ee
the probability, at least, of an adequate return. Hence, during the
South Sea madness, he kept his head when many a better man went mad with
the speculative mania. He was pious, without his piety being black-edged
with that gloomy bigotry which characterised much of the Presbyterianism
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Scotland. As he put the
matter himself in his _Epistle to James Arbuckle_:

'Neist, Anti-Toland, Blunt, and Whiston,
Know positively I'm a Christian,
Believing truths and thinking free,
Wishing thrawn parties would agree.'

He delighted in sociality and conviviality, but recoiled from aught
savouring of licence or excess. To coarseness, it is true, he may at
times have stooped in his work; but we must remember the spirit of the
times was in favour of calling a spade a spade, and not 'an implement
for disintegrating planetary particles.' To no degree greater than did
Swift, or Steele, or Arbuthnot, or Gay, can Allan Ramsay be considered
to have smirched his pages with references either ribald or indelicate.
The spirit of the age was in fault when coarseness was rated as wit; and
to be true to life, the painters of the manners around them had to
represent these as they were, not as they would have liked them to be.

On the 9th May 1755 Ramsay, when writing to his friend, James Clerk of
Penicuik, a rhyming epistle, had said--

'Now seventy years are o'er my head,
And thirty mae may lay me dead.'

Alas! the 'Shadow feared of man' was already sitting waiting for him at
no great distance farther on in his life's journey. For some years he
had suffered acutely from scurvy in the gums, which in the end attacked
his jawbone and affected his speech. To the close, however, he retained
his cheerfulness and buoyancy of spirits. When the last great summons at
length came to him, he met it with a manly fortitude and Christian
resignation.

Amongst his last words, according to his daughter Janet, who survived
until 1807, were these: 'I'm no' feared of death; the Bricht and Morning
Star has risen and is shining mair and mair unto the perfect day.' And
so he passed 'into the unseen' on the 7th January 1758, in the
seventy-second year of his age. He was interred two days after in the
Greyfriars Churchyard, where his gravestone is still visible, bearing
the inscription: 'In this cemetery was interred the mortal part of an
immortal poet, Allan Ramsay, author of _The Gentle Sheph