“By your assistance unconstrain’d, To courts I can repair, And by your art my way I’ve gained To closets of the fair.” There are many other portraits which enable us to gather what was the personal appearance of the author of “The Gentle Shepherd.” There is the print in which the poet appears in all the bright bravery of youth, clad in a kind of fanciful Scottish costume,—a coat slashed at the sleeves, a plaid laid over his right shoulder, a broad Highland bonnet, with a St. Andrew badge, set on the head. This is the frontispiece to the first quarto edition of his works, published by Ruddiman in 1721: it is engraved by T. Vereruysse, and bears the initials J. S. P., which, as we learn from the engraving by Vertue, evidently from the same picture, in Ramsay’s “Poems and Songs,” 1728, stands for “John Smibert, Pinxit.” This painter, born in Edinburgh in 1684, was a friend and correspondent of Ramsay’s, and it was to him, while studying art in Italy, that the poet addressed that “Epistle to a Friend in Florence” which is included in his works. He accompanied Bishop Berkeley to Rhode Island in 1727, and afterwards settled in Boston, where he resided till his death in 1751. In Britain his works are scarce, but a portrait of Berkeley by his hand is in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and there is at Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, along with minor examples of his art, an important group of Lord Cullen and his family, including twelve life-sized figures, which he painted in 1720. Smibert is believed to have executed a second portrait of Allan Ramsay, that kit-cat likeness with the head turned nearly in profile to the left, which formed the frontispiece to “The Gentle Shepherd, with Illustrations of the Scenery,” Edinburgh 1814, engraved by A. Wilson, from a drawing made by A. Carse from the picture (now at New Hall, Mid-Lothian), which had belonged to the poet himself, and afterwards to Janet Ramsay, a daughter who survived him. Again there is a singularly heavy-looking and spiritless portrait engraved in the second volume of Ruddiman’s 1728 edition of Ramsay’s works, marked as by Strange’s master, “R. Cooper, ad vivum sculpsit, Edin^r,” showing the figure to the waist, the right hand holding a volume of the Poems; and the smaller print, without name of painter or engraver, which seems to be an improved adaptation of this portrait, the face become refined and delicate, a fitting face for a poet.