that doubts a doomsday, doubts a God.'

But though he appears to have given a wide berth to the ponderous
theology, the narrow ethics, and the hair-splitting metaphysics of the
time, his whole nature seems to have been stirred and awakened more
deeply than ever by his study of the elder poets in English literature.
Not that their music tended to make him discontented with his lot, or
unhinged the lid of his resolution to become a thoroughly efficient man
of business. Ramsay, unlike many of his brethren of the lyre, was of an
eminently practical temperament. Rumour says that in earlier boyhood he
cherished a desire of becoming an artist. But his stepfather not
possessing the means to furnish him with the necessary training, he
wisely sloughed all such unreasonable dreams, and aimed at independence
through wig-making.

Wisdom as commendable was displayed now. Though his studies must have
kindled poetic emulation in him; though the vague unexpressed longings
of a richly-gifted nature were doubtless daily present with him, no
thought ever seems to have entered his mind of relinquishing trade for
poetry. On his ambition, also, he kept a steady curb, determining to
publish nothing but what his more matured judgment would approve. Not to
him in after years would the regret come that he had cursed his fame by
immaturity.

From 1707 until 1711, during the dreary depression of the time
immediately succeeding the Union, when Scotsmen preferred apathy to
action, Ramsay sought surcease from his pangs of wounded patriotism by
plunging into studies of various kinds, but principally of English
poetry. In a letter, hitherto unpublished, addressed to his friend
Andrew Gibb, who appears to have resided at or near West Linton, he
remarks: 'I have rowth of good reading to wile my heart from grieving
o'er what cannot be mended now,--the sale o' our unhappy country to the
Southron alliance by a wheen traitors, who thought more o' Lord Somers'
gold than Scotland's rights. In Willie Shakspeare's melodious numbers I
forget the dark days for trade, and in auld Chaucer's Tales, and
Spenser's 'Queen,' in John Milton's majestic flow, in Giles and Phineas
Fletcher, in rare Ben and our ain Drummond, I tine the sorrows o' the
day in the glories o' the days that are past.'

That we may accept Ramsay's account of the studies of Patie, the Gentle
Shepherd, as a type of his own is warranted by something more than
tradition. The internal evidence of hi