—the superficial, ethical principle permeating which is summed up in the dictum, Whatever is, is right. Though he had no sympathy with the Puritanic austerity of Presbyterianism, albeit a regular attendant on the ministrations of Dr. Webster of the Tolbooth Church, one of the sections whereinto the magnificent cathedral of St. Giles was of old divided, he was tinctured neither with French scepticism nor with the fashionable doubts which the earlier deistical writers of the century, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Shaftesbury, Toland, and Blount, were sowing broadcast over Great Britain. In his Gentle Shepherd he makes Jenny, when Glaud, her father, had remarked, with respect to the prevailing disregard of religion and morality among the youth of the better classes,
——'I've heard mysell
Some o' them laugh at doomsday, sin, and hell,'
make the following reply, which savours strongly of the slippered orthodoxy of The Essay on Man—
'Watch o'er us, father! hech, that's very odd;
Sure, him that doubts a doomsday, doubts a God.'
But though he appears to have given a wide berth to the ponderous theology, the narrow ethics, and the hair-splitting metaphysics of the time, his whole nature seems to have been stirred and awakened more deeply than ever by his study of the elder poets in English literature. Not that their music tended to make him discontented with his lot, or unhinged the lid of his resolution to become a thoroughly efficient man of business. Ramsay, unlike many of his brethren of the lyre, was of an eminently practical temperament. Rumour says that in earlier boyhood he cherished a desire of becoming an artist. But his stepfather not possessing the means to furnish him with the necessary training, he wisely sloughed all such unreasonable dreams, and aimed at independence through wig-making.
Wisdom as commendable was displayed now. Though his studies must have kindled poetic emulation in him; though the vague unexpressed longings of a richly-gifted nature were doubtless daily present with him, no thought ever seems to have entered his mind of relinquishing trade for poetry. On his ambition, also, he kept a steady curb, determining to publish nothing but what his more matured judgment would approve. Not to him in after years would the regret come that he had cursed his fame by immaturity.
From 1707 until 1711, during the dreary depression of the time immediately succeeding the Union, when Scotsmen preferred apathy to action, Ramsay sought surcease from his pangs of wounded patriotism by plunging into studies of various kinds, but principally of English poetry. In a letter, hitherto unpublished, addressed to his friend Andrew Gibb, who appears to have resided at or near West Linton, he remarks: 'I have rowth of good reading to wile my heart from grieving o'er what cannot be mended now,—the sale o' our unhappy country to the Southron alliance by a wheen traitors, who thought more o' Lord Somers' gold than Scotland's rights. In Willie Shakspeare's melodious numbers I forget the dark days for trade, and in auld Chaucer's Tales, and Spenser's 'Queen,' in John Milton's majestic flow, in Giles and Phineas Fletcher, in rare Ben and our ain Drummond, I tine the sorrows o' the day in the glories o' the days that are past.'
That we may accept Ramsay's account of the studies of Patie, the Gentle Shepherd, as a type of his own is warranted by something more than tradition. The internal evidence of his works throws a strong colour of probability over the theory. When Sir William Worthy, who as a Royalist had been compelled to flee into exile during the times of the Commonwealth, inquires what were the books his son, whom he had committed to the care of Symon, his shepherd, to be reared as his own child, was in the habit of reading, the honest old servant replies—
'When'er he drives our sheep to Edinburgh port,
He buys some books o' hist'ry, sangs, or sport;
Nor does he want o' them a rowth at will,
And carries aye a poochfu' to the hill.
Aboot ane Shakspeare—an' a famous Ben,
He aften speaks, an' ca's them best o' men.
How sweetly Hawthornden an' Stirling sing,
An' ane ca'd Cowley, loyal to his king,
He kens fu' weel, an' gars their verses ring.
I sometimes thought he made owre great a phrase
About fine poems, histories, and plays.
When I reproved him ance, a book he brings,
"Wi' this," quoth he, "on braes I crack wi' kings."'
By the side-light thrown on Ramsay's life from this passage we gain some idea of his own studies during those years of germination. To the poets more exclusively Scottish, whether writing in the current literary medium of the day or in the vernacular of the country; to Robert Sempill's Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan; to William Cleland's Highland Host—in addition to Drummond and the Earl of Stirling, mentioned in the passage quoted above; to William Hamilton of Gilbertfield's verses, The Dying Words of Bonnie Heck, and to others of less note, he seems to have devoted keen and enthusiastic attention. Lieutenant Hamilton it was (as Ramsay admits in the poetical correspondence maintained between them) who first awakened within him the desire to write in the dialect of his country—