And we doomed to have nane ava’?
Is our metropolis, ance the place
Where langsyne dwelt the royal race
Of Fergus, this gate dwindled down
To a level with ilk clachan town,
While thus she suffers the subversion
Of her maist rational diversion?”
However severe the loss to Ramsay at the time, it was soon tided over. Within six years he is found again quite at ease in his worldly fortunes. His son, for some years back from Italy, was in rapidly rising repute as a portrait-painter, alternating between London and Edinburgh in the practice of his profession, and a man of mark in Edinburgh society on his own account; and, whether by a junction of the son’s means with the father’s, or by the father’s means alone, it was now that there reared itself in Edinburgh the edifice which at the present day most distinctly preserves for the inhabitants the memory of the Ramsay family in their Edinburgh connections. The probability is that, since Allan had entered on his business premises at the end of the Luckenbooths, his dwelling-house had been somewhere else in the town or suburbs; but in 1743 he built himself a new dwelling-house on the very choicest site that the venerable old town afforded. It was that quaint octagon-shaped villa, with an attached slope of green and pleasure-ground, on the north side of the Castle Hill, which, as well from its form as from its situation, attracts the eye as one walks along Princes Street, and which still retains the name of Ramsay Lodge. The wags of the day, making fun of its quaint shape, likened the construction to a goose-pie; and something of that fancied resemblance may be traced even now in its extended and improved proportions. But envy may have had a good deal to do with the comparison. It is still a neat and comfortable dwelling internally, while it commands from its elevation an extent of scenery unsurpassed anywhere in Europe. The view from it ranges from the sea-mouth of the Firth of Forth on the east to the first glimpses of the Stirlingshire Highlands on the west, and again due north across the levels of the New Town, and the flashing waters of the Firth below them, to the bounding outline of the Fifeshire hills. When, in 1743, before there was as yet any New Town at all, Allan Ramsay took up his abode in this villa, he must have been considered a fortunate and happy man. His entry into it was saddened, indeed, by the death of his wife, which occurred just about that time; but for fourteen years of widowerhood, with two of his daughters for his companions, he lived in it serenely and hospitably. During the first nine years of those fourteen he still went daily to his shop in the Luckenbooths, attending to his various occupations, and especially to his circulating library, which is said to have contained by this time about 30,000 volumes; but for the last five or six years he had entirely relinquished business. There are authentic accounts of his habits and demeanour in his last days, and they concur in representing him as one of the most charming old gentlemen possible, vivacious and sprightly in conversation, full of benevolence and good humour, and especially fond of children and kindly in his ways for their amusement. He died on the 7th of January 1758, in the seventy-second year of his age, and was buried in Greyfriars Churchyard.
Ramsay had outlived nearly all the literary celebrities who had been his contemporaries during his own career of active authorship, ended nearly thirty years before. Swift and Pope were gone, after Gay, Steele, Arbuthnot, and others of the London band, who had died earlier. Of several Scotsmen, his juniors, who had stepped into the career of literature after he had shown the way, and had attained to more or less of poetic eminence under his own observation, three,—Robert Blair, James Thomson, and Hamilton of Bangour,—had predeceased him. Their finished lives, with all the great radiance of Thomson’s, are wholly included in the life of Allan Ramsay. David Malloch, who had been an Edinburgh protégé of Ramsay’s, but had gone to London and Anglicised himself into “Mallet,” was about the oldest of his literary survivors into another generation; but in that generation, as Scotsmen of various ages, from sixty downwards to one-and-twenty, living, within Scotland or out of it, at the date of Ramsay’s death, we count Lord Kames, Armstrong, Reid, Hume, Lord Monboddo, Hugh Blair, George Campbell, Smollett, Wilkie, Blacklock, Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord Hailes, Falconer, Meikle, and Beattie. Such of these as were residents in Edinburgh had known Allan Ramsay personally; others of them had felt his influence indirectly; and all must have noted his death as an event of some consequence.
The time is long past for any exaggeration of Allan Ramsay’s merits. But, call him only a slipshod little Horace of Auld Reekie, who wrote odes, epistles, satires, and other miscellanies in Scotch through twenty years of the earlier part of the eighteenth century, and was also, by a happy chance, the author of a unique and delightful Scottish pastoral, it remains true that he was the most considerable personality in Scottish literary history in order of time after Drummond of Hawthornden, or, if we think only of the vernacular, after Sir David Lindsay, and that he did more than any other man to stir afresh a popular enthusiasm for literature in Scotland after the Union with England. All in all, therefore, it is with no small interest that, in one’s walks along the most classic thoroughfare of the present Edinburgh, one gazes at the white stone statue of Allan Ramsay, from the chisel of Sir John Steell, which stands in the Gardens just below the famous “goose-pie villa.” It looks as if the poet had just stepped down thence in his evening habiliments to see things thereabouts in their strangely changed condition. By the tact of the sculptor, he wears, one observes, not a wig, but the true poetic night-cap or turban.