The second Allan Ramsay (1713–84), an accomplished scholar and gentleman, was the son of the poet. Being carefully educated by his father and sent to Rome to study art, he became an able portrait-painter. Through introduction to the Prince of Wales, afterwards George III, he rose rapidly into favor. To him we are indebted for the portrait of that King George, with whose physiognomy, more than with that of almost any other sovereign of England, our fathers became very familiar during the time of their eight years’ disagreement with His Majesty and his ministers. CHAPTER XXII KIRK, SCHOOL, AND FREEDOM A visit to St. Andrews, the home of golf and of ancient and modern Scottish culture, compels thought. I have met Scotsmen who thought and devoutly believed that there was nothing among all the lands of earth equal to Scotland, and in Scotland nothing greater than the Kirk. Yet this stout insistence has come not alone from believers in “the old gospel,” so called, but with equal vehemence and cool conviction from men saturated with the philosophy of common sense, even from those fearing not to be called “freethinkers.” The real Scotland, like the true United States described in Whittier’s verse, seems to fear neither “the puny sceptic’s hands” nor “the bigot’s blinded rule.” At least, her history teaches this. The first heralds of the new dawn, whose advent awakened Scotland from her mediæval slumber of intellect, were the Lollards of Kyle, who were among our own spiritual ancestors. They made a great excitement in western Scotland in the early part of the fifteenth century. Their coming was as refreshing as when a window is opened in a stuffy room, letting in God’s fresh air. The articles of which the Lollards were accused, as Knox found them stated in the Register of Glasgow, make us love these people, for their faith and belief were very much like what is held by the mass of the people who live and think in northern Europe and in the United States of America to-day. Some things to which they held are still retained by Christians who are as wide apart as are Quakers and Catholics. Those who cut down the forest are often surprised at the new and different timber which springs up from the soil. After John Knox, David Hume! But if the Puritans and reformers had not been intolerant, they would not have been men of their own age. It is to the glory of these narrow-minded but high-souled men that they believed in education. They could not well conceive that any other belief was as good as their own. Yet theirs was not the spirit of Mahomet, who gave choice of acceptance of sword or creed; for these men, who had a conviction themselves of the truth, demanded from others the same knowledge, by experience and enlightenment, of these doctrines which they believed. Hence they were earnest for both elementary training and the higher erudition.