“A little man that lo’es my ease,” and again as one who much enjoyed, in good company, “An evening and guffaw.” This kind of pleasure he was in the habit of enjoying more particularly in one of those many clubs into which the citizens of dense Auld Reekie then distributed themselves for the purposes of conviviality. It consisted of about a dozen kindred spirits calling themselves “The Easy Club,” professing literary tastes, and making it a rule that each of them should be known within the club by some adopted name of literary associations. Ramsay’s first club-name was “Isaac Bickerstaff,” but he changed it after a while for “Gavin Douglas.” There is a significance in both names, and in the exchange of the one for the other. Through Ramsay’s apprenticeship, and also after he had set up in business for himself, he had been a diligent reader of all accessible books. Recollecting what books _were_ then accessible to one in his circumstances, we can see, however, that his readings had been mainly in two directions. In the first place, there was the current English or London literature of his own time, or as much of it as was wafted to Edinburgh in the shape of the last or recent publications, in prose or verse, by Defoe, Prior, Swift, Steele, Colley Cibber, Addison, Rowe, Aaron Hill, Gay, and others of the Queen Anne wits; among whom is not to be forgotten the youthful Pope, then rising to the place of poetic supremacy that had been left vacant by Dryden. Of Ramsay’s cognisance of this contemporary English literature of the south, his admiration of it, and enjoyment of it, there is abundant evidence. He had become aware, however, of another literature, indigenous to his own Scotland, though lying far back, for the most part, in an obscure Scottish past. Through Watson’s _Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems_, Ruddiman’s edition of Gavin Douglas’s _Translation of Virgil_, and Sage’s edition of Drummond of Hawthornden, he had been attracted to the old Scottish poets, finding in them a richness of antique matter that came home to his heart amid all his readings in Steele, Pope, and Addison:— “The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox., Hae raised up great poetic stocks Of _Rapes_, of _Buckets_, _Sarks_, and _Locks_, While we neglect To shaw their betters. This provokes Me to reflect On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell: Our country then a tale could tell; Europe had nane mair snack and snell At verse or prose; Our Kings were poets too themsell, Bauld and jocose.” In this double direction of Ramsay’s literary likings,—his respectful obeisance to the literary merits of his London contemporaries, and his fonder private affection for the old poets of his Scottish vernacular,—we have the key to his own literary life.