RAMSAYAllan (1686-1758), author of the Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral drama in the Lowland Scotch dialect, was born in Lanarkshire in 1686. An Edinburgh barber set agoing the literary movement in Scotland that culminated in the poetry of Burns. This peasant-poetry is often spoken of as if it were a spontaneous indigenous product, but the harvest that ripened towards the close of the 18th century had its seed-time earlier, and the seeds were imported from England. Allan Ramsay was a peasant by birth (although he claimed kinship with the noble family of Dalhousie)—the son of a manager of lead-mines in Lanarkshire; but the country-bred lad was transplanted to a town, being apprenticed at the age of fifteen to a barber in Edinburgh. In this calling he somehow made the acquaintance of a band of Jacobite young gentlemen of literary tastes, was admitted to the convivialities of their “Easy Club,” and formally adjudged “a gentleman.” The basis of the club seems to have been literary, the members taking fancy names of celebrities,—Buchanan, Boece, Bickerstaff, and so forth. Ramsay’s name was Bickerstaff, and the fact is of some importance as showing how he was brought into contact with the discussion of the theory of pastoral poetry among the London wits of the time. Ramsay’s connexion with the Easy Club lay between 1712 and 1715, and in the course of that period occurred the dispute about pastoral poetry occasioned by the great publication of Pope’s Windsor Forest (see Pope). The Guardian for 7tli April 1713 (No. 23) contained a description of a true pastoral poem, which was afterwards realized by Ramsay in the Gentle Shepherd with such scrupulous fidelity in every detail that the criticism might fairly be described as the recipe from which the poem was made. ...There is not a clearer case in literary history of the influence of criticism on creation; Ramsay’s great pastoral— and it well deserves the epithet—was the main outcome of the prolonged discussion of that kind of poetry by the Queen Anne wits. “Paint the manners of actual rustic life,” said the Guardian critic to the poet, “not the manners of artificial shepherds and shepherdesses in a fictitious golden age; use actual rustic dialect; instead of satyrs and fauns and nymphs introduce the supernatural creatures of modern superstition.” These precepts Ramsay diligently observed, and the result was that his Gentle Shepherd not only attracted attention among the learned students of poetry as a literary curiosity, the first genuine pastoral after Theocritus, but at once became a favourite and a living force among the peasantry in whose dialect it was written and for wdiose characters it furnished ideal models. There was hardly a farmhouse in Scotland in which a copy of the poem was not to be found, and the moral force of the ideal exhibited in the hero Patie may be traced in the character of Burns and many another Scottish peasant-bard in whom ostentatious libertinism is not redeemed by the same genius. From a moral point of view a better exemplar than Ramsay’s ideal hero might well have been desired. The poct-laureate of the Easy Club took his moral tone from the poets of the Restoration, with whom his Jacobite boon companions were in full sympathy; and thus through the genial, convivial, quick-witted, and slily humorous barber the spirit of the Restoration passed into the homes of the Scotch peasantry to do battle with the austere spirit of the kirk.
The Gentle Shepherd is the only production of Ramsay’s that has much claim to remembrance. His lyrics for the most part are poor artificial imitations, adorned here and there with pretty fancies, but devoid of sincerity of feeling. He is happier in his humorous descriptions of character and occasional personal poems; “renowned Allan, canty callan,” as his admirers loved to call him, had a quick sense of the ridiculous and a firm touch in the exhibition of what amused him. Once he had established a character as a poet he abandoned the trade of wig-making, set up as a bookseller, and was the first to start a circulating library in Scotland. From his shop in High Street opposite Niddry Street he issued his incidental poems in broadsheets, and made a volume of them in 1721, and another in 1728. The nucleus of the Gentle Shepherd was laid in separately issued pastoral dialogues; round these the complete drama was built and published as a whole in 1725. As a collector, editor, imitator, and publisher of old Scottish poetry Ramsay gave an impetus to vernacular literature at least as great as that given by his principal original poem. His Tea-Table Miscellany , published in 1724, for which English as well a3 Scottish poets and moderns as well as ancients were laid under contribution, was extremely popular; and his Evergreen (1724), a collection of poems written prior to 1G00, was the precursor of Bishop Percy’s Reliques in a similar field. A collection of Fables, published complete in 1730, part original, part translated from La Motte and La Fontaine, was Ramsay’s last literary work, but he lived to an advanced age, dying in 1758, the year before the birth of Burns. One of the speculations of the enlightened and enterprising man of business was a theatre, which was opened in 1736, but soon shut up by the magistrates.
A complete edition of Ramsay’s poems was issued by A. Gardner in 1877.
RAMSAYAllan (1713-1784), portrait-painter, the eldest son of the author of The Gentle Shepherd, was born at Edinburgh about 1713. Ramsay manifested an aptitude for art from an early period, and at the age of twenty we find him in London studying under the Swedish painter Hans Huyssing, and at the St Martin’s Lane Academy; and in 1736 he left for Rome, where he worked for three years under Solimena and Imperiali (Fernandi). On his return he settled in Edinburgh; and, having attracted attention by his head of Forbes of Culloden and his full-length of the duke of Argyll, he removed to London, where he was patronized by the duke of Bridgewater. His pleasant manners and varied culture, not less than his artistic skill, contributed to render him popular.. In 1767 the Scotsman was appointed to succeed Shakelton as principal painter to His Majesty; and so fully employed was he on the royal portraits which the king was in the habit of presenting to ambassadors and colonial governors that he was forced to take advantage of the services of a host of assistants—of whom David Martin and Philip Reinagle are the best known—upon the minor portions of his works, and sometimes on the faces themselves. His life in London was varied by frequent visits to Italy, where he occupied himself more in literary and antiquarian research than with art. But at length this prosperous career came to an end. The painter’s health was shattered by an accident, a dislocation of the right arm. With an unflinching pertinacity, which we can understand when we see the firm-set resolute mouth of his own portrait, he struggled till he had completed a likeness of the king upon which he was engaged at the time, and then started for his beloved Italy, leaving behind him a series of fifty royal portraits to be completed by his assistant Reinagle. For several years he lingered in the south, his constitution finally broken. He died at Dover on the 10th of August 1784.
In his art Ramsay paid the penalty of popularity: the quality of the work which bears his name suffered from his unremitting assiduity as a court-painter and from his unsparing employment of assistants. Among his most satisfactory productions are some of his earlier ones, such as the full-length of the duke of Argyll, and the numerous bust-portraits of Scottish gentlemen and their ladies which he executed before settling in London. They are full of both grace and individuality; the features show excellent draughtsmanship; and the flesh-painting is firm and sound in method, though frequently tending a little to hardness and opacity. His full-length of Lady Mary Coke is an especially elegant female portrait, remarkable for the skill and delicacy with which the white satin drapery is managed; while in the portrait of his brown-eyed wife, the eldest daughter of Sir Alexander Lindsay of Evelick, in the Scottish National Gallery, we have a sweetness and tenderness which shows the painter at his highest. This last-named work shows the influence of French art, an influence which helped greatly to form the practice of Ramsay, and which is even more clearly visible in the large collection of his sketches inthe possession of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Board of Trustees, Edinburgh.
RAMSAYAndrew Michael (1686-1743), commonly called the “Chevalier Ramsay,” who was born at Ayr, Scotland, on 9th January 1686, is noteworthy as having been among the few writers not of French birth who are admitted by French criticism to have written in French with purity and scholarship. Ramsay visited France comparatively early and came under the influence of Fénelon, which made him a convert to Roman Catholicism. He held several important tutorships in his adopted country, the chief of which was the charge of Prince Charles Edward and the future cardinal of York. His biographers mention with surprise the conferring of an honorary degree upon him by the university of Oxford. The claim was nominally his discipleship to Fénelon, but in reality beyond doubt his connexion with the Jacobite party. He died at St Germain-en-Laye (Seine-et-Oise) on 6tli May 1743.
Ramsay’s principal work was the Travels of Cyrus (London and Paris, 1727), a book composed in avowed imitation of Télémaque. He also edited Télémaque itself with an introduction, and wrote an Essai de Politique on the principles of his master and a Histoire de la Vie et des Ouvrages de Fénelon, besides a partial biography of Turenne, some poems in English, and other miscellaneous works.
RAMSAYDavid (1749-1815), American physician and historian, was the son of an Irish emigrant, and was born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, on 2d April 1749. After graduating M.D. at Princeton College in 1765 he settled as a physician at Charleston, where he obtained an extensive practice. During the revolutionary Avar he served as a field-surgeon, and in 1776 he became a member of the South Carolina legislature. Ha r ing acted as one of the “council of safety” at Charleston, he Avas on the capture of that city on 27th August 1780 seized by the British as a hostage, and for nearly a year was kept in confinement at St Augustine. From 1782 to 1786 he was a member of Congress. His interest in the revolutionary struggle led him to devote his leisure to the preparation of several historical works on the subject, and in 1785 he published in tAvo volumes History of the Revolution in South Carolina, in 1789 in two volumes History of the American Revolution, in 1801 a Life of Washington, and in 1809 in two volumes a History of South Carolina. He was also the author of several minor works. He died at Charleston on 8th May 1815 from a Avound inflicted by a lunatic. His History of the United States in 3 vols, was published posthumously in 1816, and forms the first three volumes of his Universal History Americanized, published in 12 A r ols. in 1819.
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