ALLAN RAMSAY'S SHOP
In such a life there was plenty of room for enjoyment, for relaxation, and no want of leisure to tell a good story or compose a string of couplets where that gift existed, even when most busy. We may imagine that he did not sit much at his block, but rather in the front of the shop amusing his customers, while their periwigs were curled or fitted, with Edinburgh gossip and wit in the familiarity of common citizenship, or with anecdotes which enlightened the country gentlemen, especially those from the west, the last bon mot of the Parliament House, or the Lord Advocate's latest deliverance. And his clubs were as numerous as those of a young man of fashion. The "Easy Club" was composed of "young anti-unionists," which indicates the politics which the wigmaker mildly held in cheerful subjection to the powers that were. No doubt he would have gone to the death (in verse) for the privileges of Edinburgh: but the anti-unionism or sentimental Jacobitism of his class was not of a kind to trouble any Government. And except the question of the Union, which was settled early in his career, politics do not seem to have been of an exciting character in Edinburgh. Local matters, always the most interesting of any to the inhabitants of a town not great enough to be cosmopolitan but full of distinct and striking individuality, furnished the poetical wigmaker with his first themes. It would seem that he only learned to rhyme from the necessity of taking his part in the high jinks of the club; at least all his early productions were intended for its diversion. An "Elegy on Maggie Johnstone," mistress of a convenient "public" at Morningside, then described as "a mile and a half west from Edinburgh," a suburb on "the south side," though now a part of the town—which would lie in the way of the members when they took their walks abroad, and no doubt formed the end of many a Sabbath day's ramble—was almost the first of his known productions; and we may well believe that the jovial shopkeepers were delighted with the sensation of possessing a poet of their own, and held many a discussion upon the new verses—brimful of local allusions and circumstances which everybody knew—over their ale as they rested in the village changehouse, or among the fumes of their punch in their evening assemblies. Verses warm from the poet's brain have a certain intoxicating quality akin to the toddy, and no doubt the citizens slapped their thighs and snapped their fingers with delight when some well-known name appeared, the incidents of some story they knew by heart, or the features of some familiar character. The satisfaction of finding in what they would call poetry a host of local allusions about which there was no ambiguity, which they understood like their ABC, would rouse the first hearers to noisy enthusiasm. And thus encouraged, the cheerful bard (as he was called in those days) went on till his fame penetrated beyond the club. Another elegy of a more serious description was so highly thought of that it was printed and given to the world by the club itself. That world meant Edinburgh, its many tradesmen, the crowded inhabitants of all the lofty "lands" about that centre of busy social life where the Cross still stood, and the old Tolbooth gloomed over the street, cut in two by its big bulk and the fabric of the Luckenbooths, a sort of island of masonry which divided what is now the broad and airy High Street opposite St. Giles's into two narrow straits. The writers and the advocates, the professors and the clergy, Councillor Pleydell and his kind, were not the first to discover that Ramsay the wigmaker had something in him more than the other rough wits of the shops and markets. And by and by the goodwives in their high lodgings, floor over floor, ever glad of something new, learnt to send one of the bairns with a penny to the wigmaker's shop in the afternoon to see if Allan Ramsay had printed a new poem: and received with rapture the damp broadsheet brought in fresh from the press, with a fable or a song in "gude braid Scots," or a witty letter to some answering rhymester full of local names and things. There was no evening paper in those days, and had there been it was very unlikely it would have penetrated into all the common stairs and crowded tenements. But Allan's songs, of which Jean or Peggy would "ken the tune," and the stories that would delight the bairns, were better worth the penny than news from distant London, which was altogether foreign and unknown to that humble audience.
This no doubt was the sort of fame and widespread popular appreciation which made the statesman of that day—was it Fletcher of Saltoun or Duncan Forbes the great Lord President?—bid who would make the laws so long as he might make the songs of the people. He had in all likelihood learnt Allan's widely flying, largely read verses, which every gamin of the streets knew by heart, in his childhood. And though they might not be in general of a very ennobling quality, there are glimpses of a higher poetry to come in some of these productions, and a great deal of cheerful self-assertive content and local patriotism, as well as of rough fun and jest. If it were not for the very unnecessary introduction of Apollo as the god to whom "the bard" addresses his wishes, there would be something not unworthy of Burns in the following lines. The poet has of course introduced first, as a needful contrast, "the master o' a guid estate that can ilk thing afford," and who is much "dawted (petted) by the gods"—
"For me, I can be weel content
To eat my bannock on the bent,
And kitchen't wi' fresh air;
O' lang-kail I can make a feast
And cantily haud up my crest,
And laugh at dishes rare.
Nought frae Apollo I demand,
But through a lengthened life,
My outer fabric firm may stand,
And saul clear without strife.
May he then, but gi'e then,
Those blessings for my share;
I'll fairly, and squarely,
Quit a', and seek nae mair."
It was no doubt after he had achieved this reputation of the streets—a thing more difficult than greater fame—that his imagination developed in more continuous and refined effort. Whether he himself printed his penny broadsheet as well as sold it we are not informed, but as he began after a while to combine bookselling with wigmaking we may be allowed to imagine that the press which produced these flying leaves was either in or near his shop. It is difficult to realise the swarming of life and inhabitation within the high houses of the old town in an age when comfort was little understood: and even the concentration within so small a space, of business, work, interest, idleness, and pleasure, is hard to comprehend by people who have been used to appropriate a separate centre to each of the great occupations or exercises of mankind. When London was comparatively a small town it had still its professional distinctions—the Court, the Temple, the City, the place where law was administered and where money was made, where society had its abode and poverty found a shelter. But in old Edinburgh all were piled one on the top of another—the Parliament House within sight of the shops, the great official and the poor artificer under the same roof: and round that historical spot over which St. Giles's crown rose like the standard of the city, the whole community crowded, stalls and booths of every kind encumbering the street, while special pleaders and learned judges picked their steps in their dainty buckled shoes through the mud and refuse of the most crowded noisy market-place, and all the great personages of Edinburgh paced the "plainstanes" close by at certain hours, unheeding either smell or garbage or the resounding cries of the street.
CROWN OF ST. GILES'S
In such a crowded centre the sheets that were being read so eagerly, laughed over by the very cadgers at their booths, conned by the women at the stairheads, lying on every counter, where Allan's new verses would be pulled to pieces by brother wits who had known him to do better, or heard a livelier witticism from his lips no farther gone than yestreen, must very soon have come to the notice of the westland lads at the college, and from them to the learned professors, and still more directly to the lively groups that went and came to the Parliament House. Already the wigmaker's shop had thriven and prospered; the little man, short and fat and jovial, who had begun to lay out books in his window under the shadow of the curled and powdered periwigs, found the results of his double traffic more satisfactory than poets use. He boasts in one of his rhymed addresses that he thatches the outside and lines the inside of many a douce citizen, "and baithways gathers in the cash." He adds—
"And fain would prove to ilka Scot,
That poortith's no the poet's lot."