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

ii8 FAMOUS SCOTS
during the South Sea madness, he kept his head when
many a better man went mad with the speculative mania.
He was pious, without his piety being black-edged with
that gloomy bigotry which characterised much of the
Presbyterianism of the seventeeenth and eighteenth
centuries in Scotland. As he put the matter himself in
his Epistle to James Arbiickle :
•Neist, Anti-Toland, Blunt, and Whiston,
Know positively I'm a Christian,
Believing truths and thinking free,
Wishing thrawn parties would agree.'
He delighted in sociality and conviviality, but recoiled
from aught savouring of licence or excess. To coarse-
ness, it is true, he may at times have stooped in his
work; but we must remember the spirit of the times
was in favour of calling a spade a spade, and not ' an
implement for disintegrating planetary particles.' To
no degree greater than did Swift, or Steele, or Arbuthnot,
or Gay, can Allan Ramsay be considered to have
smirched his pages with references either ribald or
indelicate. The spirit of the age was in fault when
coarseness was rated as wit ; and to be true to life, the
painters of the manners around them had to represent
these as they were, not as they would have liked them
to be.
On the gth May 1755 Ramsay, when writing to his friend,
James Clerk of Penicuik, a rhyming epistle, had said
* Now seventy years are o'er my head,
And thirty mae may lay me dead.'
Alas ! the ' Shadow feared of man ' was already sitting
waiting for him at no great distance farther on in his
life's journey. For some years he had suffered acutely
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