To Edinburgh he was sent in his fifteenth year, when the felicity of his boyhood had been broken by the death of his mother. We have the assurance of undoubted testimony, that at that early age, when his mind was beginning to search about for the choice of a profession, his wishes were to be a painter; a circumstance too little known, and too little noticed by his biographers, but strongly indicative, in our opinion, of the aspirations of his youthful disposition. While yet in the country, he had been in the practice of amusing himself with copying such prints as he found in the books of his mother's house. This early predilection for an art kindred to that wherein he afterwards excelled, very likely followed bins through life, and led him to devote his son to that favourite study, from which he himself was so harshly precluded. For his stepfather, little consulting the inclination of young Allan, and wishing as soon as possible, and at any rate, to disencumber himself of the charge of his support, bound this nursling of the Muses apprentice to a wig-maker. Lowly as this profession is, it has been vindicated by one of Ramsay's biographers into comparative dignity, by separating it from the kindred business of barber, with which it is vulgarly, and too frequently confounded. Ramsay was never, it seems, a barber; his enemies never blotted him with that ignominy; his calling of "scull-thacker," as he himself ludicrously terms it, was too dignified to be let down into an equality with the men of the razor. Thus from the beginning his business was with _the heads of men_. We know not on what authority it is asserted by some of his biographers, that he abandoned this profession on finishing his apprenticeship: he is called wig-maker in the parish record down to the year 1716; and we suspect he continued so till the year 1718, or 1719, for in one of Hamilton's letters to him, dated 24th of July, 1719, mention is made of his "new profession." He was in 1712 induced, as one of his biographers observes, _by the example of other citizens_, to enter into the state of marriage. His wife's name was Christian Ross, daughter of a writer in Edinburgh, who brought him, year after year, a numerous family of three sons and five daughters. Of this family, Allan, the eldest, and the only son who survived him, inherited the genius of his father, and, having received a liberal education, became afterwards conspicuous as a scholar, and a painter.[3]