any by Teniers.” The judgment is perhaps too favourable; but this venture of Ramsay’s in the archaic Scotch deservedly increased the reputation he had won by his easier and shorter pieces in the ordinary colloquial Scotch of his own day, and by some of their English companions. Before the year 1718, when _Christ’s Kirk on the Green_ appeared with its completed continuation, Ramsay had begun to combine the business of bookselling with that of wig-making. For this purpose he had transferred himself and his family to a house in the High Street, just opposite Niddry’s Wynd, for which he had adopted the sign of “The Mercury”; and it was from this house that the completed edition of the old poem was published. The house still stands, now numbered 153 in the street, glass-fronted to a great extent in the two storeys above the basement, and with the old stone stair of entrance to these storeys, but bereft of an upper storey and attics which once belonged to it and gave it a more imposing look. To understand, however, the dignity of the house and its situation in Allan Ramsay’s days, one has to remember that the Edinburgh of those days consisted all but entirely of that one long descending ridge or backbone of edifices from the Castle to Holyrood of which the High Street proper was the main portion. One must remember further that the High Street was not then the continued clear oblong from the Lawnmarket to the Netherbow which we now see, but that up a portion of the middle of it, along the face of St. Giles’s Church, there ran an obstructive block of buildings,—consisting of the Old Tolbooth or “Heart of Midlothian” at the upper end, and a tall pile of dwelling-houses and shops, called the Luckenbooths, at the lower end,—the effect of which was to choke the traffic at that part, and divide it between a narrow tortuous foot-passage along the buttresses of the church on the one side and a somewhat wider causey for vehicles on the other. Now, as Ramsay’s new house was a good way below this obstruction, and in that open space of the High Street where there was plenty of room to breathe, it was in an excellent position for bookselling or any similar business. There was actually a temptation for a citizen lingering in this spot to ascend Allan Ramsay’s stone stair to have a look at the books on sale, especially if he could have his wig dressed at the same time. That this was possible we have Ramsay’s own word. It is generally represented in memoirs of him that he had given up wig-making when he entered his new shop of the Mercury opposite to Niddry’s Wynd, and there took to bookselling; but these lines, appended to the description of his personal appearance and character in the poem already quoted, settle the question—