ruce genty
wigmaker, Maister Allan Ramsay, doon ayont the Tron Kirk.'

Yea! verily, it was a love drama, but as yet only in the first scene of
the first act. The 'Miss Kirsty' of the brief dialogue recorded
above--for the authenticity of which there is abundant evidence--was
Miss Christian Ross, eldest daughter of Mr. James Ross, a lawyer of some
repute in his day, whose practice lay largely in the Bailie's and
Sheriff's Courts, and with minor cases in the Justiciary Court, but not
with civil business before the Court of Session, an honour rigorously
reserved for the members of that close Corporation--the Writers to His
Majesty's Signet.

But though not belonging, in slang phrase, 'to the upper crust' of the
legal fraternity, James Ross was a man of some social consideration.
Though he appears to have had a strain of the fashionable Pharisee in
him, and to have esteemed gentle birth as covering any multitude of sins
and peccadilloes, he manifested, throughout his intercourse with Ramsay,
certain countervailing virtues that render him dear to the lovers of the
poet. He made distinct pretensions to the possession of culture and a
love of _belles-lettres_. To the best Edinburgh society of the period he
and his had the _entree_, while his house in Blair's Close, on the
southern slope of the Castlehill, was the rendezvous for most of the
_literati_ of the city, as well as for the _beaux esprits_ of the Easy
Club, of which he was a member.

His acquaintance with the young wigmaker--whose sign of the 'Mercury,'
situate in the High Street, or, as the poet himself writes, 'on
Edinburgh's Street the sun-side,' was almost immediately opposite
Niddry's Wynd, and at the head of Halkerston's Wynd, and within sixty
yards of the Tron Church--had originated in the weekly visits paid by
him to Allan's shop for the purpose of getting his wig dressed. While
waiting until this important item in an eighteenth-century gentleman's
toilet was accomplished, he had enjoyed many a 'crack' with the young
craftsman, so shrewd, so witty, so genial, yet withal so industrious.
The man of pleas and precepts discovered him of powder and perukes to
be as deeply interested and, in good sooth, as deeply versed in the
literature of his own land as the lawyer himself. Chance acquaintance
gradually ripened, on both sides, into cordial esteem. James Ross
invited Ramsay to visit him at his house, and there the young
_perruquier_ beheld his fate in Christian,