E-text prepared by Susan Skinner and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
ALLAN RAMSAY
by
OLIPHANT SMEATON
Famous Scots Series
Published by Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier
Edinburgh and London
The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and
the printing from the press of Messrs. Morrison & Gibb, Edinburgh.
TO
DAVID MASSON, LL.D.
EMERITUS-PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY
THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
in grateful acknowledgment of kindly encouragement given in years
long gone by, and of intellectual stimulus received from him by
his former student
THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
Since this Volume was in type, I have received some additional
information which I feel constrained to lay before my readers.
With reference to the Easy Club, I have been favoured, through the
courtesy of the Rev. Dr. A. B. Grosart, with a sight of the complete
Minutes of the Club. From them I observe that Ramsay was one of the
earliest members admitted, and that his song 'Were I but a Prince or
King' was formally presented to the Club after his admission not before,
though its rough draft must have been shown to the members prior to that
event.
Next, as regards the Editions of _The Gentle Shepherd_, a valued
correspondent, Mr. J. W. Scott, Dowanhill, Glasgow, kindly calls my
attention to two 'Translations into English' of the Poem which appear to
have hitherto escaped notice. These are '_Allan Ramsay's Gentle
Shepherd, translated into English by W. Ward, 8vo, 1785._' Ward, as Mr.
Scott states, seems to have been a 'naturalised Englishman' residing at
Musselburgh. Five years after Ward's production, appeared another, and
in many respects a better Edition, to wit, '_The Gentle Shepherd, a
Scotch Pastoral by Allan Ramsay, Attempted in English by Margaret
Turner, London, 1790._' It was dedicated to the Prince of Wales, and its
list of Subscribers contains the names of most of the nobility of
Scotland. Is this not a reliable gauge of the popularity of the Poem?
_EDINBURGH, March 1896._
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
THE FAMILY TREE 9
CHAPTER II
RAMSAY'S APPRENTICESHIP; A BURGESS OF THE TOWN--1701-7 23
CHAPTER III
SCOTLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; THE UNION;
RAMSAY'S MARRIAGE--1707-12 28
CHAPTER IV
THE EASY CLUB; EARLY POEMS; EDINBURGH OF LAST CENTURY--1712-16 41
CHAPTER V
THE FAVOURITE OF THE 'FOUR 'OORS'; FROM WIGMAKER TO BOOKSELLER;
THE QUARTO OF 1721--1717-21 56
CHAPTER VI
RAMSAY AS AN EDITOR: _THE TEA-TABLE MISCELLANY_
AND _THE EVERGREEN_--1721-25 68
CHAPTER VII
_THE GENTLE SHEPHERD_; SCOTTISH IDYLLIC POETRY;
RAMSAY'S PASTORALS--1725-30 85
CHAPTER VIII
RESTING ON HIS LAURELS; BUILDS HIS THEATRE;
HIS BOOK OF _SCOTS PROVERBS_--1730-40 97
CHAPTER IX
CLOSING YEARS OF LIFE; HIS HOUSE ON CASTLEHILL; HIS FAMILY;
HIS PORTRAITS--1740-58 112
CHAPTER X
RAMSAY AS A PASTORAL POET AND AN ELEGIST 122
CHAPTER XI
RAMSAY AS A SATIRIST AND A SONG-WRITER 144
CHAPTER XII
RAMSAY'S MISCELLANEOUS POEMS; CONCLUSION 154
ALLAN RAMSAY
CHAPTER I
THE FAMILY TREE
'Ye'd better let me gang doon wi' the wig, Miss Kirsty,' said Peggy, the
'serving-lass' in the household of Mr. James Ross, writer, of the
Castlehill.
'Oh no! I'd as leif take it doon mysel' to Allan Ramsay's, for the sake
o' the walk and the bit crack wi' the canty callant,' replied the young
lady, a blush crimsoning her fair, rounded cheek.
And Peggy would retire from these periodical but good-humoured
passages-at-arms, with a knowing smile on her face, to confide the fact,
mayhap,--of course as a profound secret,--to her cronies in the same
stair, that Miss Kirsty Ross was 'unco ta'en up wi' that spruce genty
wigmaker, Maister Allan Ramsay, doon ayont the Tron Kirk.'
Yea! verily, it was a love drama, but as yet only in the first scene of
the first act. The 'Miss Kirsty' of the brief dialogue recorded
above--for the authenticity of which there is abundant evidence--was
Miss Christian Ross, eldest daughter of Mr. James Ross, a lawyer of some
repute in his day, whose practice lay largely in the Bailie's and
Sheriff's Courts, and with minor cases in the Justiciary Court, but not
with civil business before the Court of Session, an honour rigorously
reserved for the members of that close Corporation--the Writers to His
Majesty's Signet.
But though not belonging, in slang phrase, 'to the upper crust' of the
legal fraternity, James Ross was a man of some social consideration.
Though he appears to have had a strain of the fashionable Pharisee in
him, and to have esteemed gentle birth as covering any multitude of sins
and peccadilloes, he manifested, throughout his intercourse with Ramsay,
certain countervailing virtues that render him dear to the lovers of the
poet. He made distinct pretensions to the possession of culture and a
love of _belles-lettres_. To the best Edinburgh society of the period he
and his had the _entree_, while his house in Blair's Close, on the
southern slope of the Castlehill, was the rendezvous for most of the
_literati_ of the city, as well as for the _beaux esprits_ of the Easy
Club, of which he was a member.
His acquaintance with the young wigmaker--whose sign of the 'Mercury,'
situate in the High Street, or, as the poet himself writes, 'on
Edinburgh's Street the sun-side,' was almost immediately opposite
Niddry's Wynd, and at the head of Halkerston's Wynd, and within sixty
yards of the Tron Church--had originated in the weekly visits paid by
him to Allan's shop for the purpose of getting his wig dressed. While
waiting until this important item in an eighteenth-century gentleman's
toilet was accomplished, he had enjoyed many a 'crack' with the young
craftsman, so shrewd, so witty, so genial, yet withal so industrious.
The man of pleas and precepts discovered him of powder and perukes to
be as deeply interested and, in good sooth, as deeply versed in the
literature of his own land as the lawyer himself. Chance acquaintance
gradually ripened, on both sides, into cordial esteem. James Ross
invited Ramsay to visit him at his house, and there the young
_perruquier_ beheld his fate in Christian, or Kirsty, Ross.
If Allan were fascinated by Kirsty's rare beauty and piquant
_espieglerie_, by her sweet imperiousness and the subtle charm of her
refined femininity, exercised on a nature whose previous experience of
the sex had been limited to the bare-legged Amazons of Leadhills or the
rosy-cheeked ministering Hebes, whom the high wages of domestic service
attracted to town; she, in turn, was no less captivated by the manly,
self-possessed demeanour, and the ingratiating qualities, both social
and intellectual, of her father's guest. If he had mingled too little
with society for his manners to be tinged with the polish of the
_debonnair_ gallant, his natural good-breeding and ready tact, united,
it must be confessed, to a not inconsiderable spice of vanity, doubtless
prevented any lapse into those nervous _gaucheries_ wherewith a youth's
first appearance in good society is often accompanied.
Allan has drawn with truth and graphic power his own portrait as he
appeared at this time--
'_Imprimis_--then for tallness I
Am five feet and four inches high;
A black-a-vic'd, snod, dapper fellow,
Nor lean, nor overlaid wi' tallow;
With phiz of a Morocco cut,
Resembling a late man of wit,
Auld-gabbet Spec, who was so cunning
To be a dummie ten years running.
Then for the fabric of my mind,
'Tis more 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.'
Existing portraits, including the one most valued for its fidelity
to the original, that by his son, Allan Ramsay, the artist
(Portrait-painter in Ordinary to King George III.), show him to have
possessed features that were delicate and sharply chiselled, keen dark
eyes, a mobile, sensitive mouth, a complexion dark almost to
swarthiness, and a high rounded forehead. To these items may be added
those others coming as side-lights, thrown on a man's character and
individuality by the passing references of contemporaries. From such
sources we learn that his face was one whereon were writ large,
contentment with himself and with the world, as well as a certain pawky
shrewdness and unaffected _bonhomie_. This expression was largely
induced by the twinkling of his beadlike eyes, and the lines of his
mouth, which curved upwards at the corners; almost imperceptibly, it is
true, yet sufficiently to flash into his countenance that subtle element
of humorous _canniness_ which has been accepted by many as the prime
attribute of his character. He may probably have had his own feelings in
view when he makes his Patie say in _The Gentle Shepherd_--
'The bees shall loath the flow'r, and quit the hive,
The saughs on boggy ground shall cease to thrive,
Ere scornfu' queans, or loss o' warldly gear,
Shall _spill_ my rest, or ever force a tear.'
His figure was thickset, but had not as yet acquired the squatness of
later days. If in the years to come he grew to resemble George Eliot's
portrait of Mr. Casson, when the inevitable penalty of sedentariness and
good living has to be paid in increasing corpulence, he never lost his
tripping gait which in early manhood earned for him the _sobriquet_ of
'Denty Allan.' In deportment and dress he was 'easy, trig and neat,'
leaning a little to vanity's side in his manners, yet nathless as
honourable, sound-hearted, clean-souled a gentleman as any that lounged
around Edinburgh Cross of a sunny Saturday afternoon. Such was the youth
that presented himself to bonny Kirsty Ross at her father's tea-table.
The acquaintance soon expanded into friendship. Before long, as has been
stated, the household observed, not without amusement, that whenever
Saturday came round, on which day James Ross' wig was sent down to
receive its week's dressing from young Ramsay, Kirsty found she needed a
walk, which always seemed to take her past the sign of 'the flying
Mercury,' so that she could hand in the wig and call for it as she
returned. Ah, artful Miss Kirsty! As the idyll progressed, the interim
walk was abandoned, and the fair one found it pleasanter, as she said,
to pass the time in conversation with the young _coiffeur_ as he combed
the paternal wig. The intercourse thus commenced on both sides, more as
a frolic than aught else, speedily led to warmer feelings than those of
friendship being entertained, and in the spring of 1711 Allan Ramsay
asked the daughter of the lawyer to share life's lot with him.
The lovers were, of course, too well aware of the dissimilarity in their
social stations to hope for any ready acquiescence in their matrimonial
projects by the ambitious Edinburgh lawyer. To win consent, the matter
had to be prudently gone about. The position Ramsay's family had held
in the past reckoned for something, it is true, in the problem, but the
real point at issue was, What was the social status of the swain at that
moment? Ah, there was the rub! All very well was it for a
literary-minded lawyer to patronise his wigmaker by inviting him to
drink a dish of tea with his family, or to crack a bottle with him over
Jacobite plots or the latest poems of Swift or Pope; but to give him his
daughter in marriage, that was altogether another question. Mrs. Grundy
was quite as awe-inspiring a dame then as now. James Ross and his spouse
would require to make a careful investigation into the pedigree of the
'mercurial' artist in crinology--to import a trade term of the present
into the staid transactions of the past--before such an alliance could
be thought of. Many and long were the family councils held. Every item
of his descent, his relatives, his character, his prospects, was
discussed, and this is what they discovered.
Allan Ramsay was born on the 15th of October 1686, in the little town of
Leadhills, situate in the parish of Crawfordmuir, in the upper ward of
Lanarkshire, and in the very heart of the bleak, heathy Lowther hills.
The house wherein he saw the light is now 'a broken-down byre,'
according to Dr. John Brown in _Horae Subsecivae_. Standing, as it does,
1400 feet above the level of the sea, the village is chiefly notable as
being the most elevated inhabited ground in Scotland. The industry of
the district, then as now, was almost entirely devoted to lead-mining.
The superior of the parish was the Earl of Hopetoun, and on his behoof
the mines were wrought. The male population, with but few exceptions,
were in his lordship's service. A more desolate and dreary spot could
scarcely be conceived. The rugged ranges, destitute of wood, were
scarred by the traces of former workings, and intersected, moreover, by
narrow rocky ravines, down which brawled foaming mountain burns. Perched
like an eyrie on some steep cliff, the view from the vicinity of the
town is magnificent, ranging over fair Clydesdale, and the lands
formerly owned by the Earls of Crawford, 'the Lindsays, light and gay,'
whose ancient castle stands on Clydeside.
In the days of the Stuarts gold used to be found in considerable
quantities in the locality, from which was struck the gold issue bearing
the head of James V., wearing a bonnet; hence the old term for it--a
'bonnet-piece.'
The inhabitants of the town and district of Leadhills had imbibed in
Ramsay's days something of the stern, forbidding character of the
scenery. The ruggedness of their surroundings had evidently sunk deep
into their temperament,--and ofttimes the teaching of nature in
situations like this is of the most lasting kind. So it was with them.
They were a community apart: gloomily, almost fanatically, religious;
believing in miracles, visions, and in the direct interposition of
Providence,--in a word, carrying to the extreme of bigotry all the grand
attributes of Scottish Presbyterianism and Covenanting sublimity of
motive. They married and gave in marriage among themselves, looking the
while rather askance at strangers as 'orra bodies' from the big world
without, who, because they _were_ strangers, ran a strong chance of
being no better than they should be!
To this 'out-of-the-way' corner of the planet there was sent, towards
the close of the year 1684, as manager of Lord Hopetoun's mines, a gay,
happy-hearted, resourceful young Scotsman, by name Robert Ramsay. The
poet, when detailing his pedigree to the father of his _inamorata_, had
boasted that he was descended, on the paternal side, from the Ramsays of
Dalhousie (afterwards Earls of that Ilk). Such was literally the case.
Ramsay of Dalhousie had a younger brother, who, from the estate he
held--a small parcel of the ancestral acres--bore a name, or rather an
_agnomen_, yet to be historic in song, 'The Laird of Cockpen.' Whether
in this case, like his descendant of ballad fame, the said laird was
'proud and great'; whether his mind was 'ta'en up wi' things o' the
State,' history doth not record. Only on one point is it explicit, that,
like his successor, he married a wife, from which union resulted Captain
John Ramsay, whose only claim to remembrance is that he in turn married
Janet Douglas, daughter of Douglas of Muthil, and thus brought the poet
into kinship with yet another distinguished Scottish family. To the
captain and his spouse a son was born, who devoted himself to legal
pursuits, was a writer in Edinburgh, and acted as legal agent for the
Earl of Hopetoun. Through his interest with the earl, Robert Ramsay, his
eldest son, was appointed manager of the lead mines in the Lowther
hills, and set out to assume his new duties towards the close of the
year 1684.
From this pedigree, therefore, the fact is clear of the poet's right to
address William Ramsay, Earl of Dalhousie, in terms imitated from
Horace's famous Ode to Maecenas--
'Dalhousie, of an auld descent,
My chief, my stoup, my ornament.'
But to our narrative. Apparently the young mine-manager found the lines
of his life by no means cast in pleasant places amid the rough
semi-savage community of Leadhills in those days. He felt himself a
stranger in a strange land. To better his lot, though he was still very
young, he determined to marry. The only family with which he could hold
intercourse on terms of equality, was that of William Bower, an English
mineralogist who had been brought from Derbyshire, to instruct the
Scottish miners more fully in the best methods then known for extracting
the metal from the refractory matrix. But to Robert Ramsay the chief
attraction in the family was the eldest daughter of his colleague, Alice
Bower, a vivacious, high-spirited girl, with a sufficient modicum, we
are told, of the Derbyshire breeziness of nature to render her
invincibly fascinating to the youth. Alone of all those around she
reminded him of the fair dames and damsels of Edinburgh. Therefore he
wooed and won her. Their marriage took place early in January 1686. In
the October of the same year the future poet was born.
But, alas! happiness was not long to be the portion of the wedded pair.
At the early age of twenty-four Robert Ramsay died, leaving his widow,
as regards this world's gear, but indifferently provided for, and,
moreover, burdened with an infant scarce twelve months old.
Probably the outlook for the future was so dark that the young widow
shrank from facing it. Be this as it may, we learn that three months
after Robert Ramsay was laid in his grave she married David Crichton,
finding a home for herself and a stepfather for the youthful Allan at
one and the same time. Crichton was a small peasant-proprietor, or
bonnet-laird, of the district. Though not endowed with much wealth, he
seems to have been in fairly comfortable circumstances, realising his
stepson's ideal in after-life, which he put into the mouth of his
Patie--
'He that hath just enough can soundly sleep;
The o'ercome only fashes fouk to keep.'
Much has been written regarding the supposed unhappiness of Ramsay's
boyhood in the household of his step-parent. For such a conclusion there
is not a tittle of evidence. Every recorded fact of their mutual
relations points the other way. David Crichton was evidently a man of
high moral principle and strength of character. Not by a hairbreadth did
he vary the treatment meted out to Allan from that accorded to his own
children by the widow of Robert Ramsay. To the future poet he gave, as
the latter more than once testified, as good an education as the parish
school afforded. That it embraced something more than the 'three R's,'
we have Ramsay's own testimony, direct and indirect--direct in the
admission that he had learned there to read Horace 'faintly in the
original'; indirect in the number and propriety of the classical
allusions in his works. He lived before the era of quotation books and
dictionaries of phrase and fable,--the hourly godsend of the
penny-a-liner; but the felicity of his references is unquestionable, and
shows an acquaintance with Latin and English literature both wide and
intimate. At anyrate, his scholastic training was sufficiently catholic
to imbue his mind with a reverence for the masterpieces in both
languages, and to enable him to consort in after years, on terms of
perfect literary equality, with the lawyers and the _beaux esprits_ of
witty Edinburgh, such as Dr. Pitcairn, Dr. Webster, and Lord Elibank.
Until his migration to the Scottish capital, at the age of fifteen,
Ramsay was employed, during his spare hours, in assisting his stepfather
in the work of the farm. The intimate acquaintance he displays in his
pastoral with the life and lot of the peasant-farmer, was the result of
his early years of rural labour among the Lowther hills. That they were
years of hardship, and a struggle at hand-grips with poverty, goes
without the saying. The land around the Lowthers was not of such a
quality as to render the bonnet-laird's exchequer a full one. As a
shepherd, therefore, young Ramsay had to earn hardly the bread he ate at
his stepfather's table. The references to his vocation are numerous in
his poems. In his Epistle to his friend William Starrat, teacher of
mathematics at Straban in Ireland, he adverts to his early life--
'When speeling up the hill, the dog-days' heat
Gars a young thirsty shepherd pant and sweat;
I own 'tis cauld encouragement to sing,
When round ane's lugs the blattran hailstanes ring;
But feckfu' fouk can front the bauldest wind,
And slunk through muirs, an' never fash their mind.
Aft hae I wade through glens wi' chorking feet,
When neither plaid nor kilt could fend the weet;
Yet blythly wad I bang out o'er the brae,
And stend o'er burns as light as ony rae,
Hoping the morn might prove a better day.'
The boy, meantime, must have been photographing on the retentive
negatives of his mind the varied scenes of rural life, the labours
incidental to the alternating seasons, which he was to employ with
effect so rare in his inimitable pastoral. During the winter months,
when the snow lay deep on hill and glen, over scaur and cleugh among
the lonely Lowthers, when the flocks were 'faulded' and the 'kye' housed
in the warm byres, when the furious blasts, storming at window and door,
and the deadly nipping frost, rendered labour outside impracticable,
doubtless in David Crichton's household, as elsewhere over broad
Scotland, the custom prevailed of sitting within the _lum-cheek_ of the
cavernous fireplaces, or around the _ingle-neuk_, and reciting those
ancient ballads of the land's elder life, that had been handed down from
True Thomas and the border minstrels; or narrating those tales of moving
accidents by flood or field, of grim gramarye, and of the mysterious
sights and sounds of other days, whose memory floated down the stream of
popular tradition from age to age. In days when books were so costly as
to be little more than the luxury of the rich, the art of the fireside
rhapsodist was held in a repute scarcely less high, than in that epoch
which may justly be styled the period of Grecian romance--the days of
'the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle.' At that spring there is
abundant evidence that young Allan Ramsay had drunk deep.
To another well, also, of genuine inspiration he must by this time have
repaired--that of our native Scottish literature. Though some years had
yet to elapse before he could read Hamilton of Gilbertfield's poem, the
'Dying Words of Bonnie Heck,' which he afterwards praised as stimulating
him into emulation, there is little doubt he had already caught some
faint echoes of that glorious period in Scottish literature, which may
be said to have lasted from the return of the poet-king (James I.) in
1424, from his captivity in England, to the death of Drummond of
Hawthornden in 1649. Without taking account of Barbour's _Bruce_ and
Blind Harry's _Wallace_, which partake more of the character of rhyming
chronicles than poems,--though relieved here and there by passages of
genuine poetic fire, such as the familiar one in the former, beginning--
'Ah! fredome is a nobill thynge,
Fredome maks men to haiff liking,'
--the literary firmament that is starred at the period in question with
such names as King James I., Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Walter
Kennedy, Gavin Douglas, Sir David Lyndsay, Alexander Montgomery, William
Alexander (Earl of Stirling), Sir Robert Ayton, Robert Sempill, and
Drummond of Hawthornden, need not fear comparison with the contemporary
poetry of the sister land. The greatest name in the list, that of
William Dunbar, was undoubtedly the leading singer of his age in the
British Isles, but inacquaintance with his works has prevented his
genius obtaining that recognition it deserves. Sir Walter Scott
considered Dunbar in most qualities the peer, in some the superior, of
Chaucer, and his opinion will be endorsed by all those who are able to
read Dunbar with enjoyment. Though Spenser's genius may have had a
richer efflorescence than Dunbar's, if the mass of their work be
critically weighed, quality by quality, the balance, when struck, would
rest remarkably evenly between them. Drummond of Hawthornden is perhaps
the most richly-gifted writer in early Scottish literature, as an
all-round man of letters. But as a poet the palm must ever remain with
Dunbar.
The study of the breaks which occur in the poetic succession of any
literature is always interesting. In English literature such gaps
recur, though not with any definite regularity--for example, after the
death of Chaucer and Gower, when the prosaic numbers of Occleve and
Lydgate were the sole representatives of England's imaginative
pre-eminence; and the penultimate and ultimate decades of last century,
when Hayley was regarded as their acknowledged master by the younger
school of poets. In Scotland, it is to be noted, as Sir George Douglas
points out in his standard work, _Minor Scottish Poets_, that from 1617,
the date of the publication of Drummond's _Forth Feasting_, until 1721,
when Ramsay's first volume saw the light, no singer even of mediocre
power appeared in Scotland.
There were editions of many of the poems of James I., Dunbar, Stirling,
Drummond, and Sempill, which Ramsay may have seen. But he was more
likely to have gained the knowledge we know he possessed of the early
literature of his country from the recitals by fireside _raconteurs_,
and from the printed sheets, or _broadsides_, hawked about the rural
districts of Scotland during the closing decades of the seventeenth and
the initial ones of the eighteenth centuries. From specimens of these
which I have seen, it is evident that Henryson's _Robene and Makyn_,
Dunbar's _Merle and the Nightingale_ and the _Thistle and the Rose_,
with several of Drummond's and Stirling's poems, were circulated in this
way, thus becoming familiarly known in rural districts where the volumes
of these authors never could have penetrated. On these _broadsides_,
then, it must have been that the dormant poetical gifts of the youthful
Ramsay were fed, and in after years he showed his liking for this form
of publication by issuing his own earlier poems in the same way.