He wrote comic, mock-tragic poetry such as "The Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck" - a once-champion hare coursing greyhound in the East Neuk of Fife who was about to be hanged, for growing too slow.
Ramsay's Epistles in return are certainly more skillful, more self-consciously Scots and with lots more allusions to other authors, Ancient and Modern, but they are consequently, less direct than those of Hamilton.
[1] Hamilton tried his hand at epic poetry in an abridgment in 18th century English of Blind Harry's The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre and Vallyeant Campioun Schir William Wallace.
"...wherein the Old, obsolete words are rendered more intelligible and adapted to the understanding of such who have not leisure to study the Meaning and Import of such Parases (sic) without the aid of a Glossary."
This enthused the young Burns, who records, in his Autobiographical Letter, that it "...poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood gates of life shut in eternal rest."