Allan Ramsay. [A biography.] - National Library of Scotland

ALLAN RAMSAY 99
The year 1728 had v/itnessed, as we have seen, the
publication of Allan Ramsay's last original work.
Thereafter he was content to rest on his laurels, to
revise new editions of his various poems, and to add to
his Tea-Table Miscellany and Scots Songs. Perhaps he
may have been conscious that the golden glow of
youthful imagination at life's meridian, had already given
place to those soberer tints that rise athwart the mental
horizon, when the Rubicon of the forties has been
crossed. In 1737, when writing to his friend Smibert,
the painter (then in Boston, America, whither he had
emigrated), Ramsay states, with reference to his relin-
quishment of poetry :
' These six or seven years past I
have not written a Hne of poetry ; I e'en gave over in
good time, before the coolness of fancy that attends
advanced years should make me risk the reputation I
had acquired.' He then adds in the letter the following
lines of poetry, from which we gather, further, that his
determination was the result, not of mere impulse, pique,
or chagrin, but of reasoned resolve—
' Frae twenty-five to five-and-forty,
My muse was neither sweer nor dorty ;
My Pegasus would break his tether,
E'en at the shaking of a feather,
, And
through ideas scour like drift,
Straking his wings up to the lift.
Then, then my soul was in a low,
That gart my numbers safely row ;
Btii eild and judgjnent ^gin to say,
Let be your sangs and learn to pray'
By 1730, then, Ramsay's work, of an original kind at
least, was over. In that year, however, he published
another short volume of metrical fables, under the title,