w of Robert Ramsay. To the future poet he gave, as
the latter more than once testified, as good an education as the parish
school afforded. That it embraced something more than the 'three R's,'
we have Ramsay's own testimony, direct and indirect--direct in the
admission that he had learned there to read Horace 'faintly in the
original'; indirect in the number and propriety of the classical
allusions in his works. He lived before the era of quotation books and
dictionaries of phrase and fable,--the hourly godsend of the
penny-a-liner; but the felicity of his references is unquestionable, and
shows an acquaintance with Latin and English literature both wide and
intimate. At anyrate, his scholastic training was sufficiently catholic
to imbue his mind with a reverence for the masterpieces in both
languages, and to enable him to consort in after years, on terms of
perfect literary equality, with the lawyers and the _beaux esprits_ of
witty Edinburgh, such as Dr. Pitcairn, Dr. Webster, and Lord Elibank.

Until his migration to the Scottish capital, at the age of fifteen,
Ramsay was employed, during his spare hours, in assisting his stepfather
in the work of the farm. The intimate acquaintance he displays in his
pastoral with the life and lot of the peasant-farmer, was the result of
his early years of rural labour among the Lowther hills. That they were
years of hardship, and a struggle at hand-grips with poverty, goes
without the saying. The land around the Lowthers was not of such a
quality as to render the bonnet-laird's exchequer a full one. As a
shepherd, therefore, young Ramsay had to earn hardly the bread he ate at
his stepfather's table. The references to his vocation are numerous in
his poems. In his Epistle to his friend William Starrat, teacher of
mathematics at Straban in Ireland, he adverts to his early life--

'When speeling up the hill, the dog-days' heat
Gars a young thirsty shepherd pant and sweat;
I own 'tis cauld encouragement to sing,
When round ane's lugs the blattran hailstanes ring;
But feckfu' fouk can front the bauldest wind,
And slunk through muirs, an' never fash their mind.
Aft hae I wade through glens wi' chorking feet,
When neither plaid nor kilt could fend the weet;
Yet blythly wad I bang out o'er the brae,
And stend o'er burns as light as ony rae,
Hoping the morn might prove a better day.'

The boy, meantime, must have been photographing on the ret