by the unsophisticated Celt,
and his objection to the imposition of tolls ; and he wrote and sold
various more or less racy and absurd prose chapbooks, as, for
example, The History of Buchhaven, jocosely imaginary, Jocky
and Maggie's Courtship, a skit on the cutty-stool, The Comical
Transactions of Lothian Tam, etc.
Mrs Cockburn, a relative of Sir Walter Scott, wrote, besides
other songs which have not attained to popularity, a version of The
Flowers of the Forest ('I have seen the Smiling'), which appeared
in The Lark in 1765, and was, as she herself states, sung'at wells? '
to the old tune. A more vernacular version, 'I've heard them
Lilting at the Ewe Miking'-which includes the first line and the
burden of the old song now lost—by Jane Elliot, third daughter of
Sir Gilbert Elliot, of Minto, was used by Herd for a version made
up from various copies of the old ballad collated; but an authentic
copy was obtained by Scott for The Border Minstrelsy. Miss Elliot's
brother, Sir Gilbert Elliot, was the author of My Apron Dearie
in Johnson's Museum.
Of a considerable number of songs of the eighteenth century,
the authorship is either doubtful or quite unknown. There's nae
1 I. e. in watering places.
6


## p. 374 (#398) ############################################

374 Scottish Popular Poetry before Burns
luck aboot the Hooge has been attributed both to William Julius
Mickle, author of the ballad of Cumnor Hall, and to Jean Adams
of Greenock, authoress of a book of religious verse ; but Burns
states that it first came on the streets as a ballad in 1771 or 1772,
and it may not be by either of them. Two verses were added to it
by James Beattie, author of The Minstrel, who confined himself
almost wholly to English verse, but wrote a rather clever riming
epistle, in the Habbie Simson stave, To Mr Alexander Ross, whose
‘hamely auld-warld muse,' he said, had provoked him to ape'in
verse and style,' our 'guid plain country folks. ' The song ( weel
may the Boatie Row was attributed by Burns to John Ewen, an
Aberdeen merchant; but, in any case, it appears to have been
suggested by some old fisher chorus.
Excellent anonymous songs--all probably, and some certainly,
not of earlier date than the eighteenth century-are Ettrick Banks,
Here awa there awa, Saw ye my Father, The Lowlands of
Holland, Bess the Gawkie, I had a horse and I had nae mair,
Hooly and Fairly, Willie's gane to Melville Castle and O'er the
Moor amang the Heather (which Burns said he wrote down from
the singing of a disreputable female tramp, Jean Glover, and
which, if not largely by Burns, is not all by Jean, and is probably
in part founded on an old song).
Towards the later half of the eighteenth century and during it,
various anonymous songs, more or less indelicate in tone, found
their way into broadsides. Some were preserved by Herd, either
from recitation or from print, and several are included, in whole
or in part, in his 1769 and 1776 editions; others, too liberal in
their humour for general reading, are, with quite unobjectionable
songs, included in the limited edition of Songs from David Herd's
Manuscript, edited by Hans Hecht, 1904. Of these, a few have
not appeared at all in other collections, and the others only in a
garbled form. Neither the MS collection of Peter Buchan nor his
Gleanings of Scotch, English and Irish Ballads (1825), nor Robert
Hartley Cromek’s Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song
(1810), can be regarded as trustworthy authorities in regard either
to texts or sources. Rare copies of broadsides occur containing
songs of a certain literary merit and interesting for their glimpses
of the characteristics of rustic life in the eighteenth century ; but
several are not likely ever to be included in collections. Thus, by a
careful examination of existing broadsides, much that, for various
reasons, deserves preservation might be found ; and, in any case,
i See, as to Beattie, vol, x, post.


## p. 375 (#399) ############################################

Jacobite Songs and James Hogg 375
since of certain songs which are known to have first appeared
in broadsides no copies in that form exist, not a few songs
of some merit are likely to have perished with the broadsides
containing them.
For Jacobite songs, the main published authority is still James
Hogg's Jacobite Relics of Scotland, 1819–21, a work as to which
it would be hard to decide whether its merits or its defects are the
more intrinsic characteristic. On its preparation, he evidently
bestowed immense labour, and he had the cooperation of many
enthusiasts, including Scott, in supplying him with copies both in
broadsides and manuscript. Indeed, he tells us that he obtained
so many copies of the same ballad and, also, of different ballads-
that he actually grew terrified' when he ‘heard of a MS volume
of Jacobite songs. ' His critical notes are, sometimes, inimitable,
as, for example, this on Perfidious Britain :
I do not always understand what the bard means, but as he seems to have
been an ingenious, though passionate writer, I took it for granted that he
knew perfectly well himself what he would have been at, so I have not
altered a word in the manuscript, which is in the handwriting of an
amanuensis of Mr Scott's, the most incorrect transcriber, perhaps, that ever
tried the business;
lipiec
mi
1
or the following on My Laddie :
This is rather a good song, I am sure the bard who composed it thought it so,
and believed that he had produced some of the most sublime verses that had
ever been sung from the days of Homer.
The notes also contain much information conveyed in the sprightly
and irresponsible manner of which Hogg was a master. Yet,
though a diligent, more than clever and, after a fashion, even
learned, editor, he is hardly an ideal one.