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.”
Elsewhere, more briefly, he describes himself as
“A little man that lo’es my ease,”
and again as one who much enjoyed, in good company,
“An evening and guffaw.”
This kind of pleasure he was in the habit of enjoying more particularly in one of those many clubs into which the citizens of dense Auld Reekie then distributed themselves for the purposes of conviviality. It consisted of about a dozen kindred spirits calling themselves “The Easy Club,” professing literary tastes, and making it a rule that each of them should be known within the club by some adopted name of literary associations. Ramsay’s first club-name was “Isaac Bickerstaff,” but he changed it after a while for “Gavin Douglas.” There is a significance in both names, and in the exchange of the one for the other.
Through Ramsay’s apprenticeship, and also after he had set up in business for himself, he had been a diligent reader of all accessible books. Recollecting what books were then accessible to one in his circumstances, we can see, however, that his readings had been mainly in two directions. In the first place, there was the current English or London literature of his own time, or as much of it as was wafted to Edinburgh in the shape of the last or recent publications, in prose or verse, by Defoe, Prior, Swift, Steele, Colley Cibber, Addison, Rowe, Aaron Hill, Gay, and others of the Queen Anne wits; among whom is not to be forgotten the youthful Pope, then rising to the place of poetic supremacy that had been left vacant by Dryden. Of Ramsay’s cognisance of this contemporary English literature of the south, his admiration of it, and enjoyment of it, there is abundant evidence. He had become aware, however, of another literature, indigenous to his own Scotland, though lying far back, for the most part, in an obscure Scottish past. Through Watson’s Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, Ruddiman’s edition of Gavin Douglas’s Translation of Virgil, and Sage’s edition of Drummond of Hawthornden, he had been attracted to the old Scottish poets, finding in them a richness of antique matter that came home to his heart amid all his readings in Steele, Pope, and Addison:—