social status of the swain at that
moment? Ah, there was the rub! All very well was it for a
literary-minded lawyer to patronise his wigmaker by inviting him to
drink a dish of tea with his family, or to crack a bottle with him over
Jacobite plots or the latest poems of Swift or Pope; but to give him his
daughter in marriage, that was altogether another question. Mrs. Grundy
was quite as awe-inspiring a dame then as now. James Ross and his spouse
would require to make a careful investigation into the pedigree of the
'mercurial' artist in crinology--to import a trade term of the present
into the staid transactions of the past--before such an alliance could
be thought of. Many and long were the family councils held. Every item
of his descent, his relatives, his character, his prospects, was
discussed, and this is what they discovered.

Allan Ramsay was born on the 15th of October 1686, in the little town of
Leadhills, situate in the parish of Crawfordmuir, in the upper ward of
Lanarkshire, and in the very heart of the bleak, heathy Lowther hills.
The house wherein he saw the light is now 'a broken-down byre,'
according to Dr. John Brown in _Horae Subsecivae_. Standing, as it does,
1400 feet above the level of the sea, the village is chiefly notable as
being the most elevated inhabited ground in Scotland. The industry of
the district, then as now, was almost entirely devoted to lead-mining.
The superior of the parish was the Earl of Hopetoun, and on his behoof
the mines were wrought. The male population, with but few exceptions,
were in his lordship's service. A more desolate and dreary spot could
scarcely be conceived. The rugged ranges, destitute of wood, were
scarred by the traces of former workings, and intersected, moreover, by
narrow rocky ravines, down which brawled foaming mountain burns. Perched
like an eyrie on some steep cliff, the view from the vicinity of the
town is magnificent, ranging over fair Clydesdale, and the lands
formerly owned by the Earls of Crawford, 'the Lindsays, light and gay,'
whose ancient castle stands on Clydeside.

In the days of the Stuarts gold used to be found in considerable
quantities in the locality, from which was struck the gold issue bearing
the head of James V., wearing a bonnet; hence the old term for it--a
'bonnet-piece.'

The inhabitants of the town and district of Leadhills had imbibed in
Ramsay's days something of the stern, forbidding character of the
scenery. The rugge