‘Of Eminent Significancy’: Allan Ramsay’s ‘British’ Poetics and Post-Union

Constructions of Cultural Space

COLIN NICHOLSON

At a time when revolutionary financial and business systems were dissolving traditional frameworks for social action and self-definition, and all that was solid was melting into air, a cultural moderniser with Stuart sympathies made wigs, sold books, wrote poetry and edited historical and contemporary anthologies in a divided urban culture with a bi-lingual tradition. Allan Ramsay’s circulating library, established in Edinburgh in 172 j and thought to be the first of its kind in the new fiscal state of Britain, liberalised access to a range of cognitions and self-perceptions unappealing to the Scottish Kirk’s hooded crows, with whom Ramsay also clashed over the theatre he founded in 1736 and ran at his own expense for two years before being forced to close. The Presbyterian ideologue Robert Wodrow, whose history of covenanting became a text of reference for a firmly believing and widespread readership, was not happy:

All the villainous, profane, and obscene booltes and playes, as printed in London [...I are got doune [...I by Allan Ramsay [who] has a book in his shope wherein all the names of those that borrow his playes and books. for two pence a night. or some such rate, are sett doun: and by these, wickedness of all kinds are dreadfully propagat among the youth of all sorts.‘

Edinburgh’s eighteenth-century public spheres of secular opinion and sociable interaction had a difficult beginning. Ramsay had already (in 1712) co-founded the Easy Club, first of many groups and associations that mushroomed in urban Scotland with an agenda usually including the exercise of polite skills as evidenced in such newspapers as The Tatler and The Spectator: the latter debated weekly by Easy Club members who nonetheless pleaded for federal rather than incorporating Union. The original Easy Clubbers took English pseudonyms, Ramsay’s being Isaac Bickerstaff after the figure popularised by James Watson’s Edinburgh reprinting of The T&r from 1 7 ~ 0 , and a name used satirically by Swift. That changed towards the end of 1712 when because of the perceived ‘Pertidy, pride and hatred of England’, and considering ‘how great an affront was put upon ye Scots Nation by Condemning our own Country and Choosing English men for our patrons’, they resolved ‘to pay a dutiful Respect to the heroes and Authors of

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their own Nation’ by choosing them instead: Ramsay becoming Gavin Douglas.’ Continuing commitment to Scottish contexts comes into conflict with pressure to internalise London practices and values associated with tangible evidence of material enhancement: and mobilises a Machiavellian moment of economic integration, cultural retrieval and political differentia- tion. His pastoral entertainment The Gentle Shepherd both secured Ramsay’s contemporary reputation and made visible in microcosm cross-figurations of language, class and history since identified with a crisis in Lowland culture.< Ramsay observed and participated in these crises and mobilisations, and his writing traces attractions and resistances generated by the centre of the world’s stock and money markets in the capital city of Europe’s most rapidly expanding and instrumentally transforming economy. Financial terms and social effects associated with a new commercial world recur in Ramsay’s writing, whose novelty of engagement has been underestimated. His promotion of Scotland’s song traditions, together with his poetry in English and in Scots, his anthologising of classic Scottish verse and his ambivalent polishing of native rhythms for Edinburgh and London consumers, assemble a responsive mapping for processes of co-ordination. cross-fertilisation and dominance enabled by commercial practices developed during his lifetime.

At a time when Scottish and English popular songs were ‘closely connected at every level’, a rising social constituency north of the border and keen to signal its fashionable alignment with prosperity might be reassured by amended lyrics integrated as Scottish melody: politely acceptable reform of a native sound world might create senses of refinement and exchangeable codes in a developing order of l i t e r a ~ y . ~ The purpose of Ramsay’s 1724 Ever Green collection of pre-1600 Scots poetry, some transcribed from manuscript and adapted to contemporary taste, was to enhance native awareness of a distinctive cultural history within that developing order: but his claim to have reproduced this work ‘neat, correct and fair, / Frae antique manu- scripts, with utmost care’ hinted at ‘Augustan’ notions of literary correctness that would get him into as much trouble with academic editors as an improved Shakespeare did for Alexander Pope. Cultural and linguistic fallout of Union in a new socio-economic regime is traceable across Ramsay’s output, to the extent that a Preface to the subscribers’ edition of his 1721 P o e m is defensive about including verse ‘which we commonly reckon English Poetry’. But ‘all their Difference from the others’, Ramsay argues, ‘is only in the Orthography of some Words, such asfroin for frae, bold for bnuld, and some few names of Things: and in those, tho’ the Words be pure English, the Idiom or Phraseology is still Scots’.’ Idiom signifies ‘the form of speech peculiar or proper to a people or a country’: phraseology ‘the particular form of speech or diction which characterises a writer’ (OED). Ramsay heard his rhythms in his own voice first and could hardly have predicted the vigour of subsequent attempts to eradicate particular forms of Scottish speech and diction, though he can sometimes sound like their precursor. As a rapidly evolving print- world and its wider audiences made standard nominalisation a profitable

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enterprise, he developed a continuing emphasis on Scottish enunciation, with spoken usage significantly mediating scripted tensions between vernacular energies and English orthodoxies. Lallans was then a living speech across different levels of social contact and Ramsay Itnew its versatile measures: vernacular confidence in his early elegies brings onto the page real people in real places, and adaptations of native fluency to the form of Familiar Epistles he exchanged with William Hamilton set an example Burns thought worth developing.6 While the Preface to his first collection treats positively the extension of an improved Scottish sound world into similarly refined native rhythms, the style of speech thus privileged predicates a Scottish eloquence with sufficient reserves to ensure continued spoken and textual investment (i.xviii-ix):

There are no Defects in our [language], the Pronunciation is liquid and sonorous, and much fuller than the Erigfish, of which we are Masters. by being taught it in our Schools, and daily reading it; which being added to all our own native Words. of eminent Significancy, makes our Tongue by far the completest [ .]

Orality (and aurality) is at a premium when Ramsay’s concern that what he calls ‘the Scotticisms’ might ‘offend some over-nice Ear’ leads him to classical support for variant forms which can ‘give new Life and Grace to the Poetry, and become their Place as well as the Doric Dialect of Theocritus, so much admired by the best Judges’. A year later an intention in his imitations of La Fontaine and La Motte included in Fatiles and Tules (1722) is ‘to make [them] speak Scots with as much ease as I can’. He turned a number of Scots words and expressions into phonetic approximations comprehensible to an urban readership and ‘polished’ phrasing whenever he thought it necessary, yet conceived of the project as cultural reinforcement. His success in finding an audience strengthened a defence of native writing, including song writing, when discursive digestion by London threatened its survival.

While The Gentle Shepherd was in the malting, Ramsay used his Ever Green anthology to politicise the value of cultural tradition: ‘The Spirit of Freedom that shines throw both the serious and comick Performances of our old Poets’, his Preface to the collection suggests, ‘appears of a Piece with that Love of Liberty that our antient Heroes contended for, and maintained Sword in Hand’.’ He knew how effectively fashionable imitation justified and assimilated preferred ruling practice, and praises instead a poetry self- sufficient in its referential field (iv.236):

When these good old Bards wrote, we had not yet made tJse of imported Trimmings upon our Cloaths. nor of Foreign Embroidery in our Writings. Their Poetry is the product of their own Country, not pilfered and spoiled in the Transportation from Abroad: Their Iurng~s are native. and their Lnndskips domestick; copied from those Fields and Meadows we every day behold.

He also discloses class-conscious refusals of native norms in favour of fashionably polite ones (iv.237):

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There is nothing more silly than one’s expressing his Ignorance of his native Language; yet [...I every one that is born never so little superior to the Vulgar, would fain distinguish themselves from them by some Manner or other, and such. it would appear, cannot arrive at a better Method.

While constructing his Scottish readership and seeking to extend it southwards, Ramsay profits from the London book market and negotiates its cultural priorities in contexts that impose and elicit qualification and ambivalence. Nervous at the engrossing effects of English power - ‘Should proud Augusta take thee from me too, / So great a loss would make Edina bow’ - ‘Edinburgh’s Address to the Country’ nonetheless anticipates a glowing future for a capital city developing under the auspices of its independently operational civic institutions.‘ The publication by subscrip- tion of Ramsay’s 1721 Poem was an early northern initiative in inter- societal cultural commerce and class identification, and references to ‘Britain’ and ‘Britannia’ in his verse trace an earlier version of the poetic soon to be effectively nationalised by James Thomson’s Hanoverian universal spectator. By I 728 Ramsag’s participation in authorising language norms is delivered as an exercise in freedom of access to systems of exchange anywhere those norms operate: ‘My Muse is British, bold and free, I And loves at large to frisk and bound / Unman’cled o’er Poeticli Ground’ (iii.123). For a Stuart supporter ‘Britain’ could as readily signify a restored union of the crowns, but across its bid for imaginative liberty difficult elision in ‘unman’cled’ ironises a claim to operational freedom in conditions where statutory confinement of Scottish banking to domestic territories reserved the international regulation of rights and permissions to English determina- tion. Both shaping and being shaped by social citizenship in an emergent economic state, and therefore caught up in Scottish accommodations to English artistic preferences while seeking advantage from Anglo-British market opportunities, Ramsay negotiates cultural dichotomies entailed by Union.’”

During the 1720s Ramsay was a practical businessman alert to mecha- nisms driving change, and since post-Union society’s transforming experiences included the South Sea crash in London, immediately following the collapse of John Law’s Mississippi scheme in Paris, it was a knowledge many shared in one way or another. Ramsay observes these events, satirises speculative excess and is a keen ideologue for Scottish enhancement in the new dispensations. His poem ‘To Mr. Law’ may have been written during the moment of its Edinburgh-born addressee’s glory, when history took a turn and a great speculation arose in the calculated will of a single man.” With hindsight Marx calIed Law a mixture of swindler and prophet: without it Ramsay addresses a brilliant financier and gambler as ‘DARLING of SCOTS’ whose French system marks a lost opportunity for citizens who ‘Had the first Offer of [his] vast Ingine’ (iii.103). In 1705 Law had unsuccessfully proposed a Land Bank to the Scottish Parliament, publishing at the same time in Edinburgh Money and Trade Consider’d with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation

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with Money. It was one of several rejections before he was allowed to set up the French Banque Gtnerale in 1716, from which base he launched a year later the Company of the West endowed with monopoly trading rights in Louisiana (an area then representing a large chunk of today’s United States) and with a share issue additionally designed to take over part of France’s debts. Thinking larger thoughts in 1718, Law virtually nationalised French finances with the renamed Banque Royale; then merged the Company of the West with the heavily indebted Companies of the Indies and of China, funded by further share issues. He took control of the French Mint, increased the money supply, and in 1719 announced his proposal to take over both tax farming and the remainder of the national debt. Instalment purchase schemes with small down payments stimulated an ever-increasing demand that by the autumn of 1719 had pushed the price of fully paid up shares in this burgeoning conglomerate to over 9000 livres. On 5 January 1720 Law was appointed Controller General of Finances (effectively First Minister): by the second week of that month Company shares stood at IO,IOO. Also in that month, money creation and debt-management came together when the Banque Royale formally merged with what would be called the Mississippi Company: the ‘System’ was in place. As long as paper money chasing paper shares remained within a closed financial circuit, France enjoyed the wild enrichment of a spectacular inflation. When it became evident that the real economy could not begin to match this growth rate, equally spectacular problems loomed. Law’s attempt to control the system’s liquidity by devaluing shares by four-ninths and bank notes by fifty per cent had to be abandoned in the teeth of popular resistance: the move, though, prompted an irreversible decline in confidence. During the summer and autumn of 1720 share prices slid continuously: in December Law was forced to flee the country.” If Ramsay’s poem were ready for publication in July when the slide was becoming decisive, that would account for its suppression.’

‘To Mr. Law’ catches the excitement of a rising market by investing context-changing finance with epic valorisation. In the figures of Virgil, Jove, Phoebus and Jason‘s golden fleece: ‘Fmnce finds in Fact what’s in the Fable feign’d’. But Ramsay hopes for productive investment from Law’s innova- tions (iii.4):

Without Encouragement. how oft with Pain The Mulcibers their Anvils beat in vain; And others who in useful Crafts excel, While unimploy‘d in lonely Cots they dwell: Warm’d into Action with hi5 ev’ry Scheme. Thousands with glowing Rreasts at Greatness aim.

Law sought to accomplish a thoroughgoing paper installation by restricting the circulation of specie and prohibiting the wearing of jewellery to encourage its sale for notes of exchange: ‘Th’imagined Worth of Stones, costly ’cause rare, I In F r m w by his advice become despised’. When

[metal-workers]

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imagined value is in turn exchanged ‘for what is really good’, rising employment will ‘chear the industrious Poor with Cloaths and Food’. The poem celebrates Law’s promotion of paper money as a liberating breach with then conventional assumptions that coinage possessed intrinsic worth. It also recognises that a pragmatic acceptance of the Imaginary in money values enables the displacement of specie by paper promises to pay, thereby increasing participation in a generally circulating chain of credit; which instantiates an alternative Imaginary. In the current French example, credit- based economics enables long-distance dominion and stimulates self- sufficiency in domestic production. and with this prosperity in view the verse includes new riches accumulating from overseas expropriation: ‘The wise European thus with Glass and Toys / The Savage Indian of his Wealth decoys’.

Social transformation filters into conversation, and conventional representations of credit as feminine internalise when female fantasies feed and are fed by stock market expectations: ‘all their pretty Accents turn on Stocks: / Hundreds grown Thousands raise such fond Desires, / The Sex, all Passion, this new Wonder fires’. Connecting with this, Law’s speculation is praised for regenerating French finance: ‘their sinking Credit rais’d, / Whilst Your warm Fancy in MISSISSIPPI blaz’d’. Against these passionate imaginings the poem also suggests that the great projector is gratifying ’rational Desires’: ‘Thus You with steady Mind serenely move / Thro Life’: which turned out to be not quite the case. But with the force of belief behind it paper was delivering visible enrichment, and in the excitement of the time the process seemed limitless. Turning this expectation to social use by asking its addressee to lend Scotland his ’matchless Aid’. ’To Mr. Law’ calls for rational investment to increase productivity from Lowland agriculture and Scottish fisheries:

IJnnumber’d Herds her lofty Hills adorn. The warmer Vales exuberant yields her corn: Her Seas of Fish contain a lasting Fund, Which fills each Bay. clear River, Lake and Pond.

By substituting natural resources for systems of credit, the lines subordinate promissory paper to material production, the use of ‘Fund’ here disclosing Ramsay’s preoccupation with real-world effects of an Imaginary associated with the new systems. Ramsay’s friend and customer Sir John Clerk of Penicuili, who remembered Law as a professional gambler ‘full of projects, and of a very fertile clear head’, recalled more generally that 1720 had ‘a wonderful effect’ on the minds of people with money to invest:

Their Heads ran much on projects. and the main tendency of these seem’d to be that of cheating, overreaching, and abusing one another by vain and foolish expectations of advantages in the way of Trade I...] both the wise and ignorant went madly into these projects. and many of them brought ruiiie upon their families, while others exulted in their ill-gotten wealth.

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Though he claims to have seen ‘very early into the folly of the South Sea scheme‘, Clerk burned his fingers, and what he says about the experience points to a northern audience for Ramsay’s poems on the subject (p.103):

I was an Adventurer for 200 lib. ster. of the capital stock, and lost thereby about 400 lib. ster. However I reckoned it no small happiness to my Family that I got so well off, for some of my particular friends and Acquaintances in Scotland were quite ruined by it, their all was at stake, and all indeed that they had saved lay at the mercy of those from whom they had purchessed. Some of them met with compassion from those. after a great many solicitations, some had publick reliefs from the bounty of the Crown, but none of them recovered intirely their losses.

In seeming sympathy, ‘Wealth, or the Woody [Frenzy]. A Poem on the South-Sea’ (i.152-57) delivers in a form of Scots its invitation to the muse of comedy to visit a singular ‘Isle’ and gladden a ‘nation’ unified in 1720 by deficit finance: ‘Poor Britain in her Public Dept is drown’d’. As it harnesses paper speculation to productive investment the poem satirises credulous subscription to the dream of a single project, ‘if it be well laid’, supplying ‘the simple Want of trifling Trade’. A footnote describes how ‘all Manner of Trafficlt [trade] and Mechaniclts [labour] was at that time despised. Subscriptions and Transfers were the only Commodities’ in which people were interested. The cross-border unifying force here is gullible greed stimulated by market manipulations that rapidly moved beyond anyone’s control: with fantasy a powerful motivator - ‘That Fouk be guess become as rich as Kings’. The man who makes a market killing, who ‘comes to anchor on sae firm a Rock. / Britannia’s Credit and the South Sea Stock’, discloses material shifts where the social power of money to purchase and transform the human personality is part of the observation:

Imperial Gowd. What is’t thou canna grant? Possest of thee, What is’t a Man needs want? Commanding Coin, there’s nathing hard to thee, I canna see how rich F o ~ k come to die.

This speaker ends by satirising his own wish for enrichment, recording as he does so a differently monetarised relationship between poet and patron.

Written with hindsight in March I 721 after both Paris and London bubbles had burst, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Stocks, 1720’ measures its response to John Law’s scheme by focusing on that of his London counterpart John Blunt, who first followed Law’s example with a proposal for the South Sea Company to incorporate the Anglo-British national debt, and thereby provoked the bull market that seduced anyone with capital to invest. If subscribers north and south in ‘Wealth, or the Woody’ are sinking in the same ship of credit, ‘The Kise and Fall’ unionises ‘our poor bambouzl’d Nation’ as ‘Britrrin’ through the shared experience of ‘running daftly after Bubles’ (i.177):

Frae johri n Grorrts House. South to D o v ~ r . Sair have we pelted been with Stocks.

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Casting our Credit at the Cocks. Lang guilty of the highest Treason Against the Government of Reason: We madly at our ain Expences. Stock-job’d away our Cash and Senses.

[circular target in the sport of curling]

The verse traces shifts in property ownership as money buys its way into landed possession (i.178):

Some Lords and Lairds sell’d Riggs and Castles, And play’d them aff with tricky Rascals, Wha now with Routh of Riches vapour. While their late Honours live on Paper. But ah! The difference ‘twixt good Land. And a poor Bankrupt Bubble’s Band.

[abundance]

[bond]

Comparing losers in bubble speculation with victims of colonialism sharpens the overseas expropriation sanctioned in ‘To Mr. Law’: ‘Tlius Europeans Indians rifle, / And give them for their Gowd some Trifle’. The image of ‘Mr Law’ ‘Descending like great JOVE in Golden Showers’ elided a male bent on rape; that figure here pluralises into ‘little loves’ grown ‘rich in Fancy’ stimulated by ‘Gowd frae Banks built in the Air’, to produce an image of speculative mania as syphilitic plague (i.180):

For which their Danaes lift the Lap, And compliment them with a Clap, Which by aft jobbing grows a Pox. Till brigs of Noses fa’ with Stocks.

Notwithstanding the force of this corruption private vices still fund economic development, and ‘The Rise and Fall’ ends by hoping for better days to ‘brighten up Britannia’s Skies’ when ‘Britons’ together ‘shall smile at Follies past’ and a collectively recognised ‘King and Senate shall engage / To drive the Vultures off the stage’. With an eye to the effective locus of dispensing power, the poem predicts general security for trade and credit through a revival of London’s finances: ‘Lombard-street shall be replenisht’ (i.182).

While the great bubbles were blowing, both state and private lotteries were launched to secure revenue and profit, and for a participating public there could have been little difference between share purchase and conventional gambling. When Ramsay’s 1722 translation of La Motte organises ‘A Royal Lott’ry frae the Skies’ where ‘illia Ticket was a Prize’, fantasies of instant enhancement and shared dominion are in focus (ii.37):

Nor was there Need for Ten per Cent, To pay Advance for Money lent: Nor Brokers nor Stockjobbers here Were thol’d to cheat Fowks of their Gear. The first-rate Benefits were, Health. Pleasures. Honours, Empire and Weal th .

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For privileged insiders, that is. Jupiter orders the lottery draw to be made, Mercury does the honours and Jupiter’s daughter Pallas Athene wins the prize. The narrative associates nobility and high society with risk-free profit- taking that had been a feature of both the Mississippi scheme and London’s debacle. The launch of the South Sea Company’s attempted incorporation of government debt was assisted by the issue of fictitious stock for forward selling on a rising market, thereby deriving profit from nothing. As partially disclosed by a parliamentary Committee of Secrecy reporting in I 721, members of both Houses of Parliament were heavily involved, and it was also the talk of the town that the King’s mistresses had been so bribed, together with many ‘persons of distinction’. Transfer of stock to the Company Governor George I1 had been handled by Aislabie, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who on demitting office surrendered records of the royal dealings to the King personally.T5 Ramsay tilts at Hanoverian hypocrisy by mingling fable with contemporary perceptions of high-level fixing (ii.37-38):

Then a’ the Gods for Rlytheness sang, Throw Heaven glad Acclamations rang: While Mankind grumbling laid the wyte On them, and ca’d the hale a Byte. Yes! cry’d ilk ane. with sobbing Heart, Kind Jove has play’d a Parent’s Part. Wha did this Prize to Pallas send, While we’re sneg’d off at the Wob End.

[blame] [cheat]

[have our hopes cut offl

The poem’s closing lines figure a universalising egoism where ‘illia Fool himself admir’d’. which might include street level Scots in ‘A South-Sea Sang’. dreaming of ‘Gowd in Gowpings’ in London town and learning from experience (iii.38-39):

But when we fans our Purses toom. And dainty Stocks began to fa’. We hang our Lugs, and wi’ a Gloom. Girn’d at Stockjobbing ane and a’. If ye gang near the Soiith-Sm House, The Whillywha’s will grip ye’r Gear, Syne a’ the lave will fare the war. For our lang biding here.

[deceivers] [possessions] [worse]

While he satirises money-market deception and gullibility, Ramsay promotes investment targeting. ‘To Mr. Law’ refers to Scotland’s fisheries as ‘a lasting Fund’. and ‘Wealth, or the Woody’ notes that share-market winners ‘Look down on Fisher Boats wi’ meilile Pride’, explained in a footnote as people despising ‘the virtuous Design of propagating and carrying on a Fishery, which can never fail to be a real Benefit to Britain’ (i.154). ‘The Prospect of Plenty: A Poem on the North-Sea Fishery’, companion piece to ‘Wealth. or the Woody’, enters debate over Scottish economic policy by setting bubble against well-bottomed flotation to exemplify commercial progress bridging

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hostility and bringing concord to trading partners. The construction of those bridges, though, and the installation of that concord, developed practices perceived as real and present dangers to Scottish distributions of share ownership and business control. Projects spawned by the speculative boom that culminated in South Sea collapse included a London joint stock flotation for ‘The Company of the Grand Fishery of Great Britain’. Scottish opposition to this move included resistance from the Convention of Royal Burghs on the grounds that it breached their privileges established and confirmed at the Union.“ They had cause to be concerned. In December 1719 a London newspaper reported that ‘the Grand Fishery lately projected’ had specially re- opened its books to allow one Mr. Diclison, ‘an eminent Merchant’ in Edinburgh, and his friends, to subscribe €200,000.~~ When Scottish merchants and traders launched a rival fishing co-partnership. Ramsay wrote his poem to reinforce the burghers in their intentions, and they paid him ten pounds for it.

‘The Prospect of Plenty’ (i.158-66) issues an urgent recommendation that ‘Caledonian’ wealth-owners whose financial ignorance has led to their property being depleted by ‘ilka sneaking Fellow tali[ing] a Pluck’, look about them with ‘glegger Glour’ [sharper perception] and so learn to prosper, ‘wha ne’er thought on’t before’. One pressing example of taking a pluck followed the acquisition and corporate restructuring in October 1719 of the moribund York Buildings Company as an instrument for buying up Stuart estates forfeited in 1715. These were to form the basis for ‘a fund for granting annuities for life, and for assuring lives’, to which end the company had by ~ 7 2 0 invested well over f y~o,ooo. It then decided to lease its acquired property and use rent income to purchase Speyside timber, most of which sold on the London market.’* Scottish lessees might be expected to feel this keenly, and in counter-point to London-based cross-border capital exploiting territorial resources at will, ‘The Prospect of Plenty’ re-appropriates ‘Nation’ for Scottish use, and describes a ‘plenteous Product of this happy Isle’ improving northern space. Native idiom plays attention towards ‘Scotia’s smoothest Lochs and Christal Strands’ with fishing imagery dramatising unequal power relationships: ‘the Tyrant Pike [keeping] his awfu’ Court’, and ‘th’imperial whale’ attacking by stealth the ‘firm united Common- wealth’ of smaller fry; and native priorities organise the narrative. ‘Wealth, or the Woody’ had figured South Sea speculators jumping ‘headlong glorious in the golden Sea’. and ‘The Rise and Fall of the Stocks’ charged that ‘braw Projectors, / And faithfu’ managing Directors’ (i. I 81):

Wha for our Cash. the Saul of Trade. Bonny Propines of Paper made; On footing clean, drawn unco’ fair, Had they not vanisht into Air.

[pledges]

‘The Prospect of Plenty’ argues instead that Scotland’s fishermen and their backers would not be building ‘Castles in a Cloud’ since ‘Their Ships already

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into Action scud’; with Ramsay floating his own intervention on secure commercial liquidity: ‘Great Neptune’s unexhausted Bank has Store / Of endless Wealth’. The South Sea Company was initially endowed with the promise of monopoly trading to the Spanish Americas, and ‘Prospect of Plenty’ keeps international commerce in play by comparing Scottish failure to exploit ‘the Northern-Sea’ with Spain’s loss of South American profits after the Treaty of Utrecht: ‘She grasps the Shadow, but the Substance tines [loses], / While a’ the rest of Europe milk her Mines’. There are lessons to be learned is the implication of a poem seeking an appropriate role for Scottish fisheries in the economic programme to ‘set Britain on her feet’. The verse places profitable fishing at the centre of a commercial network: ‘For which deep in their Treasures we shall dive: / Thus by fair Trading, North-Sea Stock shall thrive’; and thriving northern stock signifies rising Scottish prosperity. The narrative engages dissenting voices, including fear of English hostility: ‘The Soutlzerns will with Pith your Project bauk. / They’ll never thole this great Design to tak’, yet promotes lJnion futures as a contractual alliance based on equal trading opportunities: a pre-figuring of joint commercial empire. The major project perceived as baulked by southern interests remained the Darien failure, which continued to haunt Scottish writing in the 1720s about taxation. money-making schemes and investment programmes. One example that seems to hark back to Darien and the residual ill-feeling amongst many Scots towards England over a conflict that was a major factor in precipitating Union, Ramsay’s poem dated December 1724 titled ‘On the B[ritish] P[arliament’s] design of Taking the Bounty off the Victual exported’, exploits a more immediate hostility aroused by a proposal that would issue in a 1725 Westminster project to tax Scottish malt at 3d per bushel while at the same time withdrawing the bounty on grain exports, and a consequent wave of public outrage across Scotland described by Rosalind Mitchison as ‘a movement of popular resistance’ (iii. I 81):’‘

Poor slav’d tho’ covenanted Land anes Independent brave dominion how like ane Idiot doest thou stand Sair payd and forc’d to kiss the wand And bend thy Craig beneath the Union

Given the conflicts of the time, internal and bi-lateral, recent, current and forthcoming, Ramsay’s hope for fair trading in ‘The Prospect of Plenty’ seeins retrospectively either nai’ve or necessarily forward-looking: or possibly both, since the poem is self-consciously cast in futuristic mode, after investment produces the hoped for returns: ‘when a’s in Order, as it soon will be. / And Fleets of Bushes [fishing vessels] fill the Northern Sea’. But ‘Prospect of Plenty’ has more to say about Scoto-English relationships when it moves on to maritime protection for lishing fleets by way of Holland’s competitive success in ‘suck[ing] the proiit of the Pictlnnd Seas’. Because Scotland still lacked both capital and skill in large-scale fishing ventures it was left to

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Dutch commercial fleets -highly organised and the envy of Europe -to reap the rich harvest of Scottish coastal waters: ‘Nothing riled the Scots more than to see how the resources of their waters had made the Dutch the wealthiest people in Europe.”” The Treaty of IJnion had set aside funds for Scottish development of trade and the fisheries, but disappointing experience created suspicion of English intentions and practice: some anti-Unionists argued that the only hope for Scotland was to abjure Union in favour of closer ties with Holland.’’ Ramsay here takes a different view, and as economic pressures and innovative perceptions rewrite relatively longstanding cultural alli- ances, there is something more than irony in his commercialisation of historic religious, political, legal and trading relationships between Scotland and the Netherlands: ‘Grant they’re good Allies, yet it’s hardly wise, / To buy their Friendship at sae high a Price’. One political reason for the Dutch being good allies might relate to the fact that although the seven provinces of the Netherlands were ‘united by a treaty of union, sovereign power remained with the states’.’’ Early in the year of the 1715 Rising, Easy Club members had pleaded with some heat for federal rather than Union status: now Ramsay’s ‘Prospect’ is concerned to energise Scottish initiatives it sees being held back by scarcity - ‘How dowf the Gentry loolts with an empty Purse’ - and inactivity: ‘O’er lang, in Troth, have we By-standers been’.23 The social and political orientation of that ‘we’ is secured by a use of proverbial idiom not readily intelligible to non-Scots speakers, and by payment to its author by the burghers addressed in the poem.

‘Let’s weave and fish to ane anither’s Hands’ connects two industries in which Scotland would come to establish a trading advantage, and opens the way for broader market exchange. The politically throwaway line ‘And never mind wha serves and wha commands’ returns as a Scottish preference that loyal ‘North-Sea Skippers’ should be first to exploit the resource: ‘Then in the foreign Markets we shall stand / With upright Front, and the first Sale demand’. First published in London, with a glossary, ‘Prospect’ calls for unified internal effort and cross-border co-operation partly by recognising naval strength as shared commercial insurance: a developed Scottish fishing fleet would also serve ‘as a Nursery’ to ‘breed / Stout skill’d Marines, when Britairis Navies need’. More immediately, productive labour will energise that part of a northern people at present ‘With Spirits only tint [depressed] for want of Wark’, and thereby secure continued good order for social hierarchies north and south of the border, where each ‘in the common Good [...I act their Part’: whether ‘fit for Servitude’ or ‘formed for Command’. With these hierarchies in play, the poem produces the Scottish prospect of its title as an early version of what would become standard Whig teleology for a society enjoying the cultural advancement of commercial prosperity (i. 165):

Braw Towns shall rise, with Steeples mony a ane. And Houses bigget a‘ with Estler Stane: Where Schools polite shall lib’ral Arts display, And male auld barb’rous Darkness fly away.

[square-hewn]

AlInii Rnnisay 's 'British' Poetics 21 5

Forward-looking it may have been, but an optimistic conspectus was premature. Not until 1727 were trustees appointed for a new Fisheries Board, John Clerk among them, who recorded in his Nlmoir s that after seven years, 'notwithstanding all our care I the Fisheries] never advanced'. Clerk added that the board was able to do 'no more service to the country than other improvements which cost more than they are worth'.14 Ramsay must have been disappointed.

NOTES

1. Robert Wodrow. Analertn or Mrrtcrinls fiir a Histor!] of KerilnrkrtbIe Pei:forrnnrircJs (Edinburgh 1842-1843). vol.3. p.515-16. See also John Clive. 'The Social Background of the Scottish Renaissance'. Scotlarid i n t lw Agc~ qf Iirlpr@rwiient. ed. N. T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison (1970: Edinburgh 1996). p.225-44.

2. The IV~irlt~ qf Allati Rririisay. Scottish Text Society, 6 vols (1944-1 974) vo1.v. ed. A. M. Kinghorn and A. Law (Edinburgh 1972). p.28. Hereafter R ~ I I I I S ~ ; ~ . or in main text by volume and page.

3 . Thomas Crawford, Society atid t lw Lgrir: A StiirlU of'tlv Sorig Crtltitrc of Ei(i/iteciitli-Ceritlcr!l Scothirid (Edinburgh 1979), p.71.

4. Crawford. Societg arid thr Lp-iv, p. 3 I . j. Karnsri~/ . vo1.i. ed. Rurns Martin and John Oliver (Edinburgh 19441, p.xix-xx. 6. A. M. Kinghorn and A. Law. 'Allan Ramsay and Literary Life in the First Half of the

Eighteenth Century'. Tlie History of Scotfish L i t a r a t i m (Aberdeen 1987). vol.ii. 1660-1800. ed.

7. Murray Pittock, Poetry nnd jricobitr, Politic's in L: ig l~ temt l i -C~, t~ t t i r !~ Britiiiii arid Ir~l i inrt

8. K I I I I I S ~ ~ / . vol.iv. ed. A. M. Kinghorn and A. Law (Edinburgh 1970). p.235. 9. Karnsny, i.53-56.

A. Hook. p.68-61).

(Cambridge 1994). p. I 60. 152.

I 0. Maurice Lindsay. Historg of Scoflis/i Litc2rritiircJ (London 1977). p. 176-77. I I. James Buchan. I'roirri I)cJsircT: Air l;nqifirg into the Nlraiiifig if illorlog (London 1997).

P.143. 12. I rely in this paragraph on Antoin Murphy's Introduction to ]oh11 Law's 'Essiig mi a I,nrirf

Bririk' (Dublin 1994). p.1-16. See also Uuchan. F r o m i Ilcsire, p.127-51: John Carswell. Tlw South Stw Bitbble (London 1960). p.77-88, 92-97, I 00-104 and passini. Murphy's joliri Lri iv: Eccinornic Tlirorist arid IJolicy-Maku (Oxfoi-d I 997). is a welcome revaluation of Law's standing: lanet Gleeson's T l i p Montyninkei- (London I 999) is a readable if fanciful account.

I 3. Burns Martin. A Bibliography cf tlw Writings o / A I / m Kmnsay (Glasgow 1931). p. 3 j. 14. M m o i r s u / the Lifi of Sir ]o/iir Clvrk of Prnicitik I . . . ] Extracted by Himsdf.fr-oni his mm

1.5. P. G. M. Dickson. The, Firiaficiol ~ ~ ~ I V ~ i t t ~ ~ J l i irl Englnnd: A Stirdy i f f t / w D e ~ ~ e l ~ j ~ i i i e i i t of Ptdilic

16. Bob Harris, 'Patriotic Commerce and National Revival: The Free British Fishery Society

I 7. Dicltson. Tire Fi:irinricinl Kei~olutinn. p. I 37. IS. IIenry Hamilton. An Ccononiic Historg of Scotland i n the Eiglitec~rrth Centrrr!] (Oxford

I 9631, p.6.j: Bruce Lenman. AII 6c'oriornir Historg of Mdwn Scotland. rh6o-1976 (London

]~t[rniils. 1676-1755, ed. John Gray (Kdinburgh I 8~12). p.101. IOO.

Credit. ~ 6 X # - ~ ~ . j f j (London 1967). p.107-11: Carswell, Tlie Soiitli Sea Bitbblt,. p.124-26.

and British Politics. c.1749-58'. English Historicnl Review .;o (April I 999). p.288.

19771. P.77-78. 19. Rosalind Mitchison. A Historg of Scotlarid (London 197o). p. 326. 2 0 . Hamilton. An Ecorioniic History. p.i 11: J. R . Coull. The Sen FisIitvk gf Scotlorid: A

Historiccil Gwgraphy (Edinburgh i ~ ) q h ) , p. 3: '1'. C. Smout. Scottish Trride 011 tlitl Zve I$ Uniori. 7660-77o7 (Edinburgh 196.3). p.221.

21. Smout. Scottish Tradc. p.221. 2 2 . James Moore and Michael Silverthome. 'Protestant Theologies. Limited Sovereignties:

Natural Law and Conditions of llnion in thc German Empire. The Netherlands and Great Britain'. A Uniori For Enii7ire: Politicd T h ~ i t g h t nnrl tlic Union of 1707. ed. John Kobertson (Cambridge 1995). p.187.

216 COLIN NICHOLSON

23. Ramsay, v.51-53. 24. Memoirs I...] of Sir John Clerk. p.143: Bob Harris continues the story of the British

Fisheries development in the 17jos in "'American Idols": Empire, War and the Middling Ranks in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain', Past and Present 159 (February ryy6) . p.111-41, esp. p.131-33.