Ramsay's later poems had in turn attained, numerically speaking, to such bulk as fairly entitled him to consider the practicability of issuing a second quarto volume, containing all of value he had written between 1721 and 1728. From all quarters came requests for him so to do. Therefore, towards the close of 1728 he issued his second volume of collected poems. The interest awakened by The Gentle Shepherd still burned with a clear and steady glow. From this fact, gratifying, indeed, as regards the proximate success of the individual book, but prophetic also in an ultimate sense of the stability of reputation to be his lot in the republic of letters, he concluded, as he says in one of his letters to the Clerks of Penicuik, 'to regard himself as ane o' the national bards of Scotland.' That he was justified in doing so, the future amply testified.
The realisation that he had now won for himself a permanent place in the literature of his land operated, however, rather injuriously upon the continued fecundity of his genius. He became timorous of further appeals to the public, lest he should injure his fame. Allan Ramsay, in his own eyes, became Ramsay's most dreaded rival. At length he deliberately adopted the resolution that the better part of valour was discretion, and that he would tempt fortune in verse no more. With the exception of his poetical epistle to the Lords of Session, and his volume of metrical Fables, Ramsay's poetical career was completed. Henceforth he was occupied in preparing the successive editions of his Works and of the Tea-Table Miscellany, and in compiling his collection of Scots Proverbs.
CHAPTER VIII
RESTING ON HIS LAURELS; BUILDS HIS THEATRE; HIS BOOK OF 'SCOTS PROVERBS'—1730-40
Ramsay had now reached the pinnacle of his fame. He was forty-four years of age, prosperous in business, enjoying a reputation not alone confined to Great Britain, but which had extended to France, to Holland, and to Italy. His great pastoral was lauded in terms the most gratifying by critics everywhere as the most perfect example of the pure idyll that had appeared since the days of Theocritus. The proudest of the nobility were not ashamed to take his arm for a walk down High Street, or to spend an hour cracking jokes and discussing literature with him under the sign of Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden.
What Chambers says in his Eminent Scotsmen, from which are culled the following facts, is strictly accurate: 'Ramsay had now risen to wealth and high respectability, numbering among his familiar friends the best and the wisest men in the nation. By the greater part of the Scottish nobility he was caressed, and at the houses of some of the most distinguished of them, Hamilton Palace, Loudoun Castle, etc., was a frequent visitor.' With Duncan Forbes, Lord Advocate (and before many years to be Lord President), with Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Sir William Bennet of Marlefield, Sir Alexander Dick of Prestonfield, near Edinburgh, he lived in the habit of daily, familiar, and friendly intercourse. With contemporary poets his relations were likewise of the most friendly kind. The two Hamiltons, of Bangour and Gilbertfield, were his constant associates. To Pope, to Gay, and to Somerville; to Meston, to Mitchell, and to Mallet, he addressed poetical greetings, and several of them returned the salutations in kind. From England, too, came another and a different proof of his popularity, in the fact that, when in 1726 Hogarth published his 'Illustrations of Hudibras' in twelve plates, these were dedicated to 'William Ward of Great Houghton, Northamptonshire, and Allan Ramsay of Edinburgh.' Edinburgh itself was proud of her poet, and was not averse to manifesting the fact when fitting opportunity offered. He was a frequent visitor at the University, and Dugald Stewart relates that an old friend of his father informed him, the students of the fourth and fifth decades of last century used to point out a squat, dapper, keen-eyed little man, who was wont to walk up and down the space in front of their classrooms with Professors Drummond and Maclaurin, as 'the great poet, Allan Ramsay.' The narrator also added, he felt a secret disappointment when thus viewing for the first time a real live poet, and noting that he differed neither in dress nor mien from ordinary men. From his studies among the classics, and from the prints in the early editions of Horace and Virgil, he had been led to imagine the genus poet always perambulated the earth attired in flowing singing robes, their forehead bound with a chaplet, and carrying with them a substantial looking lyre!
The year 1728 had witnessed, as we have seen, the publication of Allan Ramsay's last original work. Thereafter he was content to rest on his laurels, to revise new editions of his various poems, and to add to his Tea-Table Miscellany and Scots Songs. Perhaps he may have been conscious that the golden glow of youthful imagination at life's meridian, had already given place to those soberer tints that rise athwart the mental horizon, when the Rubicon of the forties has been crossed. In 1737, when writing to his friend Smibert, the painter (then in Boston, America, whither he had emigrated), Ramsay states, with reference to his relinquishment of poetry: 'These six or seven years past I have not written a line of poetry; I e'en gave over in good time, before the coolness of fancy that attends advanced years should make me risk the reputation I had acquired.' He then adds in the letter the following lines of poetry, from which we gather, further, that his determination was the result, not of mere impulse, pique, or chagrin, but of reasoned resolve—
'Frae twenty-five to five-and-forty,
My muse was neither sweer nor dorty;
My Pegasus would break his tether,
E'en at the shaking of a feather,
And through ideas scour like drift,
Straking his wings up to the lift.
Then, then my soul was in a low,
That gart my numbers safely row;
But eild and judgment 'gin to say,
Let be your sangs and learn to pray.'
By 1730, then, Ramsay's work, of an original kind at least, was over. In that year, however, he published another short volume of metrical fables, under the title, A Collection of Thirty Fables. Amongst them we find some of the most delightful of all our poet's work in this vein. Mercury in Quest of Peace, The Twa Lizards, The Caterpillar and the Ant, and The Twa Cats and the Cheese, possess, as Chalmers truly says, 'all the naïveté of Phædrus and La Fontaine, with the wit and ease of Gay.'
And thus Ramsay's literary career closed, after well-nigh two decades of incessant intellectual activity. Begun, as Professor Masson says, '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. Henceforward 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.'