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

52
—
FAMOUS SCOTS
might at first glance be supposed. For in the concluding
lines of the poem Ramsay, with his genial bonhomie and
humour had said
' Yet that we more good humour might display,
We frankly turned the vote another way ;
And in each thing we common topics shun,
So the great prize nor birth nor riches won.
The vote was carried thus :—that easy he
Who should three years a social fellow be,
And to our Easy Club give no offence.
After triennial trial, should commence
A gentleman ; which gives as just a claim
To that great title, as the blast of fame
Can give to those who tread in human gore.'
In 1715, also, he amused the members of the Club,
and after them the wits of Edinburgh, with some lines
on the current predictions regarding The Great Eclipse
of the Sun, foretold to take place during April 1715.
The following picture, descriptive of the awe and terror
produced on ignorant minds and on the brute creation
by the occurrence of the eclipse, is as pithily effective
in its simplicity and fidelity to life and nature as
anything in Crabbe's Tales in Verse or Shenstone's
Schoolm istress—
' When
this strange darkness overshades the plains,
'Twill give an odd surprise to unwarned swains ;
Plain honest hinds, who do not know the cause,
Nor know of orbs, their motions or their laws,
Will from the half- ploughed furrows homeward bend
In dire confusion, judging that the end
Of time approacheth ; thus possessed with fear,
They'll think the gen'ral conflagration near.
The traveller, benighted on the road,
Will turn devout, and supplicate his God.