28 Pale though thou art, yet best yet best beloved; Oh, could my warmth to life restore thee, Ye'd lie all night between my breasts! No youth lay ever there before thee. 29 Pale pale, indeed, O lovely lovely youth; Forgive, forgive so foul a slaughter, And lie all night between my breasts; No youth shall ever lie there after. 30 A. Return, return, O mournful mournful bride, Return and dry thy useless sorrow: Thy lover heeds nought of thy sighs, He lies a corpse on the Braes of Yarrow. ALLAN RAMSAY. Crawford Muir, in Lanarkshire, was the birthplace of this true poet. His father was manager of the Earl of Hopetoun's lead-mines. Allan was born in 1686. His mother was Alice Bower, the daughter of an Englishman who had emigrated from Derbyshire. His father died while his son was yet in infancy; his mother married again in the same district; and young Allan was educated at the parish school of Leadhills. At the age of fifteen, he was sent to Edinburgh, and bound apprentice to a wig-maker there. This trade, however, he left after finishing his term. He displayed rather early a passion for literature, and made a little reputation by some pieces of verse,--such as 'An Address to the Easy Club,' a convivial society with which he was connected,--and a considerable time after by a capital continuation of King James' 'Christis Kirk on the Green.' In 1712, he married a writer's daughter, Christiana Ross, who was his affectionate companion for thirty years. Soon after, he set up a bookseller's shop opposite Niddry's Wynd, and in this capacity edited and published two collections,--the one of songs, some of them his own, entitled 'The Tea-Table Miscellany,' and the other of early Scottish poems, entitled 'The Evergreen.' In 1725, he published 'The Gentle Shepherd.' It was the expansion of one or two pastoral scenes which he ad shewn to his delighted friends. The poem became instantly popular, and was republished in London and Dublin, and widely circulated in the colonies. Pope admired it. Gay, then in Scotland with his patrons the Queensberry family, used to lounge into Ramsay's shop to get explanations of its Scotch phrases to transmit to Twickenham, and to watch from the window the notable characters whom Allan pointed out to him in the Edinburgh Exchange. He now removed to a better shop, and set up for his sign the heads of Ben Jonson and Drummond, who agreed better in figure than they had done in reality at Hawthornden. He established the first circulating library in Scotland. His shop became a centre of intelligence, and Ramsay sat a Triton among the minnows of that rather mediocre day --giving his little senate laws, and inditing verses, songs, and fables. At forty-five--an age when Sir Walter Scott had scarcely commenced his Waverley novels, and Dryden had by far his greatest works to produce --honest Allan imagined his vein exhausted, and ceased to write, although