The year 1728 had witnessed, as we have seen, the publication of Allan Ramsay's last original work. Thereafter he was content to rest on his laurels, to revise new editions of his various poems, and to add to his _Tea-Table Miscellany_ and _Scots Songs_. Perhaps he may have been conscious that the golden glow of youthful imagination at life's meridian, had already given place to those soberer tints that rise athwart the mental horizon, when the Rubicon of the forties has been crossed. In 1737, when writing to his friend Smibert, the painter (then in Boston, America, whither he had emigrated), Ramsay states, with reference to his relinquishment of poetry: 'These six or seven years past I have not written a line of poetry; I e'en gave over in good time, before the coolness of fancy that attends advanced years should make me risk the reputation I had acquired.' He then adds in the letter the following lines of poetry, from which we gather, further, that his determination was the result, not of mere impulse, pique, or chagrin, but of reasoned resolve-- 'Frae twenty-five to five-and-forty, My muse was neither sweer nor dorty; My Pegasus would break his tether, E'en at the shaking of a feather, And through ideas scour like drift, Straking his wings up to the lift. Then, then my soul was in a low, That gart my numbers safely row; _But eild and judgment 'gin to say, Let be your sangs and learn to pray_.' By 1730, then, Ramsay's work, of an original kind at least, was over. In that year, however, he published another short volume of metrical fables, under the title, _A Collection of Thirty Fables_. Amongst them we find some of the most delightful of all our poet's work in this vein. _Mercury in Quest of Peace_, _The Twa Lizards_, _The Caterpillar and the Ant_, and _The Twa Cats and the Cheese_, possess, as Chalmers truly says, 'all the _naïveté_ of Phædrus and La Fontaine, with the wit and ease of Gay.' And thus Ramsay's literary career closed, after well-nigh two decades of incessant intellectual activity. Begun, as Professor Masson says, 'in the last years of the reign of Queen Anne, and continued through the whole of the reign of George I., it had just touched the beginning of that of George II. when it suddenly ceased. Twice or thrice afterwards, at long intervals, he did scribble a copy of verses; but in the main, from his forty-fifth year onwards, he rested on his laurels. Henceforward he contented himself with his bookselling, the management of his circulating library, and the superintendence of the numerous editions of his _Collected Poems_, his _Gentle Shepherd_, and his _Tea-Table Miscellany_.'