erd_ and other
admirable poems in the Scottish dialect. He was born in 1686 and died in
1758.

'No sculptured marble here, no pompous lay,
No storied urn, no animated bust;
This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way
To pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust.[2]

Though here you're buried, worthy Allan,
We'll ne'er forget you, canty callan;
For while your soul lives in the sky,
Your "Gentle Shepherd" ne'er shall die.'

Sir John Clerk, one of the Barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, who
admired his genius and was one of his most intimate friends, erected at
his family seat at Penicuik an obelisk to his memory; while Mr.
Alexander Fraser-Tytler, at Woodhouselee, near the Glencorse _locale_
of _The Gentle Shepherd_, has erected a rustic temple which bears the
inscription--

'ALLANO RAMSAY ET GENIO LOCI.

'Here midst those streams that taught thy Doric Muse
Her sweetest song,--the hills, the woods, and stream,
Where beauteous Peggy strayed, list'ning the while
Her Gentle Shepherd's tender tale of love.
Scenes which thy pencil, true to Nature, gave
To live for ever. Sacred be this shrine;
And unprofaned, by ruder hands, the stone
That owes its honours to thy deathless name.'

Ramsay was survived by his son Allan, the painter, and by his two
daughters, Christian and Janet, who amongst them inherited the poet's
fortune. The house on the Castlehill fell to his son, and remained in
the possession of the family, as Mr. Logie Robertson records, until
1845, when it changed hands at the death of General John Ramsay, the
poet's grandson, and the last of his line. For many years it stood, an
object of interest to all admirers of the bard, until 1892, when, just
as the building was beginning to show signs of age, the site was bought
for the erection of the new students' boarding-house, 'University Hall,'
which so imposingly crowns the ridge of the Castlehill. With a reverence
for the memory of the poet as rare as it is commendable, the promoters
of the scheme resolved to preserve as much as possible of the house, and
the greater part of it has been incorporated in the new building.

Of Ramsay we have only two portraits remaining that are of any real
value,--that painted by his son Allan, and that by Smibert, the poet's
lifelong friend. The latter represents him in youth, the former in
age--both being considered, at the time of execution, striking
likenesses