CLOSING YEARS OF LIFE; HIS HOUSE ON CASTLEHILL; HIS FAMILY; HIS
PORTRAITS--1740-58.
Little more of a biographical character is there to relate. The last
seventeen years of Ramsay's life were passed in the bosom of his family,
and in attention to his business. His son, Allan--afterwards an artist
of great celebrity, and portrait painter to George III.,--after
studying, as the proud father informs his friend Smibert in a letter
about this time, with Mr. Hyffidg in London, and spending a little time
at home 'painting like a Raphael,' had been sent to Rome, where he made
good use of his opportunities. The father's heart yearns over the boy,
and he pathetically adds: 'I'm sweer to part with him, but canna stem
the current which flows from the advice of his patrons and his own
inclination.' His three daughters were growing up into 'fine, handsome
girls,' while 'my dear auld wife is still my bedfellow.'
What a beautiful picture we get of the kindly old poet, drawn
unconsciously by himself in this letter. Domesticity and parental
affection were two qualities pre-eminently present in Ramsay's nature.
From Mrs. Murray of Henderland we also receive a delicious side-peep
into Allan's character. In 1825 she informed Mr. Robert Chambers that
'he was one of the most amiable men she had ever known. His constant
cheerfulness and lively conversational powers had made him a favourite
amongst persons of rank, whose guest he frequently was. Being very fond
of children, he encouraged his daughters in bringing troops of young
ladies about the house, in whose sports he would mix with a patience and
vivacity wonderful in an old man. He used to give these young friends a
kind of ball once a year. From pure kindness for the young, he would
help to make dolls for them, and cradles wherein to place these little
effigies, with his own hands.'
From 1740 to 1743 he enjoyed to the full the idyllic happiness and peace
described in his epistle to James Clerk of Penicuik--
'Though born to not ae inch of ground,
I keep my conscience white and sound;
And though I ne'er was a rich heaper,
To make that up I live the cheaper;
By this ae knack I've made a shift
To drive ambitious care adrift;
And now in years and sense grown auld,
In ease I like my limbs to fauld.
Debts I abhor, and plan to be
Frae shochling trade and danger free,
That I may, loos'd frae care and strife,
With calmness view the edge of life;
And when a full ripe age shall crave,
Slide easily into my grave.'
In 1742, finding himself in a position to take more ease than his busy
life had hitherto permitted to him, he bought a piece of ground on the
Castlehill, overlooking the valley of the North Loch, and there erected
that curious house, with its octagonal-shaped frontage, copied from a
Neapolitan villa, and designed by his son Allan, which so long was an
ornament on the northern slope overlooking the New Town of Edinburgh.
From his windows a reach of scenery was commanded, probably not
surpassed in Europe, stretching from the mouth of the Firth of Forth on
the east to the Grampians on the west, and extending far across the
green hills of Fife to the north. The poet, however, becoming alarmed at
the expense he was incurring, altered his son's design after the
building was half completed. In consequence, the mansion presented a
very quaint appearance. Tradition states that Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun
(afterwards Lord Milton) first detected the resemblance to a goose-pie.
Be this as it may, Allan was grievously vexed by the comparison, and one
day, when showing it, in the pride of his heart, to the witty Lord
Elibank, who duly admired its unrivalled prospect, he added, 'And yet,
my lord, thae toon wits say it's like naething else than a guse-pie.'
'Deed, Allan, noo I see ye intilt, I'm thinkin' the wits are no' sae far
wrang.' History does not record Allan's rejoinder.
Scarcely had he entered his new mansion, however, expecting to enjoy
there many years of domestic happiness and peace, than the great sorrow
of his life fell upon him. In March 1743, his faithful and loving
partner, who had stood by him amid all the storm and stress of his busy
career, was taken from him, after thirty years of unbroken affection and
devotion. She was interred in the Greyfriars Churchyard, as the cemetery
records show, on the 28th of March 1743. So intense was her husband's
grief that he, who for many another had written elegies instinct with
deep sympathy and regret, could not trust himself to write of her, 'lest
I should break doon a'thegither into my second bairnhood.' Alas! poor
Allan!
But his daughters, realising to the full the part that now devolved on
them, stepped into the gap left in his domestic circle. Nobly they
fulfilled their duty, and amongst the most affecting tributes Ramsay
paid, is that to the filial affection of 'his girls,' over whom, after
their mother had gone from them, he watched with a wealth of paternal
love and an anxious solicitude, as unsparing as it was unremitting.
And thus did the life of Allan Ramsay roll quietly onward through placid
reaches of domestic and social happiness, during the closing fourteen
years of existence. Though he did not formally retire from business
until 1755, he left it almost entirely in the hands of capable
subordinates. He had worked hard in his day, and now, as he said--
----'I the best and fairest please,
A little man that lo'es my ease,
And never thole these passions lang
That rudely mint to do me wrang.'
Accordingly, he lived quietly in the 'goose-pie,' 'faulding his limbs in
ease,' and absolutely refusing to concern himself with anything
political, social, or ecclesiastical calculated to bring worry and
trouble upon him.
During the Rebellion of 1745, tradition states that Prince Charles
Edward, after the capture of the city by the Highland army, sent a
message to Ramsay, asking him to repair to Holyrood, that some mark of
his new sovereign's favour might be bestowed on him. Singular, indeed,
it was, that the poet should have selected the day in question to repair
to his friend James Clerk's mansion at Penicuik, and that he should
there have been seized with so severe an indisposition as to prevent him
returning to Edinburgh for nearly five weeks. Though a Tory and a
Jacobite, honest Allan knew upon which side his bread was buttered. Such
honours as would have been conferred would have been inconvenient.
Moreover, the Rebellion had not yet attained dimensions sufficient to
transmute it from a rebellion into a revolution. Pawkiness and caution
were prominent traits in his character, and they were never used to more
salient advantage than in the instance in question.
To the end of life, Ramsay remained the same kindly, genial, honourable
man, whose appearance in any of the social circles he frequented, was
the signal for 'quips and cranks and wreathed smiles' to go round, and
for the feast of reason and the flow of soul to commence. His squat,
podgy figure waddling down the High Street on his way to his shop in the
Luckenbooths, his head covered with the quaint three-cornered hat of the
period, beneath which peeped his tie-wig, was one of the familiar sights
of Edinburgh, to be pointed out to strangers with a pride and an
affection that never diminished. In his little villa on the Castlehill
he entertained his friends in true Horatian style, and with a
hospitality every whit as warm, though it was every whit as simple as
that which the great Roman promised Maecenas, he made them free of what
was in his power to give.
Foibles he had,--and who is without them? faults, too,--for what
character lacks them? yet his very foibles and his faults leaned to
virtue's side. Vain he certainly was, deny the fact who can? his
egotism, also, may have jarred on some whose individuality was as strong
as his own, but whose liberality in making allowances for human
weaknesses was less. Nay, he may even in some respects have been 'near'
with regard to certain little things, though this was the result of his
humble upbringing, where, in the household economy of the Crichtons, a
pound was a fortune. But once break through the crust of his
old-fashioned formalism with the thrust of some pressing appeal for aid,
and instantly we touch the core of a ready and warm sympathy--a sympathy
as catholic in the radius of its beneficence as it was munificent in the
measure of its benefactions. To the poor, to the suffering, to the widow
and the orphan, to the fatherless and the friendless, Allan Ramsay was
ever the readiest to help where help was really needed; and if his
vanity liked the fact to be made public property, wherein lay the harm?
Do our published subscription-lists to-day not testify to the existence
of the same foible in nine-tenths of us? To the improvident, however, to
the lazy, to the genteel beggar, and to the thousand and one forms
mendicity--supported by mendacity--takes to extort money, Allan was as
adamant. 'Gang your wa's,' he would say to such; 'gar your elbuck earn
what your mooth eats, and ye'll be a better man.'
Allan has had the misfortune to be rated by what he did not do in the
way of charity, rather than by what he did. Because he esteemed charity
to begin at home, and that he should provide for his own before
participating in any schemes for providing for others, he has been rated
as selfish and miserly. The opposite is the case. Prudent, careful, and
economical,--into no speculation would he go from which he did not see
the probability, at least, of an adequate return. Hence, during the
South Sea madness, he kept his head when many a better man went mad with
the speculative mania. He was pious, without his piety being black-edged
with that gloomy bigotry which characterised much of the Presbyterianism
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Scotland. As he put the
matter himself in his _Epistle to James Arbuckle_:
'Neist, Anti-Toland, Blunt, and Whiston,
Know positively I'm a Christian,
Believing truths and thinking free,
Wishing thrawn parties would agree.'
He delighted in sociality and conviviality, but recoiled from aught
savouring of licence or excess. To coarseness, it is true, he may at
times have stooped in his work; but we must remember the spirit of the
times was in favour of calling a spade a spade, and not 'an implement
for disintegrating planetary particles.' To no degree greater than did
Swift, or Steele, or Arbuthnot, or Gay, can Allan Ramsay be considered
to have smirched his pages with references either ribald or indelicate.
The spirit of the age was in fault when coarseness was rated as wit; and
to be true to life, the painters of the manners around them had to
represent these as they were, not as they would have liked them to be.
On the 9th May 1755 Ramsay, when writing to his friend, James Clerk of
Penicuik, a rhyming epistle, had said--
'Now seventy years are o'er my head,
And thirty mae may lay me dead.'
Alas! the 'Shadow feared of man' was already sitting waiting for him at
no great distance farther on in his life's journey. For some years he
had suffered acutely from scurvy in the gums, which in the end attacked
his jawbone and affected his speech. To the close, however, he retained
his cheerfulness and buoyancy of spirits. When the last great summons at
length came to him, he met it with a manly fortitude and Christian
resignation.
Amongst his last words, according to his daughter Janet, who survived
until 1807, were these: 'I'm no' feared of death; the Bricht and Morning
Star has risen and is shining mair and mair unto the perfect day.' And
so he passed 'into the unseen' on the 7th January 1758, in the
seventy-second year of his age. He was interred two days after in the
Greyfriars Churchyard, where his gravestone is still visible, bearing
the inscription: 'In this cemetery was interred the mortal part of an
immortal poet, Allan Ramsay, author of _The Gentle Shepherd_ and other
admirable poems in the Scottish dialect. He was born in 1686 and died in
1758.
'No sculptured marble here, no pompous lay,
No storied urn, no animated bust;
This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way
To pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust.[2]
Though here you're buried, worthy Allan,
We'll ne'er forget you, canty callan;
For while your soul lives in the sky,
Your "Gentle Shepherd" ne'er shall die.'
Sir John Clerk, one of the Barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, who
admired his genius and was one of his most intimate friends, erected at
his family seat at Penicuik an obelisk to his memory; while Mr.
Alexander Fraser-Tytler, at Woodhouselee, near the Glencorse _locale_
of _The Gentle Shepherd_, has erected a rustic temple which bears the
inscription--
'ALLANO RAMSAY ET GENIO LOCI.
'Here midst those streams that taught thy Doric Muse
Her sweetest song,--the hills, the woods, and stream,
Where beauteous Peggy strayed, list'ning the while
Her Gentle Shepherd's tender tale of love.
Scenes which thy pencil, true to Nature, gave
To live for ever. Sacred be this shrine;
And unprofaned, by ruder hands, the stone
That owes its honours to thy deathless name.'
Ramsay was survived by his son Allan, the painter, and by his two
daughters, Christian and Janet, who amongst them inherited the poet's
fortune. The house on the Castlehill fell to his son, and remained in
the possession of the family, as Mr. Logie Robertson records, until
1845, when it changed hands at the death of General John Ramsay, the
poet's grandson, and the last of his line. For many years it stood, an
object of interest to all admirers of the bard, until 1892, when, just
as the building was beginning to show signs of age, the site was bought
for the erection of the new students' boarding-house, 'University Hall,'
which so imposingly crowns the ridge of the Castlehill. With a reverence
for the memory of the poet as rare as it is commendable, the promoters
of the scheme resolved to preserve as much as possible of the house, and
the greater part of it has been incorporated in the new building.
Of Ramsay we have only two portraits remaining that are of any real
value,--that painted by his son Allan, and that by Smibert, the poet's
lifelong friend. The latter represents him in youth, the former in
age--both being considered, at the time of execution, striking
likenesses. But perhaps the best idea of the appearance of the poet may
be gathered from Sir John Steele's fine statue of him (designed from his
son's portrait) which now stands at the corner of West Princes Street
Gardens, Edinburgh, immediately below the site of his house. There, with
his familiar 'nightcap' on his head, he stands, watching the busy crowds
passing to and fro in front of him, wearing the while an expression on
his face as though he were saying with his Patie--
'He that hath just enough can soundly sleep,
The o'ercome only fashes fouk to keep;
Content's the greatest bliss we can procure
Frae 'boon the lift: without it, kings are poor.'
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The first stanza is in reality by Burns, and is identical with that
he placed on the tombstone he erected over the remains of Fergusson, the
poet, in the Canongate Churchyard.