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

32
FAMOUS SCOTS
Scotland as a hostile neighbour dogging her heels ?—must
of itself have been an education to young Ramsay. It
both confirmed his patriotism and widened his political
outlook.
Yet when the play was over, the curtain rung down,
and the lights gone out, the lapse of time must to him,
as to other observers of the period, have driven home
with stunning force the conviction that the Union spelled
ruin for Scotland as a nation and Edinburgh as a city.
For five decades to come a listless apathy, born of
despair, strangled Scottish enterprise in its birth. The
immediate effect of the Union was a serious diminution
in the national trade and commerce. The jealousy of
English merchants, as it had frustrated the Darien
Scheme in the previous century, now closed every pos-
sible avenue of commercial activity for the renumerative
utilisation of Scottish capital. ' We are dying by inches,'
wrote James, Earl of Bute, to a friend. And the signs
of the times did not seem to belie the assertion.
In Edinburgh, also, the change was severely felt. The
removal of the Court to London, a hundred and four
years before, had drawn a large number of the Scottish
nobility to the vortex of fashion. The money they were
wont to spend during their stay in Edinburgh, while the
Court season lasted, was diverted into another channel.
The town houses which they had been forced to maintain
in the Scottish metropolis, were in many cases relin-
quished, and the place that so long had known them
knew them no more. At that time Scottish merchants
and shopkeepers had suffered severely, yet they had the
satisfaction of knowing that the seat of Scottish govern-
ment remained north of the Tweed.