r frae Spey an' Clyde,
Stands that great town o' Lud,
To whilk our best lads rin an' ride,
That's like to put us wud [mad];
For sindle times they e'er come back
Wha anes are heftit there;
Sure, Bess, thae hills are nae sae black,
Nor yet thir [these] howms sae bare.'

And in _The Gentle Shepherd_, after the discovery has been made of
Patie's noble birth, his fellow-herd, Roger, remarks--

'Is not our master an' yoursell to stay
Amang us here? or, are ye gawn away
To London Court, or ither far aff parts,
To leave your ain poor us wi' broken hearts?'

The five intercalary years between Ramsay's commencing in business on
his own account and his marriage, were those which may properly be
designated his intellectual seedtime. That he was exercised over any of
the deeper and more complex problems of life, death and futurity; that
he was hagridden by doubt, or appalled by the vision of man's motelike
finitude when viewed against the deep background of infinity and
eternity, we have no reason to suppose. Never at any epoch of his life a
'thinker,' in the true sense of the word, he was inclined, with the
genial insouciant Hedonism always characteristic of him, to slip
contentedly into the Pantheism of Pope, to regard humanity and the world
without as

----'but parts of a stupendous whole
Whose body nature is, and God the soul,

--the superficial, ethical principle permeating which is summed up in
the dictum, _Whatever is, is right_. Though he had no sympathy with the
Puritanic austerity of Presbyterianism, albeit a regular attendant on
the ministrations of Dr. Webster of the Tolbooth Church, one of the
sections whereinto the magnificent cathedral of St. Giles was of old
divided, he was tinctured neither with French scepticism nor with the
fashionable doubts which the earlier deistical writers of the century,
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Shaftesbury, Toland, and Blount, were sowing
broadcast over Great Britain. In his _Gentle Shepherd_ he makes Jenny,
when Glaud, her father, had remarked, with respect to the prevailing
disregard of religion and morality among the youth of the better
classes,

----'I've heard mysell
Some o' them laugh at doomsday, sin, and hell,'

make the following reply, which savours strongly of the slippered
orthodoxy of _The Essay on Man_--

'Watch o'er us, father! hech, that's very odd;
Sure, him