SOURCE: "Ramsay to Burns," in Scottish Vernacular Literature: A Succinct History, revised edition, John Grant, 1910, pp. 400-26.

Henderson's Scottish Vernacular Literature: A Succinct History was the first book-length study of Scots literature. In the following excerpt, Henderson credits Ramsay with reviving interest in the Scots literary tradition, but typifies most of his verse as coarse in content and crude in execution.

If not the victim of the contradictory poetic models, English and Scots, which he sought combinedly to imitate, Ramsay, except in the case of The Gentle Shepherd, was nothing advantaged, either as Scots or English versifier, by any compensating result of the twofold influence. His familiarity with the vernacular song and some of the verse of the old Scots 'makaris,' in no wise tended to modify the pompous commonplace of his more ambitious essays in English verse, while his acquaintance with the English classics exercised little...