Hitherto the sky of Ramsay's life had been well-nigh cloudless. Misfortune and failure had never shrivelled his hopes or his enterprises with the frost of disappointment. Nothing more serious than an envious scribbler's splenetic effusions had ever assailed him. Now he was to know the sting of mortification and the pinch of financial loss. We have already adverted to the gloomy bigotry of a certain section of the Scottish clergy of this period. To them everything that savoured of jollity and amusement was specially inspired by the Evil One, for the hindrance of their ministerial labours. The references to this matter are manifold throughout Ramsay's poetry. Though no one had a deeper respect for vital piety than he, no one more bitterly reprobated that puritanic fanaticism that saw sin and wrong-doing in innocent recreation and relaxation. Against Ramsay the ecclesiastical thunder had commenced to roll some years before (according to Wodrow), when he started his circulating library. That the works of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Massinger, Dryden, Waller, and the romances of chivalry, should be placed in the hands of the youth of Edinburgh, was accounted a sin so grave as to merit Presbyterial censure. Accordingly, a party, amongst whom was the infamous Lord Grange, attempted to suppress the library. But the _ægis_ of the redoubtable Dr. Webster had been thrown over him, and the pother in time died away. It appears, however, that Ramsay, in 1736, had imported a large stock of translations of the most celebrated French plays of the day, and had added them to his library. Sufficient was this to blow into a blaze the smouldering embers of clerical indignation. From pulpit and press our poet was fulminated at. Not that he gave the smallest sign that he cared one jot for all their denunciations. He attended to his shop and his library, and quaffed his claret at the _Isle of Man Arms_, at Luckie Dunbar's in Forrester's Wynd, or at the famous John's Coffee House, with the cynical response that 'they might e'en gang their ain gate.'