SOURCE: "Modern Period: Alan Ramsay (1686-1758)," in The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, Vol. II, William Blackwood and Sons, 1887, pp. 24-38.

In the following excerpt, Veitch praises Ramsay's depiction of the natural scenery of the Scottish Lowlands.

Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) is by far the most interesting and influential literary personage in Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century. To his example, impulse, and suggestions of new lines of poetry, we owe much of all that is best in Scottish poetry and literature since his time. Fergusson and Burns could not have done what they did, unless as coming after Ramsay, and being thus enabled to start from the high level both of feeling and of accomplished versification which he had attained. Ramsay had the courage, in a conventional time both in English and Scottish poetry, to recognise and be true to the manners, the simple...