that the wigmakers ranked amongst the
forty-two incorporated Societies or Guilds of the city (for their name
does not appear), that they must have enjoyed the same privileges as the
other trades, is evident from the fact of Ramsay being enrolled as a
burgess, the moment he had completed his apprenticeship.

CHAPTER III

SCOTLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; THE UNION; RAMSAY'S
MARRIAGE--1707-12

An important stage in Allan Ramsay's life's journey had now been
reached. He was of age, he was a burgess of the town, he was a member,
or free, of one of the most influential of the Crafts, or Guilds, in the
capital, but, greatest step of all, he had started in business for
himself, and had flung himself, with a sort of fierce determination to
succeed, into that hand-to-hand fight with fortune for the sustenance of
life, from which each of us emerges either made or marred.

At a time when all the youthful Ramsay's faculties were beginning to be
strung to their utmost tension of achievement, strange would it have
been if that of observation were not as eagerly exercised.

Scotland in general, and Edinburgh in particular, were at this period in
the throes of a new political birth. The epoch of transition commenced
in 1707, and ended only when the dangers of the repeated rebellions of
1715 and 1745 showed the supercilious statesmen by the Thames--the
Harleys, the Walpoles, the Pelhams--that conciliation, not intimidation,
was the card to play in binding Scotland to her greater neighbour. A
patriotism that had burned clear and unwavering from the days of
Wallace and Bruce to those of the exiled and discredited Stuarts, was
not to be crushed out by a band of political wirepullers, by whom State
peculation was reduced to an art and parliamentary corruption to a
science.

Although the ultimate effects of the Union between England and Scotland
were in the highest degree beneficial upon the arts, the commerce, and
the literature of the latter, the proximate results were disastrous in
the extreme; yet the step was imperative. So strained had become the
relations between the two countries, consequent on the jealousy of
English merchants and English politicians, that only two alternatives
were possible--war, or the corporate union of the whole island. Yet in
Scotland the very mention of Union was sufficient to drive the people
into a paroxysm of rage. The religious animosity between the two
countries was as important a factor