--a daughter named Agnes. Witnesses, James Norie, painter, and
George Young, chyrurgeon. Born the 9th instant. 10th August 1725.'

Besides these named above, Chalmers states that Christian Ross brought
Allan Ramsay three other daughters, who were not recorded in the
Register,--one born in 1719, one in 1720, and one in 1724,--who are
mentioned in his letter to Smibert as 'fine girls, no ae wally-draigle
among them all.'

In 1719 our poet published his first edition of 'Scots Songs,'--some
original, others collected from all sources, and comprising many of the
gems of Scottish lyrical poetry. The success attending the volume was
instant and gratifying, and led, as we will see further on, to other
publications of a cognate but more ambitious character. Almost
contemporaneously was published, in a single sheet or _broadside_, what
proved to be the germ of the _Gentle Shepherd_--to wit, a _Pastoral
Dialogue between Patie and Roger_. The dialogue was reprinted in the
quarto of 1721, and was much admired by all the lovers of poetry of the
period.

A reliable gauge of the estimation wherein Ramsay was now held, as
Scotland's great vernacular poet, is afforded in the metrical epistles
sent to him during the closing months of 1719 by Lieutenant William
Hamilton of Gilbertfield, to which Allan returned replies in similar
terms. This was not a poetical tourney like the famous 'flyting' between
Dunbar and Kennedy, two hundred and thirty years before. In the latter,
the two tilters sought to say the hardest and the bitterest things of
each other, though they professed to joust with pointless spears; in the
former, Hamilton and Ramsay, on the contrary, vied each with the other
in paying the pleasantest compliments. Gilbertfield contributed a
luscious sop to his correspondent's vanity when he saluted him, in a
stanza alluded to by Burns in his own familiar tribute, as--

'O fam'd and celebrated Allan!
Renowned Ramsay! canty callan!
There's nowther Highland-man nor Lawlan,
In poetrie,
But may as soon ding down Tantallan,
As match wi' thee.'

Then he proceeds to inform honest Allan that of 'poetry, the hail
quintescence, thou hast suck'd up,' and affirms that--

'Tho' Ben and Dryden of renown
Were yet alive in London town,
Like kings contending for a crown,
'Twad be a pingle,
Whilk o' you three wad gar words sound
And best to jingle.'

Af