Note 13 — Front matter

Carlyle is always extreme in his judgments, and here is unjustly contemptuous of men whom, as the quotation from Scott below (p. 60) will show, Burns always regarded as his models, and whom he often directly and openly imitated. Ramsay has been admired by men as different as Pope and Leigh Hunt; and Stevenson, whose estimate of these men in his essay on Some Aspects of Robert Burns it would be well to read, places the "poor lad Fergusson" even higher than Ramsay.