'Hodden-Gray': Pastoral, Enlightenment Re-Mediation, and The Proverbial Allan Ramsay

'Hodden-gray' appears at key moments in Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (1725) and his other works, including A Collection of Scots Proverbs (1737). By tracing this figure of homespun rusticity in Ramsay and texts from a seventeenth-century manual for colonising New Jersey to Burns's 'Is There For Honest Poverty' to the London Scottish regiment, this essay shows how Ramsay's remediation of a range of forms and practices – pastoral, Second Sight, songs, and proverbs – at once confirms and questions our models of Enlightenment within the terrain of an imperfectly United Kingdom.