Allan Ramsay was born at Leadhills, in the parish of Crawford, Lanarkshire, on 15 October 1686, son of an Edinburgh lawyer who was then manager of Lord Hopetoun’s lead mines on Crawford Moor.

He died when Allan was still in his infancy, and his mother, Alice Bower, then married a man called Creighton. Ramsay was educated at the local village school In Crawford until the age of fifteen, when he was apprenticed to an Edinburgh wig-maker.

After completing the apprenticeship, he set up shop In the High Street as a wig-maker him self, but abandoned the trade for book selling between 1716 and 1718 after discovering that the poems he wrote in his spare time were very popular, and indeed soon very fashionable.

In the meantime he had married Christian Ross (who died in 1743, after giving him three sons and five daughters), and joined the Jacobite ‘Easy Club’, where at club meetings the rules stated that members must use a pseudonym. Ramsay called himself Isaac Bickerstaff, but later changed to Gawin Douglas. The ‘Easy Club’ closed after the 1715 rebellion, it being considered too dangerous to continue with such open meetings.

Now established in Edinburgh literary circles as an excellent poet, Ramsay was urged by Mends to consolidate his reputation, by writing a pastoral, a style of poetry much admired at that time.

The result of this pressure was ‘The Gentle Shepherd’, a drama produced for the stage and an instant success when it was published in 1725. The next year he moved his shop to the Luckenbooths, further down the Royal Mile near St Giles, where his book selling enterprise flourished and he established the first circulating library in Scotland.

His shop quickly became the meeting place for all the literati in Edinburgh, as well as a Mecca for educated travellers. Here he met John Gay, author of the ‘Beggars Opera’, to whom he explained the Scotticisms in the ‘Gentle Shepherd’ so that he might help Alexander Pope, a ‘great admirer’ of Ramsay, to read it.

Around 1730 Ramsay had practically stopped writing at all, lest ‘the coolness of fancy that attends advancing years should make me risk the reputation I had acquired’. In 1736 he determined to build ‘a playhouse new, at vast expense’ in Carrubbers Close

Alan was a very decent and regular attendee of the Old Church in St Giles’s. He delighted in music and theatricals, and, as we shall see, encouraged the Assembly. It was also no doubt his own taste which led him, in 1725, to set up a circulating library, whence he diffused plays and other works of fiction among the people of Edinburgh.

It appears, from the private notes of the historian Woodrow, that, in 1728, the magistrates, moved by some meddling spirits, took alarm at the effect of this kind of reading on the minds of youth, and made an attempt to put it down, but without effect.

One cannot but be amused to find amongst these self-constituted guardians of morality Lord Grange, who kept his wife in unauthorised restraint for several years, and whose own life was a scandal to his professions.

Ramsay, as is well known, also attempted to establish a theatre in Edinburgh, but failed. The following advertisement on this subject appears in the Caledonian Mercury, September 1736: ‘The New Theatre in Carrubber’s Close being in great forwardness, will be opened the 1st of November. These are to advertise the gentlemen and ladies who incline to purchase annual tickets, to enter their names before the 20th of October next, on which day they shall receive their tickets from Allan Ramsay. on paying 80s, more than forty to be subscribed for; after which none will be disposed of under two guineas.’

Owing to strict licensing laws regarding theatres It was quickly closed by the magistrates and not reopened until 1767, when David Ross, a London actor, managed to fulfil Ramsay’s dream.

In 1755 Ramsay retired from business and settled In an octagonal house he had had built to his own plans on the north side of the Castle Rock. On telling Lord Effibank that his friends called It the ‘goosepie house’, Ramsay met the joking reply that, ‘Indeed Allan, now that I see you in It, I think the term Is most properly applied’. The house is now surrounded by later buildings of the 19th century by Sir Patrick Geddes,

Ramsay died on 7 January, aged 72.1758 He is buried in the old Greyfriars churchyard in Edinburgh, where another monument has been raised to him.

An elderly female told a friend of mine that she remembered, when a girl, living as an apprentice with a milliner in the  Grassmarket, being sent to Ramsay Garden to assist in making dead-clothes for the poet. She could recall, however, no particulars of the scene but the roses blooming in at the window of the death-chamber.

The late Mrs Murray of Henderland knew Ramsay for the last ten years of his life, her sister having married his son, the celebrated painter. She spoke of him to me in 1825, with kindly enthusiasm, as one of the most amiable men she had ever known. His constant cheerfulness and lively conversational powers had made him a favourite amongst persons of rank, whose guest he frequently was. Being very fond of children, he encouraged his daughters in bringing troops of young ladies about the house, in whose sports he would mix with a patience and vivacity wonderful in an old man.

He used to give these young friends a kind of ball once a year. From pure kindness for the young, he would help to make dolls for them, and cradles wherein to place these little effigies, with his own hands. But here a fashion of the age must be held in view; for, however odd it may appear, it is undoubtedly true that to make and dispose of dolls, such as children now alone are interested in, was a practice in vogue amongst grown-up ladies who had little to do about a hundred years ago.

In Mr and Mrs Macrae’s circle of visiting acquaintance, and frequent spectators of the Marionville theatricals, were Sir George Ramsay of Bamif and his lady. Sir George had recently returned, with an addition to his fortune, from India, and was now settling himself down for the remainder of life in his native country.

There was a quarrel between Mr Macrae and Sir George Ramsay of a kind almost too mean and ridiculous to be spoken of. On the evening of the 7th April 1790, the former gentleman handed a lady out of the Edinburgh theatre and endeavoured to get a chair for her, in which she might be conveyed home.

Seeing two men approaching through the crowd with one, he called to ask if it was disengaged, to which the men replied with a distinct affirmative. As Mr Macrae handed the lady forward to put her into it, a footman, called James Merry in a violent manner, seized hold of one of the poles, and insisted that it was engaged for his mistress.

The man seemed disordered by liquor, and it was afterwards distinctly made manifest that he was acting without the guidance of reason. His lady had gone home some time before, while he was out of the way. He was not aware of this, and, under a confused sense of duty, he was now eager to obtain a chair for her, but in reality had not bespoken that upon which he laid hold. Mr Macrae, annoyed at the man’s pertinacity at such a moment, rapped him over the knuckles with a short cane to make him give way; on which the servant called him a scoundrel, and gave him a push on the breast.

Incensed overmuch by this conduct, Mr Macrae struck him smartly over the head with his cane, on which the man cried out worse than before, and moved off. Mr Macrae, following him, repeated his blows two or three times, but only with that degree of force which he thought needful for a chastisement. In the meantime the lady whom Mr Macrae had handed out got into a different chair, and was carried off. Some of the bystanders, seeing a gentleman beating a servant, cried shame, and showed a disposition to take part with the latter; but there were individuals present who had observed all the circumstances, and who felt differently. One gentleman afterwards gave evidence that he had been insulted by the servant, at an earlier period of the evening, in precisely the same manner as Mr Macrae, and that the man’s conduct had throughout been rude and insolent, a consequence apparently of drunkenness.

Learning that the servant was in the employment of Lady Ramsay, Mr Macrae came into town next day, full of anxiety to obviate any unpleasant impression which the incident might have made upon her mind. Meeting Sir George in the street, he expressed to him his concern on the subject, when Sir George said lightly that the man being his lady’s footman, he did not feel any concern in the matter. Mr Macrae then went to apologise to Lady Ramsay, whom he found sitting for her portrait in the lodgings of the young artist Henry Raeburn, afterwards so highly distinguished. It has been said that he fell on his knees before the lady to entreat her pardon for what he had done to her servant.

Sir George went to Mr Macrae, and proposed that if Mr Macrae would apologise for the intemperate style of his letters demanding the discharge of the servant, Sir George would grant his request, and the affair would end. Mr Macrae answered that he would be most happy to comply with this proposal if his friends thought it proper; but he must abide by their decision. The question being put to Captain Haig, he answered, in a deliberate manner: ‘It Is altogether impossible; Sir George must, in the first place, turn off his servant, and Mr Macrae will then apologise.’ Hearing this speech, equally marked by wrong judgement and wrong feeling, Macrae, according to the testimony of Mr Bell, shed tears of anguish. The parties then walked to the beach, and took their places in the usual manner. On the word being given, Sir George took deliberate aim at Macrae, the neck of whose coat was grazed by his bullet. Macrae had, if his own solemn asseveration is to be believed, intended to fire in the air; but when he found Sir George aiming thus at his life, he altered his resolution, and brought his antagonist to the ground with a mortal wound in the body.

There was the usual consternation and unspeakable distress. Mr Macrae went up to Sir George and ‘told him that he was sincerely afflicted at seeing him in that situation.’ It was with difficulty, arid only at the urgent request of Sir William Maxwell, that he could be induced to quit the field. Sir George lingered for two days before he died.

William 5th Earl of Dalhousie was a man of mark and influence. He had the sagacity to perceive the great good that would flow from the union of Scotland with England, and, in spite of popular clamour, he steadily supported that measure throughout. In the war of the Spanish Succession he was colonel of the Scots Guards, with the rank of brigadier-general in the forces sent by the British Government, in 1710, to the assistance of the Archduke Charles of Austria, in his contest for the Spanish Crown against Philip, grandson of Louis XIV. On the death of Earl William unmarried, in October of the same year, the family titles and estates descended to WILLIAM RAMSAY, grandson of the first Earl, who, like most both of his predecessors and successors, was a gallant soldier. He died in 1739, in the seventy-ninth year of his age, having had the misfortune to outlive his eldest son George, Lord Ramsay, whose marriage to Jean, daughter of the Hon. Henry Maule, the heiress of the ancient family of Maule, brought extensive estates into the family. She bore him seven sons, of whom four died young. Eating the berries of the ivy poisoned two of them.