He delighted in sociality and conviviality, but recoiled from aught savouring of licence or excess. To coarseness, it is true, he may at times have stooped in his work; but we must remember the spirit of the times was in favour of calling a spade a spade, and not 'an implement for disintegrating planetary particles.' To no degree greater than did Swift, or Steele, or Arbuthnot, or Gay, can Allan Ramsay be considered to have smirched his pages with references either ribald or indelicate. The spirit of the age was in fault when coarseness was rated as wit; and to be true to life, the painters of the manners around them had to represent these as they were, not as they would have liked them to be. On the 9th May 1755 Ramsay, when writing to his friend, James Clerk of Penicuik, a rhyming epistle, had said-- 'Now seventy years are o'er my head, And thirty mae may lay me dead.' Alas! the 'Shadow feared of man' was already sitting waiting for him at no great distance farther on in his life's journey. For some years he had suffered acutely from scurvy in the gums, which in the end attacked his jawbone and affected his speech. To the close, however, he retained his cheerfulness and buoyancy of spirits. When the last great summons at length came to him, he met it with a manly fortitude and Christian resignation. Amongst his last words, according to his daughter Janet, who survived until 1807, were these: 'I'm no' feared of death; the Bricht and Morning Star has risen and is shining mair and mair unto the perfect day.' And so he passed 'into the unseen' on the 7th January 1758, in the seventy-second year of his age. He was interred two days after in the Greyfriars Churchyard, where his gravestone is still visible, bearing the inscription: 'In this cemetery was interred the mortal part of an immortal poet, Allan Ramsay, author of _The Gentle Shepherd_ and other admirable poems in the Scottish dialect. He was born in 1686 and died in 1758. 'No sculptured marble here, no pompous lay, No storièd urn, no animated bust; This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way To pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust.[2] Though here you're buried, worthy Allan, We'll ne'er forget you, canty callan; For while your soul lives in the sky, Your "Gentle Shepherd" ne'er shall die.' Sir John Clerk, one of the Barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, who admired his genius and was one of his most intimate friends, erected at his family seat at Penicuik an obelisk to his memory; while Mr. Alexander Fraser-Tytler, at Woodhouselee, near the Glencorse _locale_ of _The Gentle Shepherd_, has erected a rustic temple which bears the inscription-- 'ALLANO RAMSAY ET GENIO LOCI.