[1868.—It seems to have been unknown to the biographers of Allan Ramsay the painter that he made a romantic marriage. In his early days, while teaching the art of drawing in the family of Sir Alexander Lindsay of Evelick, one of the young ladies fell in love with him, captivated probably by the tongue which afterwards gave him the intimacy of princes, and was undoubtedly a great source of his success in life. The father of the enamoured girl was an old proud baronet; her mother, a sister of the Chief-Justice, Earl of Mansfield. A marriage with consent of parents was consequently impossible. The young people, nevertheless, contrived to get themselves united in wedlock.
Allan Ramsay’s Monument, Princes Street Gardens.
The speedily developed talent of Ramsay, the illustrious patronage they secured to him, and the very considerable wealth which he acquired must have in time made him an acceptable relation to those proud people. A time came when their descendants held the connection even as an honour. The wealth of the painter ultimately, on the death of his son in 1845, became the property of Mr Murray of Henderland, a grandson of Sir Alexander Lindsay and nephew of Mrs Allan Ramsay; thence it not long after passed to Mr Murray’s brother, Sir John Archibald Murray, better known by his judicial name of Lord Murray. This gentleman admired the poet, and resolved to raise a statue to him beside his goose-pie house on the Castlehill; but the situation proved unsuitable, and since his own lamented death, in 1858, the marble full-length of worthy Allan, from the studio of John Steell, has found a noble place in the Princes Street Gardens, resting on a pedestal, containing on its principal side a medallion portrait of Lord Murray, on the reverse one of General Ramsay, on the west side one of the General’s lady, and on the east similar representations of the General’s two daughters, Lady Campbell and Mrs Malcolm. Thus we find—owing to the esteem which genius ever commands—the poet of the Gentle Shepherd in the immortality of marble, surrounded by the figures of relatives and descendants who so acknowledged their aristocratic rank to be inferior to his, derived from mind alone.]
Doorway of Duke of Gordon’s House. Now built into School in Boswell’s Court.
HOUSE OF THE GORDON FAMILY.
Tradition points out, as the residence of the Gordon family, a house, or rather range of buildings, situated between Blair’s and Brown’s Closes, being almost the first mass of building in the Castle-hill Street on the right-hand side. The southern portion is a structure of lofty and massive form, battlemented at top, and looking out upon a garden which formerly stretched down to the old town-wall near the Grassmarket, but is now crossed by the access from the King’s Bridge.[8] From the style of building, I should be disposed to assign it a date a little subsequent to the Restoration. There are, however, no authentic memorials respecting the alleged connection of the Gordon family with this house,[9] unless we are to consider as of that character a coronet resembling that of a marquis, flanked by two deer-hounds, the well-known supporters of this noble family, which figures over a finely moulded door in Blair’s Close.[10] The coronet will readily be supposed to point to the time when the Marquis of Huntly was the principal honour of the family—that is, previous to 1684, when the title of Duke of Gordon was conferred.[11]
