_THE GENTLE SHEPHERD_; SCOTTISH IDYLLIC POETRY; RAMSAY'S PASTORALS--1725-30 85 CHAPTER VIII RESTING ON HIS LAURELS; BUILDS HIS THEATRE; HIS BOOK OF _SCOTS PROVERBS_--1730-40 97 CHAPTER IX CLOSING YEARS OF LIFE; HIS HOUSE ON CASTLEHILL; HIS FAMILY; HIS PORTRAITS--1740-58 112 CHAPTER X RAMSAY AS A PASTORAL POET AND AN ELEGIST 122 CHAPTER XI RAMSAY AS A SATIRIST AND A SONG-WRITER 144 CHAPTER XII RAMSAY'S MISCELLANEOUS POEMS; CONCLUSION 154 ALLAN RAMSAY CHAPTER I THE FAMILY TREE 'Ye'd better let me gang doon wi' the wig, Miss Kirsty,' said Peggy, the 'serving-lass' in the household of Mr. James Ross, writer, of the Castlehill. 'Oh no! I'd as leif take it doon mysel' to Allan Ramsay's, for the sake o' the walk and the bit crack wi' the canty callant,' replied the young lady, a blush crimsoning her fair, rounded cheek. And Peggy would retire from these periodical but good-humoured passages-at-arms, with a knowing smile on her face, to confide the fact, mayhap,--of course as a profound secret,--to her cronies in the same stair, that Miss Kirsty Ross was 'unco ta'en up wi' that spruce genty wigmaker, Maister Allan Ramsay, doon ayont the Tron Kirk.' Yea! verily, it was a love drama, but as yet only in the first scene of the first act. The 'Miss Kirsty' of the brief dialogue recorded above--for the authenticity of which there is abundant evidence--was Miss Christian Ross, eldest daughter of Mr. James Ross, a lawyer of some repute in his day, whose practice lay largely in the Bailie's and Sheriff's Courts, and with minor cases in the Justiciary Court, but not with civil business before the Court of Session, an honour rigorously reserved for the members of that close Corporation--the Writers to His Majesty's Signet. But though not belonging, in slang phrase, 'to the upper crust' of the legal fraternity, James Ross was a man of some social consideration. Though he appears to have had a strain of the fashionable Pharisee in him, and to have esteemed gentle birth as covering any multitude of sins and peccadilloes, he manifested, throughout his intercourse with Ramsay, certain countervailing virtues that render him dear to the lovers of the poet. He made distinct pretensions to the possession of culture and a love of _belles-lettres_. To the best Edinburgh society of the period he and his had the _entrée_, while his house in Blair's Close, on the southern slope of the Castlehill, was the rendezvous for most of the _literati_ of the city, as well as for the _beaux esprits_ of the Easy Club, of which he was a member.