Allan Ramsay, the author of the _Gentle Shepherd_,--'the best pastoral that had ever been written,' said Mr. Boswell, whose judgments upon poetry, however, are not final,--Allan Ramsay, the poet, father of Allan Ramsay, principal painter to King George the Third, claimed descent from the noble house of Dalhousie; he was the great-grandson of the laird of Cockpen. His claim was admitted by the contemporary earl, who ever took pride in recognising, as a relative, the 'restorer of Scottish national poetry.' Certainly the poetical branch of the family tree had been in some danger of being lost altogether--the clouds of obscurity had so gathered round it--the sunshine of good fortune had so ceased to play upon it. The laird's descendants appear to have been of the humblest class, dwelling in a poor hamlet on the banks of the Glengoner, a tributary of the Clyde among the hills between Clydesdale and Annandale. The father of the Gentle Shepherd is said to have been a workman in Lord Hopetoun's lead-mines, and the Gentle Shepherd himself, as a child, employed as a washer of ore. Early in the last century he was in Edinburgh, a barber's apprentice. In 1712 he married Christina Ross, daughter of a legal practitioner in that city. In 1729 he had published his comic pastoral, and was then in a bookseller's shop in the Luckenbooths. Here he used to amuse Gay, famous for his Newgate pastoral, with pointing out the chief characters and literati of the city as they met daily in the forenoon at the Cross, according to custom. Here Gay first read the _Gentle Shepherd_, and studied the Scottish dialect, so that, on his return to England, he was able to explain to Pope the peculiar merits of the poem. And the poets, Gay and Ramsay, spent much time and emptied many glasses together at a twopenny alehouse opposite Queensberry House, kept by one Janet Hall, called more frequently Janet Ha'. It was at Edinburgh that Allan Ramsay, junior, was born, the eldest of seven children, in the year 1713. Late in life he was fond of understating his age as people somehow _will_ do: 'I am old enough,' he said once, with the air of making a very frank avowal, 'I am old enough to have been a contemporary of Pope.' Which was not remarkable, considering that Pope did not die until 1744, when Mr. Ramsay must have been thirty-one.