SOURCE: "Augustan Influences on Allan Ramsay," in Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. XVI, 1981, pp. 97-109.

In the following excerpt, McGuirk compares Ramsay's selective use of the Scots vernacular "to match the elevation of his chosen genre" with the use of colloquial English dialects by London's neo-classical Augustan poets.

Allan Ramsay's pastorals, songs, elegies, satires and epistles, in which neoclassical and dialect elements were mixed, had established him by 1720 as Edinburgh's most popular poet. The whole spectrum of Edinburgh's literate and semi-literate population supported Ramsay's work, which was extensively circulated in broadside sheets. By 1719 he was so well known even outside Scotland that a pirated edition of one of his pastorals was printed at London. By 1720 an octavo collection of Ramsay's most popular pieces was issued at Edinburgh, and the following year a more ambitious quarto edition was published there.

The subscription list for Ramsay's 1721 Poems included what must...