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 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 débonnair 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—

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—

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 Horæ Subsecivæ. 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—

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—

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—

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—

—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.

Minor Scottish PoetsForth Feasting