Edinburgh sketches & memories

by David Masson

And in my ain house am good-man;

Which stands in Ed’nburgh’s street the sun-side.

I theek the out and line the inside

Of mony a douce and witty pash,

And baith ways gather in the cash.”

Ramsay remained in this house in the High Street about eight years. They were busy and prosperous years. During the first three of them, or from 1718 to 1721, he continued to send forth miscellaneous little pieces, some in English but most in Scotch, in sheets or half-sheets, to be bought separately. There were songs, satirical sketches and squibs, elegies, metrical epistles to friends or to public persons, odes on Edinburgh events or on such national occurrences as the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, and a few essays in a more general and serious vein, chiefly in the English heroic couplet, such as The Morning Interview, Tartana or the Plaid, and Content. The sheets or half-sheets were bought eagerly. It was at this time, indeed, according to the tradition, that the good-wives of Edinburgh were in the habit of sending out their children, with a penny or twopence, to buy “Allan Ramsay’s last piece,” whatever it might be. His popularity, however, did not rest on such humble demonstrations of liking. He was now one of the most respected of the citizens of Edinburgh, spoken of universally among them as their poet, and on terms of personal intimacy with the most distinguished of them. He had become a notability even beyond the bounds of Edinburgh,—through the south of Scotland, if not yet in all Scotland. His name had even been carried to London, with the effect of some vague notion of him among the English wits there as a poet in the colloquial Scotch possessing all the north part of the island by himself. This recognition of him in the south seems to have begun about the year 1720, and to have been occasioned by a little Scottish pastoral elegy, entitled Richy and Sandy, which he had written on the death of Addison in the previous year. The “Richy” of this piece is Sir Richard Steele, and the “Sandy” is Mr. Alexander Pope; and they are represented as two fellow-shepherds of the famous deceased bewailing his loss in a colloquy. Steele and Pope could hardly avoid hearing of such a thing; and, indeed, pirated copies reached London, and there was a reprint of the elegy there from Lintot’s press, with the Scotch dreadfully mangled. It seems to have been with a view to prevent such piracy and misprinting of his productions in future, as well as to confirm his reputation by putting all his writings before the public in permanent form, that Ramsay, in the course of 1720, sent out subscription papers for a collected edition of his works. The appeal was most successful; and in July 1721 the collected edition did appear, in a handsome quarto volume, of about 400 pages, with the title Poems by Allan Ramsay, “printed by Mr. Thomas Ruddiman for the Author.” The “Alphabetical List of Subscribers” prefixed to the volume contains nearly 500 names, most of them Scotch, but with a sprinkling of English. Among the Scottish names are those of nearly all the Scottish nobility of the day, in the persons of seven dukes, five marquises, twenty-one earls, one viscount, and twenty-three lords, while the columns are crowded with the names of the best-known baronets, knights, lairds, judges, lawyers, merchants, and civic functionaries in and round about Edinburgh and in other parts of Scotland. Among the few names from England one reads with special interest, besides that of the literary Scoto-Londoner “John Arbuthnot, M.D.,” these three,—“Mr. Alexander Pope,” “Sir Richard Steele” (for two copies), and “Mr. Richard Savage.” The volume was dedicated to the Ladies of Scotland in a few gallant and flowery sentences; and there was a preface, addressed specially to the critics, full of shrewd sense, and showing Ramsay’s command of an easy and light style of English prose.

Another distinction of the volume was a portrait of the author, excellently engraved after a painting by an Edinburgh artist-friend. It represents a youngish man, with a bright, knowing, clever face, a smallish and sensitive nose, and fine and lively eyes. One observes that there is no wig, or semblance of a wig, in the portrait, but only the natural hair, closely cropped to the shape of the head, and surmounted by a neat Scotch bonnet, cocked a little to one side. As it is impossible to suppose that a man who lived by making wigs did not wear one himself, the inference must be that, in a portrait which was to represent him in his poetical capacity, the wig was rejected by artistic instinct. In later portraits of Ramsay it is the same, save that the small Scotch bonnet is superseded in these by a kind of cloth turban of several folds. In proof that this deviation in the portraits from the usual habit of real life was suggested by artistic instinct, one may note that there is the same deviation in the portraits of most of the other real British poets of the wig-wearing age. Pope, Prior, Gay, and Thomson all appear in their portraits with something like Allan Ramsay’s turban or night-cap for their head-dress; and it descended to the poet Cowper.

Very likely, however, about the date at which we are now arrived, Allan Ramsay, though he still continued to wear a wig when off poetic duty, had ceased to make wigs for others. The collected edition of his poems had brought him 400 guineas at once, worth then about 1000 guineas now; and his bookselling,—including now a steady sale of that volume in a cheaper edition for the general public, and also the sale of the new pieces of an occasional kind which he continued to issue in separate form as fast as before,—was becoming a sufficient trade in itself. By the year 1724, at all events, when he had added a considerable number of such stray occasional pieces to those bound up in the collected volume, he seems to have been known in the little business world of Edinburgh no longer as “wig-maker,” but simply as “bookseller,” or sometimes more generally as “merchant.” Two enterprises of that year, both in the way of editorship rather than authorship, must have occupied a good deal of his time. These were The Tea Table Miscellany: A Collection of Choice Songs, Scots and English, and The Evergreen: A Collection of Scots Poems wrote by the Ingenious before 1600. The first, originally in two volumes, but subsequently extended to four, was a collection of what might be called contemporary songs of all varieties, with the inclusion of floating popular favourites from the seventeenth century, deemed suitable, according to the somewhat lax standard of taste in those days, for musical eveningparties in families, or for companies of gentlemen by themselves. The purpose of the other, as the title indicates, was more scholarly. It was to recall the attention of his countrymen to that older Scottish poetry which he still thought too little regarded by furnishing selected specimens of Henryson, Dunbar, Kennedy, Scott, Montgomery, the Wedderburns, Sir Richard Maitland, and others certainly or presumably of earlier centuries than the seventeenth. The intention was creditable, and the book did good service, though the editing of the old Scotch was inaccurate and meagre. In reality, Ramsay’s exertions for the two publications were not merely editorial. The Tea Table Miscellany, when completed, besides containing about thirty songs contributed by “some ingenious young gentlemen” of Ramsay’s acquaintance,—among whom we can identify now Hamilton of Bangour, young David Malloch, a William Crawford, and a William Walkinshaw,—contained about sixty songs of Ramsay’s own composition. Similarly, among several mock-antiques by modern hands inserted into The Evergreen, were two by Ramsay himself, entitled The Vision and The Eagle and Robin Redbreast.

The time had come for Ramsay’s finest and most characteristic performance. More than once, in his miscellanies hitherto, he had tried the pastoral form in Scotch, whether from a natural tendency to that form or induced by recent attempts in the English pastoral by Ambrose Philips, Pope, and Gay. Besides his pastoral elegy on the death of Addison, and another on the death of Prior, he had written a pastoral dialogue of real Scottish life in 162 lines, entitled Patie and Roger, introduced by this description:—

“Beneath the south side of a craigy bield,