"Ramsay was an early avatar of the primitivists and folklorists of the ; 1760s and thereafter, who wrote and collected at a time when it may yet ; have seemed possible to him that the preservation and defence of the ; culture of his native land might serve a political purpose rather than a; cultural or literary one." Ramsay was an Edinburgh burgesses and businessman, a member and founder of various Scottish Enlightenment clubs, a Jacobite and Scottish nationalist, and renowned as a poet throughout Britain. In Helgerson's terminology he was a laureate poet, but with a specfically nationalist-political cast: he published medieval Scottish verse (e.g. Dunbar), altering and even rewriting it for contemporary purposes.; Don't get the impression that he was some kind of Ossian--Ramsay's verse also includes modern poetry written in standard English, e.g. the Rape of the Lock-inspired "Morning Battel" of 1718; Ramsay seems to be unusually forthright about authorship--other than the scurrilous-ish Lucky Spence's Last Advice almost everything has his full name on the title page. In the case of the hilarious (and thought-provoking) pastoral elegy dialogue btwn Pope and Steele on the death of Addison, this means describing the poem as "In a dialogue, between Sir Richard Steel, and Mr. Alexander Pope. By Mr. Alan Ramsey."--an admission of fictionality that is very un-Swift/un-Pope (though that particular formulation belongs to the Notts edition, not the Edinburgh original); More than anyone, he reminds me of Burns--I wonder to what extent Ramsay was a conscious pattern/influence for Burns