But now a change even more radical was inaugurated. The national Parliament, whose sittings had always necessitated the attendance of a considerable proportion of the nobility and gentry of the country, during a certain part of the year, was merged in that of the larger country. Those of the purely Scottish peerage, whom choice or political duties had retained in Scotland, now found no need to maintain their costly Edinburgh establishments. Many a noble ancestral home, that for three or four hundred years had sheltered the household and retainers of families, whose deeds were interwoven with the historic records of Scotland's most glorious epochs, was now advertised for sale. An exodus to London on a vast scale set in, and the capital of Scotland ere long settled down, in the apathy of despair, to play the _rôle_ of a provincial centre. Henceforward her 'paper lords,' otherwise Judges of the Court of Session, were to represent her titled magnates. The bitterness of spirit which such a course of action as this migration inspired in the minds of the residents of the Scottish capital, Ramsay, as a young journeyman, or as a master craftsman who had only newly commenced business for himself, would fervently reciprocate. In two places at least in his works he pathetically, yet vigorously, protests against the cream of Scottish youth being sent away out of the country. In one of the most suggestively beautiful of his minor pastorals, _Betty and Kate_, he thus writes-- 'Far, far, o'er far frae Spey an' Clyde, Stands that great town o' Lud, To whilk our best lads rin an' ride, That's like to put us wud [mad]; For sindle times they e'er come back Wha anes are heftit there; Sure, Bess, thae hills are nae sae black, Nor yet thir [these] howms sae bare.' And in _The Gentle Shepherd_, after the discovery has been made of Patie's noble birth, his fellow-herd, Roger, remarks-- 'Is not our master an' yoursell to stay Amang us here? or, are ye gawn away To London Court, or ither far aff parts, To leave your ain poor us wi' broken hearts?' The five intercalary years between Ramsay's commencing in business on his own account and his marriage, were those which may properly be designated his intellectual seedtime. That he was exercised over any of the deeper and more complex problems of life, death and futurity; that he was hagridden by doubt, or appalled by the vision of man's motelike finitude when viewed against the deep background of infinity and eternity, we have no reason to suppose. Never at any epoch of his life a 'thinker,' in the true sense of the word, he was inclined, with the genial insouciant Hedonism always characteristic of him, to slip contentedly into the Pantheism of Pope, to regard humanity and the world without as ----'but parts of a stupendous whole Whose body nature is, and God the soul,