Where a clear spring did halesome water yield,
Twa youthfu’ shepherds on the gowans lay,
Tending their flocks ae bonny morn of May:
Poor Roger graned till hollow echoes rang,
While merry Patie hummed himsel a sang.”
This piece, and two smaller pastoral pieces in the same vein, called Patie and Peggy and Jenny and Meggie, had been so much liked that Ramsay had been urged by his friends to do something more extensive in the shape of a pastoral story or drama. He had been meditating such a thing through the year 1724, while busy with his two editorial compilations; and in June 1725 the result was given to the public in The Gentle Shepherd: A Scots Pastoral Comedy. Here the three pastoral sketches already written were inwoven into a simply-constructed drama of rustic Scottish life as it might be imagined among the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, at that time, still within the recollection of very old people then alive, when the Protectorates of Cromwell and his son had come to an end and Monk had restored King Charles. The poem was received with enthusiastic admiration. There had been nothing like it before in Scottish literature, or in any other; nothing so good of any kind that could be voted as even similar; and this was at once the critical verdict. It is a long while ago, and there are many spots in Edinburgh which compete with one another in the interest of their literary associations; but one can stand now with particular pleasure for a few minutes any afternoon opposite that decayed house in the High Street, visible as one is crossing from the South Bridge to the North Bridge, where Allan Ramsay once had his shop, and whence the first copies of The Gentle Shepherd were handed out, some day in June 1725, to eager Edinburgh purchasers.
The tenancy of this house by Ramsay lasted but a year longer. He had resolved to add to his general business of bookselling and publishing that of a circulating library, the first institution of the kind in Edinburgh. For this purpose he had taken new premises, still in the High Street, but in a position even more central and conspicuous than that of “The Mercury” opposite Niddry’s Wynd. They were, in fact, in the easternmost house of the Luckenbooths, or lower part of that obstructive stack of buildings, already mentioned, which once ran up the High Street alongside of St. Giles’s Church, dividing the traffic into two narrow and overcrowded channels. It is many years since the Luckenbooths and the whole obstruction of which they formed a part were swept away; but from old prints we can see that the last house of the Luckenbooths to the east was a tall tenement of five storeys, with its main face looking straight down the lower slope of the High Street towards the Canongate. The strange thing was that, though thus in the very heart of the bustle of the town as congregated round the Cross, the house commanded from its higher windows a view beyond the town altogether, away to Aberlady Bay and the farther reaches of sea and land in that direction. It was into this house that Ramsay removed in 1726, when he was exactly forty years of age. The part occupied by him was the flat immediately above the basement floor, but perhaps with that floor in addition. The sign he adopted for the new premises was one exhibiting the heads or effigies of Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden.
Having introduced Ramsay into this, the last of his Edinburgh shops, we have reached the point where our present interest in him all but ends. In 1728, when he had been two years in the new premises, he published a second volume of his collected poems, under the title of Poems by Allan Ramsay, Volume II., in a handsome quarto matching the previous volume of 1721, and containing all the pieces he had written since the appearance of that volume; and in 1730 he published A Collection of Thirty Fables. These were his last substantive publications, and with them his literary career may be said to have come to a close. Begun in the last years of the reign of Queen Anne, and continued through the whole of the reign of George I., it had just touched the beginning of that of George II., when it suddenly ceased. Twice or thrice afterwards at long intervals he did scribble a copy of verses; but, in the main, from his forty-fifth year onwards, he rested on his laurels. Thenceforward he contented himself with his bookselling, the management of his circulating library, and the superintendence of the numerous editions of his Collected Poems, his Gentle Shepherd, and his Tea Table Miscellany that were required by the public demand, and the proceeds of which formed a good part of his income. It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that, when Allan Ramsay’s time of literary production ended, the story of his life in Edinburgh also came to a close, or ceased to be important. For eight-and-twenty years longer, or almost till George II. gave place to George III., Ramsay continued to be a living celebrity in the Scottish capital, known by figure and physiognomy to all his fellow-citizens, and Ramsay’s bookshop at the end of the Luckenbooths, just above the Cross, continued to be one of the chief resorts of the well-to-do residents, and of chance visitors of distinction. Now and then, indeed, through the twenty-eight years, there are glimpses of him still in special connections with the literary, as well as with the social, history of Edinburgh. When the English poet Gay, a summer or two before his death in 1732, came to Edinburgh on a visit, in the company of his noble patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, and resided with them in their mansion of Queensberry House in the Canongate,—now the gloomiest and ugliest-looking house in that quarter of the old town, but then reckoned of palatial grandeur,—whither did he tend daily, in his saunterings up the Canongate, but to Allan Ramsay’s shop? One hears of him as standing there with Allan at the window to have the city notabilities and oddities pointed out to him in the piazza below, or as taking lessons from Allan in the Scottish words and idioms of the Gentle Shepherd, that he might explain them better to Mr. Pope when he went back to London.
Some years later, when Ramsay had reached the age of fifty, and he and his wife were enjoying the comforts of his ample success, and rejoicing in the hopes and prospects of their children,—three daughters, “no ae wally-draggle among them, all fine girls,” as Ramsay informs us, and one son, a young man of three-and-twenty, completing his education in Italy for the profession of a painter,—there came upon the family what threatened to be a ruinous disaster. Never formally an anti-Presbyterian, and indeed regularly to be seen on Sundays in his pew in St. Giles’s High Kirk, but always and systematically opposed to the unnecessary social rigours of the old Presbyterian system, and of late under a good deal of censure from clerical and other strict critics on account of the dangerous nature of much of the literature put in circulation from his library, Ramsay had ventured at last on a new commercial enterprise, which could not but be offensive on similar grounds to many worthy people, though it seems to have been acceptable enough to the Edinburgh community generally. Edinburgh having been hitherto deficient in theatrical accommodation, and but fitfully supplied with dramatic entertainments, he had, in 1736, started a new theatre in Carrubber’s Close, near to his former High Street shop. He was looking for great profits from the proprietorship of this theatre and his partnership in its management. Hardly had he begun operations, however, when there came the extraordinary statute of 10 George II. (1737), regulating theatres for the future all over Great Britain. As by this statute there could be no performance of stage-plays out of London and Westminster, save when the King chanced to be residing in some other town, Ramsay’s speculation collapsed, and all the money he had invested in it was lost. It was a heavy blow; and he was moved by it to some verses of complaint to his friend Lord President Forbes and the other judges of the Court of Session. While telling the story of his own hardship in the case, he suggests that an indignity had been done by the new Act to the capital of Scotland:—
“Shall London have its houses twa