At his 'flitting,' also, he changed his sign, and, thinking the 'Flying Mercury' no longer applicable to his new pursuits, he adopted the heads of Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden, a sign which in local parlance gradually grew to bear the title of 'The Twa Heids.' In his new premises also, Ramsay extended the scope of his business, adding to the other attractions of his establishment a circulating library, the first of its kind in Scotland. He entered his new shop in May 1726. Sixty years after, the ground-floor of the same _land_, together with the flat where formerly Ramsay was located, were in the occupancy of William Creech, the first of the great Edinburgh Sosii that were yet to include the Constables, the Blackwoods, the Chambers, the Blacks, and others of renown in their day. With the Luckenbooths' premises it is that _The Gentle Shepherd_ is always associated. From them Ramsay dated all his editions subsequent to the first two, and there he reaped all the gratifying results of its success. The poem, which takes its name from the 12th eclogue of Spenser's _Shepherds' Calendar_, whose opening runs as follows-- 'The Gentle Shepherd satte beside a spring, All in the shadow of a bushy brere,'-- may certainly be ranked in the same category with the _Idylls_ of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, the _Aminta_ of Tasso, the _Pastor Fido_ (faithful shepherd) of Guarini, and Spenser's great poem referred to above. In _The Gentle Shepherd_ Ramsay rises to a level of poetic strength, united to a harmony between conception and execution, so immeasurably superior to anything else he accomplished, that it has furnished matter for speculation to his rivals and his enemies, whether in reality the poem were his own handiwork, or had been merely fathered by him. Lord Hailes, however, pricks this bubble, when dealing with the ill-natured hypothesis raised by Alexander Pennecuik--the doggerel poet, not the doctor--that Sir John Clerk and Sir William Bennet had written _The Gentle Shepherd_, when he remarks, 'that they who attempt to depreciate Ramsay's fame, by insinuating that his friends and patrons composed the works which pass under his name, ought first to prove that his friends and patrons were capable of composing _The Gentle Shepherd_.' Not for a moment can the argument be esteemed to possess logical cogency that, because he never equalled the poem in question in any of his other writings, he was therefore intellectually incapable of composing that masterpiece which will be read after his other productions are forgotten, as long, in fact, as Scots poetry has a niche in the great temple of English literature.