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

34
FAMOUS SCOTS
For sindle times they e'er come back
Wha anes are heftit there ;
Sure, Bess, thae hills are nae sae black,
Nor yet thir [these] howms sae bare.'
And in The Gentle Shepherd, after the discovery has been
made of Patie's noble birth, his fellow -herd, Roger,
remarks
—
' Is not our master an' yoursell to stay
Amang us here? or, are ye gawn away
To London Court, or ither far aff parts,
To leave your ain poor us wi' broken hearts ?
The five intercalary years between Ramsay's commencing
in business on his own account and his
marriage, were those which may properly be designated
his intellectual seedtime. That he was exercised over
any of the deeper and more complex problems of life,
death and futurity ; that he was hagridden by doubt, or
appalled by the vision of man's motelike finitude when
viewed against the deep background of infinity and
eternity, we have no reason to suppose. Never at any
epoch of his life a ' thinker,' in the true sense of the
word, he was inclined, with the genial insouciant Hedon-
ism always characteristic of him, to slip contentedly into
the Pantheism of Pope, to regard humanity and the world
without as
' but parts of a stupendous whole
Whose body nature is, and God the soul,
—the superficial, ethical principle permeating which is
summed up in the dictum. Whatever is, is right. Though
he had no sympathy with the Puritanic austerity of Pres-
byterianism, albeit a regular attendant on the ministra-
tions of Dr. Webster of the Tolbooth Church, one of the
sections whereinto the magnificent cathedral of St. Giles
'