Allan Ramsay

Allan Ramsay.

by William Henry Oliphant Smeaton.

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 n.o.bility 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-la.s.s" 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 pa.s.sages-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 mult.i.tude 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 s.e.x 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 pa.s.sing 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. Ca.s.son, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, that whenever Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.s 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, dest.i.tute 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 quant.i.ties 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 c.o.c.kpen." 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 a.s.sume 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 modic.u.m, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 t.i.ttle 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 cla.s.sical allusions in his works. He lived before the era of quotation books and dictionaries of phrase and fable,--the hourly G.o.dsend 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 a.s.sisting 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 f.e.c.kfu" 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.