If Allan were fascinated by Kirsty's rare beauty and piquant espièglerie, by her sweet imperiousness and the subtle charm of her refined femininity, exercised on a nature whose previous experience of the sex had been limited to the bare-legged Amazons of Leadhills or the rosy-cheeked ministering Hebes, whom the high wages of domestic service attracted to town; she, in turn, was no less captivated by the manly, self-possessed demeanour, and the ingratiating qualities, both social and intellectual, of her father's guest. If he had mingled too little with society for his manners to be tinged with the polish of the débonnair gallant, his natural good-breeding and ready tact, united, it must be confessed, to a not inconsiderable spice of vanity, doubtless prevented any lapse into those nervous gaucheries wherewith a youth's first appearance in good society is often accompanied.
Allan has drawn with truth and graphic power his own portrait as he appeared at this time—
'Imprimis—then for tallness I
Am five feet and four inches high;
A black-a-vic'd, snod, dapper fellow,
Nor lean, nor overlaid wi' tallow;
With phiz of a Morocco cut,
Resembling a late man of wit,
Auld-gabbet Spec, who was so cunning
To be a dummie ten years running.
Then for the fabric of my mind,
'Tis more to mirth than grief inclined;
I rather choose to laugh at folly
Than show dislike by melancholy:
Well judging a sour heavy face
Is not the truest mark of grace.'
Existing portraits, including the one most valued for its fidelity to the original, that by his son, Allan Ramsay, the artist (Portrait-painter in Ordinary to King George III.), show him to have possessed features that were delicate and sharply chiselled, keen dark eyes, a mobile, sensitive mouth, a complexion dark almost to swarthiness, and a high rounded forehead. To these items may be added those others coming as side-lights, thrown on a man's character and individuality by the passing references of contemporaries. From such sources we learn that his face was one whereon were writ large, contentment with himself and with the world, as well as a certain pawky shrewdness and unaffected bonhomie. This expression was largely induced by the twinkling of his beadlike eyes, and the lines of his mouth, which curved upwards at the corners; almost imperceptibly, it is true, yet sufficiently to flash into his countenance that subtle element of humorous canniness which has been accepted by many as the prime attribute of his character. He may probably have had his own feelings in view when he makes his Patie say in The Gentle Shepherd—
'The bees shall loath the flow'r, and quit the hive,
The saughs on boggy ground shall cease to thrive,
Ere scornfu' queans, or loss o' warldly gear,
Shall spill my rest, or ever force a tear.'
His figure was thickset, but had not as yet acquired the squatness of later days. If in the years to come he grew to resemble George Eliot's portrait of Mr. Casson, when the inevitable penalty of sedentariness and good living has to be paid in increasing corpulence, he never lost his tripping gait which in early manhood earned for him the sobriquet of 'Denty Allan.' In deportment and dress he was 'easy, trig and neat,' leaning a little to vanity's side in his manners, yet nathless as honourable, sound-hearted, clean-souled a gentleman as any that lounged around Edinburgh Cross of a sunny Saturday afternoon. Such was the youth that presented himself to bonny Kirsty Ross at her father's tea-table.
The acquaintance soon expanded into friendship. Before long, as has been stated, the household observed, not without amusement, that whenever Saturday came round, on which day James Ross' wig was sent down to receive its week's dressing from young Ramsay, Kirsty found she needed a walk, which always seemed to take her past the sign of 'the flying Mercury,' so that she could hand in the wig and call for it as she returned. Ah, artful Miss Kirsty! As the idyll progressed, the interim walk was abandoned, and the fair one found it pleasanter, as she said, to pass the time in conversation with the young coiffeur as he combed the paternal wig. The intercourse thus commenced on both sides, more as a frolic than aught else, speedily led to warmer feelings than those of friendship being entertained, and in the spring of 1711 Allan Ramsay asked the daughter of the lawyer to share life's lot with him.
The lovers were, of course, too well aware of the dissimilarity in their social stations to hope for any ready acquiescence in their matrimonial projects by the ambitious Edinburgh lawyer. To win consent, the matter had to be prudently gone about. The position Ramsay's family had held in the past reckoned for something, it is true, in the problem, but the real point at issue was, What was the social status of the swain at that moment? Ah, there was the rub! All very well was it for a literary-minded lawyer to patronise his wigmaker by inviting him to drink a dish of tea with his family, or to crack a bottle with him over Jacobite plots or the latest poems of Swift or Pope; but to give him his daughter in marriage, that was altogether another question. Mrs. Grundy was quite as awe-inspiring a dame then as now. James Ross and his spouse would require to make a careful investigation into the pedigree of the 'mercurial' artist in crinology—to import a trade term of the present into the staid transactions of the past—before such an alliance could be thought of. Many and long were the family councils held. Every item of his descent, his relatives, his character, his prospects, was discussed, and this is what they discovered.
Allan Ramsay was born on the 15th of October 1686, in the little town of Leadhills, situate in the parish of Crawfordmuir, in the upper ward of Lanarkshire, and in the very heart of the bleak, heathy Lowther hills. The house wherein he saw the light is now 'a broken-down byre,' according to Dr. John Brown in Horæ Subsecivæ. Standing, as it does, 1400 feet above the level of the sea, the village is chiefly notable as being the most elevated inhabited ground in Scotland. The industry of the district, then as now, was almost entirely devoted to lead-mining. The superior of the parish was the Earl of Hopetoun, and on his behoof the mines were wrought. The male population, with but few exceptions, were in his lordship's service. A more desolate and dreary spot could scarcely be conceived. The rugged ranges, destitute of wood, were scarred by the traces of former workings, and intersected, moreover, by narrow rocky ravines, down which brawled foaming mountain burns. Perched like an eyrie on some steep cliff, the view from the vicinity of the town is magnificent, ranging over fair Clydesdale, and the lands formerly owned by the Earls of Crawford, 'the Lindsays, light and gay,' whose ancient castle stands on Clydeside.