Allan Ramsay. William Henry Oliphant Smeaton
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William Henry Oliphant Smeaton
Allan Ramsay
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066208332
Table of Contents
CHAPTER II HIS APPRENTICESHIP; A BURGESS OF THE TOWN—1701-7
CHAPTER III SCOTLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; THE UNION; RAMSAY'S MARRIAGE—1707-12
CHAPTER IV THE EASY CLUB; EARLY POEMS; EDINBURGH OF LAST CENTURY—1712-16
CHAPTER V THE FAVOURITE AT THE 'FOUR-OORS'; FROM WIGMAKER TO BOOKSELLER; THE QUARTO OF 1721—1717-21
CHAPTER VI RAMSAY AS AN EDITOR; THE 'TEA-TABLE MISCELLANY' AND THE 'EVERGREEN'—1721-25
CHAPTER VII 'THE GENTLE SHEPHERD'; SCOTTISH IDYLLIC POETRY; RAMSAY'S PASTORALS—1725-30
CHAPTER VIII RESTING ON HIS LAURELS; BUILDS HIS THEATRE; HIS BOOK OF 'SCOTS PROVERBS'—1730-40
CHAPTER IX CLOSING YEARS OF LIFE; HIS HOUSE ON CASTLEHILL; HIS FAMILY; HIS PORTRAITS—1740-58.
CHAPTER X RAMSAY AS A PASTORAL POET AND AN ELEGIST
CHAPTER XI RAMSAY AS A SATIRIST AND A SONG-WRITER
CHAPTER XII RAMSAY'S MISCELLANEOUS POEMS; CONCLUSION
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.
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 entrée, 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 espièglerie, by her sweet imperiousness and the subtle charm of her refined