Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 7.djvu/66

202 sions of the most unworthy nature. Dr Irving has quoted two lines of this description,—

And it were easy to fill a page with similar instances:—

Nor ran the reader easily overlook Ross's absurd nomenclature. Thus the hero is honoured with the female name of Rosalind, and Scottish glens are clothed with the classic appellations of Flaviana and Sœvitia; which last name, intended by the author to be expressive of fierceness, was, by a typographical error in the first edition, converted into Sœvilia. But the most forcible objection undoubtedly lies in the plot, than which it were difficult to conceive any thing more unpoetical. The early part of the poem is devoted to the description of the love of the hero and heroine, which is beautifully painted in its various stages, growing up from their infancy to their youth, and strengthened by all the love-inspiring incidents and situations of a pastoral life. And at the very moment when the poet has succeeded in completing this beautiful picture of simple affection and guileless innocence, he sets himself to undo the charm, weds the heroine to a richer lover, and sacrifices the hero to a marriage, which his heart cannot approve, and of which the chief object is the recovery of certain sheep and horned cattle. Ross seems to have been aware of the objections which are chargeable against this denouement, and endeavours to obviate them in the preface prefixed to the first edition, by pleading that it is productive of a salutary moral:—"This important lesson is inculcated, that when two young people have come under engagements to one another, no consideration whatever should induce them to break faith, or to promise things incompatible with keeping it entire." It is certainly difficult to see the force of this apology; and Ross's error on this head is the more note-worthy from his taking objection in his invocation to the plot of his model, the Gentle Shepherd:—

It is singular how Ross could have overlooked the circumstance, that Ramsay, in elevating his hero, sacrifices no long-cherished feeling, or former affection; while not only is the Fortunate Shepherdess raised to a similar rank, but this upon the very ruins of an affection, which had twined itself round her heart-strings from her earliest years. We have, perhaps, dwelt too long upon the ungracious task of fault-finding. Ross's chief talent lies, as was remarked by Beattie, in his descriptions of scenery, and of the habits of a rude and pastoral life. Many of these will cope with the best passages in the Gentle Shepherd, or in any of our Scottish poets. We may refer to the description of a valley at noon (at page 28 of the second edition); to the picture of Flaviana, which has been quoted by Sir Walter Scott in the Heart of Mid Lothian; and to the numerous descriptions of morning, evening, and night, scattered through the poem. It must not be concealed, however, that few of the delineations possess that consistency in their parts, completeness, and nice finish, which are to be found in the Gentle Shepherd. Ross's songs, though certainly of a very high