ALLAN RAMSAY[5]

In the reign of Queen Anne there were the stirrings of a literary revival in Scotland. No name connects itself more distinctly with this interesting phenomenon than that of Allan Ramsay.

Born in 1686, of humble parentage, in the village of Leadhills, in the wild inland parish of Crawfordmuir in Lanarkshire, and educated in the ordinary fashion at the parish school there, Ramsay was brought to Edinburgh in 1701, when he was in his fifteenth year, and was apprenticed to a periwig-maker. The statement sometimes made that he began life as a barber is therefore incorrect. The crafts of the barber and the wig-maker were then distinct.Wigandperiwigare one and the same thing, and both are derived, it seems, though one would hardly suppose so, from the Latinpilus, hair. Thus,—Latin,pilus, hair; old Italian,pilucca, a mass of hair or head of hair; this, still in old Italian, corrupted intoperucca; whence the Frenchperruque; that word adopted into English, but generally twirled intoperiwigto make it native; from which wordperiwigif you lop off theperi, the sole remnant of the originalpilus, you have the mere twirl or terminationwig, standing as a substantive word and answering the whole purpose. Now a wig-maker, periwig-maker,orperruquier, was no mean tradesman in those old times, extending from the middle of the seventeenth century to near the end of the eighteenth, when it was the strange custom, in all civilised European countries, for people to wear artificial heads of hair, not as mere substitutes for the natural growths in cases of necessity (which had been a usage everywhere from time immemorial), but as fashionable adornments of bulging volume and fantastic device. An essay might be written on the fact that there was such a wig-wearing age in Europe, nearly the same in range of time in every country of that continent; in which essay it might be plausibly argued that there was an inherent congruity between the strange wig-wearing habit and the intellectual and spiritual characteristics, and consequently the literary capabilities and products, of the age distinguished by the habit. One can hardly conceive Addison or Dr. Johnson, for example, without a wig, or Wordsworth, or Byron, or Sir Walter Scott, with one.

Be that as it may,—and there are curious intricacies in the speculation,—Allan Ramsay not only belonged to the wig-wearing age in Scotland, but was brought up to the business of wig-making and wig-dressing for the Edinburgh lieges. It was no bad employment in a population of between 30,000 and 40,000 inhabitants, including resident noblemen and lairds, and a good many professional men and merchants, all of whom wore wigs, and liked them to be handsome. Accordingly, when, in or about the year 1708, or just after the Union, young Ramsay, having concluded his apprenticeship, started in business for himself, in some shop in the High Street, or oneof its offshoots, his prospects were fair enough. Skipping four years, and coming to the year 1712, when he was twenty-five years of age, we find him just married to the daughter of a respectable Edinburgh lawyer, and in very comfortable circumstances otherwise. It was then that he was beginning to be known in the cosy society of old Edinburgh as not only an expert wig-maker but also something besides.

“Whenever fame, with voice of thunder,Sets up a chield a warld’s wonder,Either for slashing folk to dead,Or having wind-mills in his head,Or poet, or an airy beau,Or ony twa-legged rary-show,They wha have never seen’t are busyTo speer what-like a carlie is he.”

“Whenever fame, with voice of thunder,

Sets up a chield a warld’s wonder,

Either for slashing folk to dead,

Or having wind-mills in his head,

Or poet, or an airy beau,

Or ony twa-legged rary-show,

They wha have never seen’t are busy

To speer what-like a carlie is he.”

The words are Ramsay’s own, by way of preface in one of his poems to an account of his personal appearance and general character. The description, though not written till 1719, will do very well for 1712:—

“Imprimis, then, for tallness, IAm five feet and four inches high;A black-a-viced, snod, dapper, fallow,Nor lean nor overlaid with tallow;With phiz of a Morocco cut,Resembling a late man of wit,Auld-gabbit Spec., wha was sae cunningTo be a dummie ten years running.Then, for the fabric of my mind,’Tis mair to mirth than grief inclined:I rather choose to laugh at follyThan show dislike by melancholy,Well judging a sour heavy faceIs not the truest mark of grace.”

“Imprimis, then, for tallness, I

Am five feet and four inches high;

A black-a-viced, snod, dapper, fallow,

Nor lean nor overlaid with tallow;

With phiz of a Morocco cut,

Resembling a late man of wit,

Auld-gabbit Spec., wha was sae cunning

To be a dummie ten years running.

Then, for the fabric of my mind,

’Tis mair to mirth than grief inclined:

I rather choose to laugh at folly

Than show dislike by melancholy,

Well judging a sour heavy face

Is not the truest mark of grace.”

Elsewhere, more briefly, he describes himself as

“A little man that lo’es my ease,”

and again as one who much enjoyed, in good company,

“An evening and guffaw.”

This kind of pleasure he was in the habit of enjoying more particularly in one of those many clubs into which the citizens of dense Auld Reekie then distributed themselves for the purposes of conviviality. It consisted of about a dozen kindred spirits calling themselves “The Easy Club,” professing literary tastes, and making it a rule that each of them should be known within the club by some adopted name of literary associations. Ramsay’s first club-name was “Isaac Bickerstaff,” but he changed it after a while for “Gavin Douglas.” There is a significance in both names, and in the exchange of the one for the other.

Through Ramsay’s apprenticeship, and also after he had set up in business for himself, he had been a diligent reader of all accessible books. Recollecting what bookswerethen accessible to one in his circumstances, we can see, however, that his readings had been mainly in two directions. In the first place, there was the current English or London literature of his own time, or as much of it as was wafted to Edinburgh in the shape of the last or recent publications, in prose or verse, by Defoe, Prior, Swift, Steele, Colley Cibber, Addison, Rowe, Aaron Hill, Gay, and others of the Queen Anne wits; among whom is not to be forgotten the youthful Pope, then rising to the place of poetic supremacy that had been left vacant by Dryden. Of Ramsay’s cognisance of this contemporary English literature of the south, his admiration of it, and enjoyment of it, there is abundant evidence. He had become aware, however, of anotherliterature, indigenous to his own Scotland, though lying far back, for the most part, in an obscure Scottish past. Through Watson’sCollection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, Ruddiman’s edition of Gavin Douglas’sTranslation of Virgil, and Sage’s edition of Drummond of Hawthornden, he had been attracted to the old Scottish poets, finding in them a richness of antique matter that came home to his heart amid all his readings in Steele, Pope, and Addison:—

“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.,Hae raised up great poetic stocksOfRapes, ofBuckets,Sarks, andLocks,While we neglectTo shaw their betters. This provokesMe to reflectOn the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:Our country then a tale could tell;Europe had nane mair snack and snellAt verse or prose;Our Kings were poets too themsell,Bauld and jocose.”

“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.,Hae raised up great poetic stocksOfRapes, ofBuckets,Sarks, andLocks,While we neglectTo shaw their betters. This provokesMe to reflect

“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.,

Hae raised up great poetic stocks

OfRapes, ofBuckets,Sarks, andLocks,

While we neglect

To shaw their betters. This provokes

Me to reflect

On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:Our country then a tale could tell;Europe had nane mair snack and snellAt verse or prose;Our Kings were poets too themsell,Bauld and jocose.”

On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:

Our country then a tale could tell;

Europe had nane mair snack and snell

At verse or prose;

Our Kings were poets too themsell,

Bauld and jocose.”

In this double direction of Ramsay’s literary likings,—his respectful obeisance to the literary merits of his London contemporaries, and his fonder private affection for the old poets of his Scottish vernacular,—we have the key to his own literary life.

Between 1712 and 1718, or between Ramsay’s twenty-sixth and his thirty-third year, just when the reign of Queen Anne was passing into that of George I., the Edinburgh public became more and more alive to the fact that they had a poet among them in the guise of a wig-maker. A number of little pieces of verse, with Ramsay’s name attached, came out in succession in the form of humbly printed leaflets, some of them with the sanction of “TheEasy Club,” as having been originally written for that convivial fraternity, but others independently, when that club had ceased to exist. On examining these earliest pieces of Ramsay, one finds that, while some of them are satires or moralisings in a rather crude English, in imitation of the London poetry then in vogue, the best are occasional poems in the colloquial Scotch of Ramsay’s own day, suggested by local incidents, characters, and humours. In these he was evidently connecting himself as well as he could with the broken chain of those older vernacular poets to whom he looked back with so much interest. We can even detect those predecessors of his in this broken chain whom he took more immediately for his models. They were the two later Semples of Beltrees,—Robert Semple (1595–1659), the author of “The Piper of Kilbarchan,” and his son Francis Semple (died about 1685), author of “Fye, let us a’ to the bridal,” “Maggie Lauder,” and other Scottish songs. Not that these were poets of anything like the dimensions of the older Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Lindsay, but that they had exhibited the literary capabilities of the Scottish tongue in that more recent and less archaic stage from which one might make a fresh start. That he had still a hankering, however, after the greater and older Scots was shown by the boldest, and in point of length most considerable, of his attempts at authorship during the time now under notice. This was the publication, in 1717, of a new edition of the old Scotch poem, in complex rhyming stanzas, calledChrist’s Kirk on the Green, attributed by some to King James V., and by others, with utter improbability, to the poet-king James I. To the original of this old poem of Scottish humour,the language of which is so difficult that it had puzzled previous editors, there was added a continuation by himself, in the form of a second canto, carrying on the story; and, the demand having been such that another edition was called for in the following year, he then added a third canto. Ramsay was no philologist, and his edition of the old poem was of no value for scholars; but his appreciation of the poetic merit of the old piece must have been beyond the common, and his two cantos of continuation were something of a feat. “Nothing so rich,” says a modern critic, “had appeared since the strains of Dunbar or Lindsay”; and of the opening of the third canto the same critic says that it is “an inimitable sketch of rustic life,—coarse, but as true as any by Teniers.” The judgment is perhaps too favourable; but this venture of Ramsay’s in the archaic Scotch deservedly increased the reputation he had won by his easier and shorter pieces in the ordinary colloquial Scotch of his own day, and by some of their English companions.

Before the year 1718, whenChrist’s Kirk on the Greenappeared with its completed continuation, Ramsay had begun to combine the business of bookselling with that of wig-making. For this purpose he had transferred himself and his family to a house in the High Street, just opposite Niddry’s Wynd, for which he had adopted the sign of “The Mercury”; and it was from this house that the completed edition of the old poem was published. The house still stands, now numbered 153 in the street, glass-fronted to a great extent in the two storeys above the basement, and with the old stone stair of entrance to these storeys, but bereft of an upper storey and atticswhich once belonged to it and gave it a more imposing look. To understand, however, the dignity of the house and its situation in Allan Ramsay’s days, one has to remember that the Edinburgh of those days consisted all but entirely of that one long descending ridge or backbone of edifices from the Castle to Holyrood of which the High Street proper was the main portion. One must remember further that the High Street was not then the continued clear oblong from the Lawnmarket to the Netherbow which we now see, but that up a portion of the middle of it, along the face of St. Giles’s Church, there ran an obstructive block of buildings,—consisting of the Old Tolbooth or “Heart of Midlothian” at the upper end, and a tall pile of dwelling-houses and shops, called the Luckenbooths, at the lower end,—the effect of which was to choke the traffic at that part, and divide it between a narrow tortuous foot-passage along the buttresses of the church on the one side and a somewhat wider causey for vehicles on the other. Now, as Ramsay’s new house was a good way below this obstruction, and in that open space of the High Street where there was plenty of room to breathe, it was in an excellent position for bookselling or any similar business. There was actually a temptation for a citizen lingering in this spot to ascend Allan Ramsay’s stone stair to have a look at the books on sale, especially if he could have his wig dressed at the same time. That this was possible we have Ramsay’s own word. It is generally represented in memoirs of him that he had given up wig-making when he entered his new shop of the Mercury opposite to Niddry’s Wynd, and there took to bookselling; but these lines, appended to the descriptionof his personal appearance and character in the poem already quoted, settle the question—

“Say, wad ye ken my gate of fending,My income, management, and spending?Born to nae landship,—mair’s the pity,—Yet denizen of this fair city,I make what honest shift I can,And in my ain house am good-man;Which stands in Ed’nburgh’s street the sun-side.I theek the out and line the insideOf mony a douce and witty pash,And baith ways gather in the cash.”

“Say, wad ye ken my gate of fending,

My income, management, and spending?

Born to nae landship,—mair’s the pity,—

Yet denizen of this fair city,

I make what honest shift I can,

And in my ain house am good-man;

Which stands in Ed’nburgh’s street the sun-side.

I theek the out and line the inside

Of mony a douce and witty pash,

And baith ways gather in the cash.”

Ramsay remained in this house in the High Street about eight years. They were busy and prosperous years. During the first three of them, or from 1718 to 1721, he continued to send forth miscellaneous little pieces, some in English but most in Scotch, in sheets or half-sheets, to be bought separately. There were songs, satirical sketches and squibs, elegies, metrical epistles to friends or to public persons, odes on Edinburgh events or on such national occurrences as the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, and a few essays in a more general and serious vein, chiefly in the English heroic couplet, such asThe Morning Interview,Tartana or the Plaid, andContent. The sheets or half-sheets were bought eagerly. It was at this time, indeed, according to the tradition, that the good-wives of Edinburgh were in the habit of sending out their children, with a penny or twopence, to buy “Allan Ramsay’s last piece,” whatever it might be. His popularity, however, did not rest on such humble demonstrations of liking. He was now one of the most respected of the citizens of Edinburgh, spoken of universally among them as their poet, and on terms of personal intimacy with the most distinguished of them. He had become a notability even beyond thebounds of Edinburgh,—through the south of Scotland, if not yet in all Scotland. His name had even been carried to London, with the effect of some vague notion of him among the English wits there as a poet in the colloquial Scotch possessing all the north part of the island by himself. This recognition of him in the south seems to have begun about the year 1720, and to have been occasioned by a little Scottish pastoral elegy, entitledRichy and Sandy, which he had written on the death of Addison in the previous year. The “Richy” of this piece is Sir Richard Steele, and the “Sandy” is Mr. Alexander Pope; and they are represented as two fellow-shepherds of the famous deceased bewailing his loss in a colloquy. Steele and Pope could hardly avoid hearing of such a thing; and, indeed, pirated copies reached London, and there was a reprint of the elegy there from Lintot’s press, with the Scotch dreadfully mangled. It seems to have been with a view to prevent such piracy and misprinting of his productions in future, as well as to confirm his reputation by putting all his writings before the public in permanent form, that Ramsay, in the course of 1720, sent out subscription papers for a collected edition of his works. The appeal was most successful; and in July 1721 the collected edition did appear, in a handsome quarto volume, of about 400 pages, with the titlePoems by Allan Ramsay, “printed by Mr. Thomas Ruddiman for the Author.” The “Alphabetical List of Subscribers” prefixed to the volume contains nearly 500 names, most of them Scotch, but with a sprinkling of English. Among the Scottish names are those of nearly all the Scottish nobility of the day, in the persons of seven dukes, five marquises, twenty-one earls, one viscount, and twenty-three lords,while the columns are crowded with the names of the best-known baronets, knights, lairds, judges, lawyers, merchants, and civic functionaries in and round about Edinburgh and in other parts of Scotland. Among the few names from England one reads with special interest, besides that of the literary Scoto-Londoner “John Arbuthnot, M.D.,” these three,—“Mr. Alexander Pope,” “Sir Richard Steele” (for two copies), and “Mr. Richard Savage.” The volume was dedicated to the Ladies of Scotland in a few gallant and flowery sentences; and there was a preface, addressed specially to the critics, full of shrewd sense, and showing Ramsay’s command of an easy and light style of English prose.

Another distinction of the volume was a portrait of the author, excellently engraved after a painting by an Edinburgh artist-friend. It represents a youngish man, with a bright, knowing, clever face, a smallish and sensitive nose, and fine and lively eyes. One observes that there is no wig, or semblance of a wig, in the portrait, but only the natural hair, closely cropped to the shape of the head, and surmounted by a neat Scotch bonnet, cocked a little to one side. As it is impossible to suppose that a man who lived by making wigs did not wear one himself, the inference must be that, in a portrait which was to represent him in his poetical capacity, the wig was rejected by artistic instinct. In later portraits of Ramsay it is the same, save that the small Scotch bonnet is superseded in these by a kind of cloth turban of several folds. In proof that this deviation in the portraits from the usual habit of real life was suggested by artistic instinct, one may note that there is the same deviation in the portraits of most of the other real British poets of thewig-wearing age. Pope, Prior, Gay, and Thomson all appear in their portraits with something like Allan Ramsay’s turban or night-cap for their head-dress; and it descended to the poet Cowper.

Very likely, however, about the date at which we are now arrived, Allan Ramsay, though he still continued to wear a wig when off poetic duty, had ceased to make wigs for others. The collected edition of his poems had brought him 400 guineas at once, worth then about 1000 guineas now; and his bookselling,—including now a steady sale of that volume in a cheaper edition for the general public, and also the sale of the new pieces of an occasional kind which he continued to issue in separate form as fast as before,—was becoming a sufficient trade in itself. By the year 1724, at all events, when he had added a considerable number of such stray occasional pieces to those bound up in the collected volume, he seems to have been known in the little business world of Edinburgh no longer as “wig-maker,” but simply as “bookseller,” or sometimes more generally as “merchant.” Two enterprises of that year, both in the way of editorship rather than authorship, must have occupied a good deal of his time. These wereThe Tea Table Miscellany: A Collection of Choice Songs, Scots and English, andThe Evergreen: A Collection of Scots Poems wrote by the Ingenious before 1600. The first, originally in two volumes, but subsequently extended to four, was a collection of what might be called contemporary songs of all varieties, with the inclusion of floating popular favourites from the seventeenth century, deemed suitable, according to the somewhat lax standard of taste in those days, for musical eveningparties in families, or for companies of gentlemen bythemselves. The purpose of the other, as the title indicates, was more scholarly. It was to recall the attention of his countrymen to that older Scottish poetry which he still thought too little regarded by furnishing selected specimens of Henryson, Dunbar, Kennedy, Scott, Montgomery, the Wedderburns, Sir Richard Maitland, and others certainly or presumably of earlier centuries than the seventeenth. The intention was creditable, and the book did good service, though the editing of the old Scotch was inaccurate and meagre. In reality, Ramsay’s exertions for the two publications were not merely editorial. TheTea Table Miscellany, when completed, besides containing about thirty songs contributed by “some ingenious young gentlemen” of Ramsay’s acquaintance,—among whom we can identify now Hamilton of Bangour, young David Malloch, a William Crawford, and a William Walkinshaw,—contained about sixty songs of Ramsay’s own composition. Similarly, among several mock-antiques by modern hands inserted intoThe Evergreen, were two by Ramsay himself, entitledThe VisionandThe Eagle and Robin Redbreast.

The time had come for Ramsay’s finest and most characteristic performance. More than once, in his miscellanies hitherto, he had tried the pastoral form in Scotch, whether from a natural tendency to that form or induced by recent attempts in the English pastoral by Ambrose Philips, Pope, and Gay. Besides his pastoral elegy on the death of Addison, and another on the death of Prior, he had written a pastoral dialogue of real Scottish life in 162 lines, entitledPatie and Roger, introduced by this description:—

“Beneath the south side of a craigy bield,Where a clear spring did halesome water yield,Twa youthfu’ shepherds on the gowans lay,Tending their flocks ae bonny morn of May:Poor Roger graned till hollow echoes rang,While merry Patie hummed himsel a sang.”

“Beneath the south side of a craigy bield,

Where a clear spring did halesome water yield,

Twa youthfu’ shepherds on the gowans lay,

Tending their flocks ae bonny morn of May:

Poor Roger graned till hollow echoes rang,

While merry Patie hummed himsel a sang.”

This piece, and two smaller pastoral pieces in the same vein, calledPatie and PeggyandJenny and Meggie, had been so much liked that Ramsay had been urged by his friends to do something more extensive in the shape of a pastoral story or drama. He had been meditating such a thing through the year 1724, while busy with his two editorial compilations; and in June 1725 the result was given to the public inThe Gentle Shepherd: A Scots Pastoral Comedy. Here the three pastoral sketches already written were inwoven into a simply-constructed drama of rustic Scottish life as it might be imagined among the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, at that time, still within the recollection of very old people then alive, when the Protectorates of Cromwell and his son had come to an end and Monk had restored King Charles. The poem was received with enthusiastic admiration. There had been nothing like it before in Scottish literature, or in any other; nothing so good of any kind that could be voted as even similar; and this was at once the critical verdict. It is a long while ago, and there are many spots in Edinburgh which compete with one another in the interest of their literary associations; but one can stand now with particular pleasure for a few minutes any afternoon opposite that decayed house in the High Street, visible as one is crossing from the South Bridge to the North Bridge, where Allan Ramsay once had his shop, and whence the first copies ofThe Gentle Shepherdwere handed out, some day in June 1725, to eager Edinburgh purchasers.

The tenancy of this house by Ramsay lasted but a year longer. He had resolved to add to his general business of bookselling and publishing that of a circulating library, the first institution of the kind in Edinburgh. For this purpose he had taken new premises, still in the High Street, but in a position even more central and conspicuous than that of “The Mercury” opposite Niddry’s Wynd. They were, in fact, in the easternmost house of the Luckenbooths, or lower part of that obstructive stack of buildings, already mentioned, which once ran up the High Street alongside of St. Giles’s Church, dividing the traffic into two narrow and overcrowded channels. It is many years since the Luckenbooths and the whole obstruction of which they formed a part were swept away; but from old prints we can see that the last house of the Luckenbooths to the east was a tall tenement of five storeys, with its main face looking straight down the lower slope of the High Street towards the Canongate. The strange thing was that, though thus in the very heart of the bustle of the town as congregated round the Cross, the house commanded from its higher windows a view beyond the town altogether, away to Aberlady Bay and the farther reaches of sea and land in that direction. It was into this house that Ramsay removed in 1726, when he was exactly forty years of age. The part occupied by him was the flat immediately above the basement floor, but perhaps with that floor in addition. The sign he adopted for the new premises was one exhibiting the heads or effigies of Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden.

Having introduced Ramsay into this, the last of his Edinburgh shops, we have reached the point where our present interest in him all but ends. In 1728,when he had been two years in the new premises, he published a second volume of his collected poems, under the title ofPoems by Allan Ramsay, Volume II., in a handsome quarto matching the previous volume of 1721, and containing all the pieces he had written since the appearance of that volume; and in 1730 he publishedA Collection of Thirty Fables. These were his last substantive publications, and with them his literary career may be said to have come to a close. Begun in the last years of the reign of Queen Anne, and continued through the whole of the reign of George I., it had just touched the beginning of that of George II., when it suddenly ceased. Twice or thrice afterwards at long intervals he did scribble a copy of verses; but, in the main, from his forty-fifth year onwards, he rested on his laurels. Thenceforward he contented himself with his bookselling, the management of his circulating library, and the superintendence of the numerous editions of hisCollected Poems, hisGentle Shepherd, and hisTea Table Miscellanythat were required by the public demand, and the proceeds of which formed a good part of his income. It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that, when Allan Ramsay’s time of literary production ended, the story of his life in Edinburgh also came to a close, or ceased to be important. For eight-and-twenty years longer, or almost till George II. gave place to George III., Ramsay continued to be a living celebrity in the Scottish capital, known by figure and physiognomy to all his fellow-citizens, and Ramsay’s bookshop at the end of the Luckenbooths, just above the Cross, continued to be one of the chief resorts of the well-to-do residents, and of chance visitors of distinction. Now and then, indeed, through the twenty-eightyears, there are glimpses of him still in special connections with the literary, as well as with the social, history of Edinburgh. When the English poet Gay, a summer or two before his death in 1732, came to Edinburgh on a visit, in the company of his noble patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, and resided with them in their mansion of Queensberry House in the Canongate,—now the gloomiest and ugliest-looking house in that quarter of the old town, but then reckoned of palatial grandeur,—whither did he tend daily, in his saunterings up the Canongate, but to Allan Ramsay’s shop? One hears of him as standing there with Allan at the window to have the city notabilities and oddities pointed out to him in the piazza below, or as taking lessons from Allan in the Scottish words and idioms of theGentle Shepherd, that he might explain them better to Mr. Pope when he went back to London.

Some years later, when Ramsay had reached the age of fifty, and he and his wife were enjoying the comforts of his ample success, and rejoicing in the hopes and prospects of their children,—three daughters, “no ae wally-draggle among them, all fine girls,” as Ramsay informs us, and one son, a young man of three-and-twenty, completing his education in Italy for the profession of a painter,—there came upon the family what threatened to be a ruinous disaster. Never formally an anti-Presbyterian, and indeed regularly to be seen on Sundays in his pew in St. Giles’s High Kirk, but always and systematically opposed to the unnecessary social rigours of the old Presbyterian system, and of late under a good deal of censure from clerical and other strict critics on account of the dangerous nature of much of the literature put incirculation from his library, Ramsay had ventured at last on a new commercial enterprise, which could not but be offensive on similar grounds to many worthy people, though it seems to have been acceptable enough to the Edinburgh community generally. Edinburgh having been hitherto deficient in theatrical accommodation, and but fitfully supplied with dramatic entertainments, he had, in 1736, started a new theatre in Carrubber’s Close, near to his former High Street shop. He was looking for great profits from the proprietorship of this theatre and his partnership in its management. Hardly had he begun operations, however, when there came the extraordinary statute of 10 George II. (1737), regulating theatres for the future all over Great Britain. As by this statute there could be no performance of stage-plays out of London and Westminster, save when the King chanced to be residing in some other town, Ramsay’s speculation collapsed, and all the money he had invested in it was lost. It was a heavy blow; and he was moved by it to some verses of complaint to his friend Lord President Forbes and the other judges of the Court of Session. While telling the story of his own hardship in the case, he suggests that an indignity had been done by the new Act to the capital of Scotland:—

“Shall London have its houses twaAnd we doomed to have nane ava’?Is our metropolis, ance the placeWhere langsyne dwelt the royal raceOf Fergus, this gate dwindled downTo a level with ilk clachan town,While thus she suffers the subversionOf her maist rational diversion?”

“Shall London have its houses twa

And we doomed to have nane ava’?

Is our metropolis, ance the place

Where langsyne dwelt the royal race

Of Fergus, this gate dwindled down

To a level with ilk clachan town,

While thus she suffers the subversion

Of her maist rational diversion?”

However severe the loss to Ramsay at the time, it was soon tided over. Within six years he is foundagain quite at ease in his worldly fortunes. His son, for some years back from Italy, was in rapidly rising repute as a portrait-painter, alternating between London and Edinburgh in the practice of his profession, and a man of mark in Edinburgh society on his own account; and, whether by a junction of the son’s means with the father’s, or by the father’s means alone, it was now that there reared itself in Edinburgh the edifice which at the present day most distinctly preserves for the inhabitants the memory of the Ramsay family in their Edinburgh connections. The probability is that, since Allan had entered on his business premises at the end of the Luckenbooths, his dwelling-house had been somewhere else in the town or suburbs; but in 1743 he built himself a new dwelling-house on the very choicest site that the venerable old town afforded. It was that quaint octagon-shaped villa, with an attached slope of green and pleasure-ground, on the north side of the Castle Hill, which, as well from its form as from its situation, attracts the eye as one walks along Princes Street, and which still retains the name of Ramsay Lodge. The wags of the day, making fun of its quaint shape, likened the construction to a goose-pie; and something of that fancied resemblance may be traced even now in its extended and improved proportions. But envy may have had a good deal to do with the comparison. It is still a neat and comfortable dwelling internally, while it commands from its elevation an extent of scenery unsurpassed anywhere in Europe. The view from it ranges from the sea-mouth of the Firth of Forth on the east to the first glimpses of the Stirlingshire Highlands on the west, and again due north across the levels of the New Town, and the flashingwaters of the Firth below them, to the bounding outline of the Fifeshire hills. When, in 1743, before there was as yet any New Town at all, Allan Ramsay took up his abode in this villa, he must have been considered a fortunate and happy man. His entry into it was saddened, indeed, by the death of his wife, which occurred just about that time; but for fourteen years of widowerhood, with two of his daughters for his companions, he lived in it serenely and hospitably. During the first nine years of those fourteen he still went daily to his shop in the Luckenbooths, attending to his various occupations, and especially to his circulating library, which is said to have contained by this time about 30,000 volumes; but for the last five or six years he had entirely relinquished business. There are authentic accounts of his habits and demeanour in his last days, and they concur in representing him as one of the most charming old gentlemen possible, vivacious and sprightly in conversation, full of benevolence and good humour, and especially fond of children and kindly in his ways for their amusement. He died on the 7th of January 1758, in the seventy-second year of his age, and was buried in Greyfriars Churchyard.

Ramsay had outlived nearly all the literary celebrities who had been his contemporaries during his own career of active authorship, ended nearly thirty years before. Swift and Pope were gone, after Gay, Steele, Arbuthnot, and others of the London band, who had died earlier. Of several Scotsmen, his juniors, who had stepped into the career of literature after he had shown the way, and had attained to more or less of poetic eminence under his own observation, three,—Robert Blair, James Thomson,and Hamilton of Bangour,—had predeceased him. Their finished lives, with all the great radiance of Thomson’s, are wholly included in the life of Allan Ramsay. David Malloch, who had been an Edinburghprotégéof Ramsay’s, but had gone to London and Anglicised himself into “Mallet,” was about the oldest of his literary survivors into another generation; but in that generation, as Scotsmen of various ages, from sixty downwards to one-and-twenty, living, within Scotland or out of it, at the date of Ramsay’s death, we count Lord Kames, Armstrong, Reid, Hume, Lord Monboddo, Hugh Blair, George Campbell, Smollett, Wilkie, Blacklock, Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord Hailes, Falconer, Meikle, and Beattie. Such of these as were residents in Edinburgh had known Allan Ramsay personally; others of them had felt his influence indirectly; and all must have noted his death as an event of some consequence.

The time is long past for any exaggeration of Allan Ramsay’s merits. But, call him only a slipshod little Horace of Auld Reekie, who wrote odes, epistles, satires, and other miscellanies in Scotch through twenty years of the earlier part of the eighteenth century, and was also, by a happy chance, the author of a unique and delightful Scottish pastoral, it remains true that he was the most considerable personality in Scottish literary history in order of time after Drummond of Hawthornden, or, if we think only of the vernacular, after Sir David Lindsay, and that he did more than any other man to stir afresh a popular enthusiasm for literature in Scotland after the Union with England. All in all, therefore, it is with no small interest that, in one’s walks along themost classic thoroughfare of the present Edinburgh, one gazes at the white stone statue of Allan Ramsay, from the chisel of Sir John Steell, which stands in the Gardens just below the famous “goose-pie villa.” It looks as if the poet had just stepped down thence in his evening habiliments to see things thereabouts in their strangely changed condition. By the tact of the sculptor, he wears, one observes, not a wig, but the true poetic night-cap or turban.

Back to Index Next