In 1715, also, he amused the members of the Club, and after them the wits of Edinburgh, with some lines on the current predictions regarding _The Great Eclipse of the Sun_, foretold to take place during April 1715. The following picture, descriptive of the awe and terror produced on ignorant minds and on the brute creation by the occurrence of the eclipse, is as pithily effective in its simplicity and fidelity to life and nature as anything in Crabbe's _Tales in Verse_ or Shenstone's _Schoolmistress_-- 'When this strange darkness overshades the plains, 'Twill give an odd surprise to unwarned swains; Plain honest hinds, who do not know the cause, Nor know of orbs, their motions or their laws, Will from the half-ploughed furrows homeward bend In dire confusion, judging that the end Of time approacheth; thus possessed with fear, They'll think the gen'ral conflagration near. The traveller, benighted on the road, Will turn devout, and supplicate his God. Cocks with their careful mates and younger fry, As if 'twere evening, to their roosts will fly. The horned cattle will forget to feed, And come home lowing from the grassy mead. Each bird of day will to his nest repair, And leave to bats and owls the dusky air; The lark and little robin's softer lay Will not be heard till the return of day.' The years 1715-16 were evidently periods of great activity on Ramsay's part, for at least five other notable productions of his pen are to be assigned to that date. To him the revelation of his life's _métier_ had at last come, and his enthusiasm in its prosecution was intense. Henceforward poetry was to represent to him the supreme aim of existence. But like the canny Scot he was, he preferred to regard its emoluments as a crutch rather than a staff; nay, on the other hand, the determination to discharge his daily duties in his trade, as he executed his literary labours, _con amore_, seems to have been ever present with him. On this point, and referring to his dual pursuits as a wigmaker and a poet, he writes to his friend Arbuckle-- 'I theek the out, and line the inside Of mony a douce and witty pash, And baith ways gather in the cash. . . . . . Contented I have sic a skair, As does my business to a hair; And fain would prove to ilka Scot, That pourtith's no the poet's lot.' During the years in question Ramsay produced in rapid succession his poem _On Wit_, the Club being again responsible for this clever satire; and also two humorous _Elegies_, one on John Cowper, the Kirk-Treasurer's-Man, whose official oversight of the _nymphes de pave_ furnished the poet with a rollickingly ludicrous theme, of which he made the most; the other, an _Elegy on Lucky Wood_, alewife in the Canongate, also gave Ramsay full scope for the exercise of that broad Rabelaisian humour, of his possession of which there was now no longer to be any doubt.