SOURCE: "Allan Ramsay and the Romantic Revival," in Essays and Studies, Vol. X, 1924, pp. 137-44.

In the following excerpt, Mackail argues that "[Ramsay's importance in letters is less in respect of his own poetry, vital and even excellent as some of it is, than as having given the first clearly assignable impulse to the romantic movement of the eighteenth century. "]

[Sir John] Steel's statue of Ramsay [in West Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh] has nothing romantic about it. It is the presentment of the sleek little tradesman of the Luckenbooths, burgess and bon vivant, and the presentment is true to life. But it is incomplete. Here, as often elsewhere, a man stands in the history of his country and of his art not merely for what he obviously was and consciously did, but also for what he in effect, and perhaps unconsciously, originated; for the turn he gave, recognizable...