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

ALLAN RAMSAY 35
was of old divided, he was tinctured neither with French
scepticism nor with the fashionable doubts which the
earlier deistical writers of the century, Lord Herbert of
Cherbury, Shaftesbury, Toland, and Blount, were sowing
broadcast over Great Britain. In his Gentle Shepherd
he makes Jenny, when Glaud, her father, had remarked,
with respect to the prevailing disregard of religion and
morality among the youth of the better classes,
' I've heard mysell
Some o' them laugh at doomsday, sin, and hell,*
make the following reply, which savours strongly of the
slippered orthodoxy of The Essay on Man—
' Watch o'er us, father ! hech, that's very odd ;
Sure, him that doubts a doomsday, doubts a God.'
But though he appears to have given a wide berth to
the ponderous theology, the narrow ethics, and the hair-
splitting metaphysics of the time, his whole nature seems
to have been stirred and awakened more deeply than
ever by his study of the elder poets in English literature.
Not that their music tended to make him discontented
with his lot, or unhinged the Ud of his resolution to
become a thoroughly efficient man of business. Ramsay,
unlike many of his brethren of the lyre, was of an
eminently practical temperament. Rumour says that in
earlier boyhood he cherished a desire of becoming an
artist. But his stepfather not possessing the means to
furnish him with the necessary training, he wisely
sloughed all such unreasonable dreams, and aimed at
independence through wig-making.
Wisdom as commendable was displayed now. Though
his studies must have kindled poetic emulation in him
;