Whose ragged walls the ivy creeps, And see the rivers how they run, Through woods and meads, in shade and sun, To disperse our cares away. Ever charming, ever new, When will the landscape tire the view! See on the mountain's southern side, So we mistake the future's face, For, while our wishes wildly roll, Now, ev'n now, my joys run high. Be full, ye courts; be great who will; Search for peace with all your skill; Open wide the lofty door, Seek her on the marble floor; In vain you search, she is not there; And often, by the murmuring rill, ALLAN RAMSAY. BORN 1686.-DIED 1758. THE personal history of Allan Ramsay is marked by few circumstances of striking interest; yet, independently of his poetry, he cannot be reckoned an insignificant individual who gave Scotland her first circulating library, and who established her first regular theatre. He was born in the parish of Crawfurd Moor, in Lanarkshire, where his father had the charge of Lord Hopeton's lead mines. His mother, Alice Bower, was the daughter of an Englishman who had emigrated to that place from Derbyshire. By his paternal descent the poet boasts of having sprung from "a Douglas loin," but, owing to the early death of his father, his education was confined to a parish school, and at the age of fifteen he was bound apprentice to the humble business of a wigmaker. On this subject one of his Scottish biographers refutes, with some indignation, a report which had gone abroad, that our poet was bred a barber, and carefully instructs the reader, that in those good times, when a fashionable wig cost twenty guineas, the employment of manufacturing them was VOL. IV. Z both lucrative and creditable1. Ramsay, however, seems to have felt no ambition either for the honours or profits of the vocation, as he left it on finishing his apprenticeship. In his twenty-fourth year he married the daughter of a writer or attorney, in Edinburgh. His eldest son rose to well-known eminence 2 1 Apropos to this delicate distinction of the Scottish biographer may be mentioned the advertisement of a French peruquier in the Palais Royal, who ranks his business among the " imitative arts." A London artist in the same profession had a similar jealousy with the historian of Ramsay's life, at the idea of mere "trimmers of the human face" being confounded with "genuine peruquiers." In advertising his crop-wigs he alluded to some wig-weaving competitors, whom he denominated" mere hair-dressers and barbers;" and "shall a barber (he exclaims) affect to rival these crops?" "Barbarus has segetes.”—VIRGIL. 2 This son of the poet was a man of literature as well as genius. The following whimsical specimen of his poetry is subjoined as a curiosity. The humorous substitution of the kirk treasury-man for Horace's wolf, in the third stanza, will only be recognised by those who understand the importance of that ecclesiastical officer in Scotland, and the powers with which he is invested for summoning delinquents before the clergy and elders, in cases of illegitimate love. HORACE'S "INTEGER VITÆ," &c. BY ALLAN RAMSAY, JUN. A man of no base (John) life or conversation, Whether he ranges, eastward to the Ganges, |