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In the reign of Queen Anne there were the stirrings of a literary revival in Scotland. No name connects itself more distinctly with this interesting phenomenon than that of Allan Ramsay.

Be that as it may,--and there are curious intricacies in the speculation,--Allan Ramsay not only belonged to the wig-wearing age in Scotland, but was brought up to the business of wig-making and wig-dressing for the Edinburgh lieges. It was no bad employment in a population of between 30,000 and 40,000 inhabitants, including resident noblemen and lairds, and a good many professional men and merchants, all of whom wore wigs, and liked them to be handsome. Accordingly, when, in or about the year 1708, or just after the Union, young Ramsay, having concluded his apprenticeship, started in business for himself, in some shop in the High Street, or one of its offshoots, his prospects were fair enough. Skipping four years, and coming to the year 1712, when he was twenty-five years of age, we find him just married to the daughter of a respectable Edinburgh lawyer, and in very comfortable circumstances otherwise. It was then that he was beginning to be known in the cosy society of old Edinburgh as not only an expert wig-maker but also something besides.

"Whenever fame, with voice of thunder, Sets up a chield a warld's wonder, Either for slashing folk to dead, Or having wind-mills in his head, Or poet, or an airy beau, Or ony twa-legged rary-show, They wha have never seen't are busy To speer what-like a carlie is he."

The words are Ramsay's own, by way of preface in one of his poems to an account of his personal appearance and general character. The description, though not written till 1719, will do very well for 1712:--

Elsewhere, more briefly, he describes himself as

"A little man that lo'es my ease,"

and again as one who much enjoyed, in good company,

"An evening and guffaw."

This kind of pleasure he was in the habit of enjoying more particularly in one of those many clubs into which the citizens of dense Auld Reekie then distributed themselves for the purposes of conviviality. It consisted of about a dozen kindred spirits calling themselves "The Easy Club," professing literary tastes, and making it a rule that each of them should be known within the club by some adopted name of literary associations. Ramsay's first club-name was "Isaac Bickerstaff," but he changed it after a while for "Gavin Douglas." There is a significance in both names, and in the exchange of the one for the other.

On the learn'd days of Gawn Dunkell: Our country then a tale could tell; Europe had nane mair snack and snell At verse or prose; Our Kings were poets too themsell, Bauld and jocose."

In this double direction of Ramsay's literary likings,--his respectful obeisance to the literary merits of his London contemporaries, and his fonder private affection for the old poets of his Scottish vernacular,--we have the key to his own literary life.

"Say, wad ye ken my gate of fending, My income, management, and spending? Born to nae landship,--mair's the pity,-- Yet denizen of this fair city, I make what honest shift I can, And in my ain house am good-man; Which stands in Ed'nburgh's street the sun-side. I theek the out and line the inside Of mony a douce and witty pash, And baith ways gather in the cash."

Another distinction of the volume was a portrait of the author, excellently engraved after a painting by an Edinburgh artist-friend. It represents a youngish man, with a bright, knowing, clever face, a smallish and sensitive nose, and fine and lively eyes. One observes that there is no wig, or semblance of a wig, in the portrait, but only the natural hair, closely cropped to the shape of the head, and surmounted by a neat Scotch bonnet, cocked a little to one side. As it is impossible to suppose that a man who lived by making wigs did not wear one himself, the inference must be that, in a portrait which was to represent him in his poetical capacity, the wig was rejected by artistic instinct. In later portraits of Ramsay it is the same, save that the small Scotch bonnet is superseded in these by a kind of cloth turban of several folds. In proof that this deviation in the portraits from the usual habit of real life was suggested by artistic instinct, one may note that there is the same deviation in the portraits of most of the other real British poets of the wig-wearing age. Pope, Prior, Gay, and Thomson all appear in their portraits with something like Allan Ramsay's turban or night-cap for their head-dress; and it descended to the poet Cowper.

"Beneath the south side of a craigy bield, Where a clear spring did halesome water yield, Twa youthfu' shepherds on the gowans lay, Tending their flocks ae bonny morn of May: Poor Roger graned till hollow echoes rang, While merry Patie hummed himsel a sang."

The tenancy of this house by Ramsay lasted but a year longer. He had resolved to add to his general business of bookselling and publishing that of a circulating library, the first institution of the kind in Edinburgh. For this purpose he had taken new premises, still in the High Street, but in a position even more central and conspicuous than that of "The Mercury" opposite Niddry's Wynd. They were, in fact, in the easternmost house of the Luckenbooths, or lower part of that obstructive stack of buildings, already mentioned, which once ran up the High Street alongside of St. Giles's Church, dividing the traffic into two narrow and overcrowded channels. It is many years since the Luckenbooths and the whole obstruction of which they formed a part were swept away; but from old prints we can see that the last house of the Luckenbooths to the east was a tall tenement of five storeys, with its main face looking straight down the lower slope of the High Street towards the Canongate. The strange thing was that, though thus in the very heart of the bustle of the town as congregated round the Cross, the house commanded from its higher windows a view beyond the town altogether, away to Aberlady Bay and the farther reaches of sea and land in that direction. It was into this house that Ramsay removed in 1726, when he was exactly forty years of age. The part occupied by him was the flat immediately above the basement floor, but perhaps with that floor in addition. The sign he adopted for the new premises was one exhibiting the heads or effigies of Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden.

"Shall London have its houses twa And we doomed to have nane ava'? Is our metropolis, ance the place Where langsyne dwelt the royal race Of Fergus, this gate dwindled down To a level with ilk clachan town, While thus she suffers the subversion Of her maist rational diversion?"

However severe the loss to Ramsay at the time, it was soon tided over. Within six years he is found again quite at ease in his worldly fortunes. His son, for some years back from Italy, was in rapidly rising repute as a portrait-painter, alternating between London and Edinburgh in the practice of his profession, and a man of mark in Edinburgh society on his own account; and, whether by a junction of the son's means with the father's, or by the father's means alone, it was now that there reared itself in Edinburgh the edifice which at the present day most distinctly preserves for the inhabitants the memory of the Ramsay family in their Edinburgh connections. The probability is that, since Allan had entered on his business premises at the end of the Luckenbooths, his dwelling-house had been somewhere else in the town or suburbs; but in 1743 he built himself a new dwelling-house on the very choicest site that the venerable old town afforded. It was that quaint octagon-shaped villa, with an attached slope of green and pleasure-ground, on the north side of the Castle Hill, which, as well from its form as from its situation, attracts the eye as one walks along Princes Street, and which still retains the name of Ramsay Lodge. The wags of the day, making fun of its quaint shape, likened the construction to a goose-pie; and something of that fancied resemblance may be traced even now in its extended and improved proportions. But envy may have had a good deal to do with the comparison. It is still a neat and comfortable dwelling internally, while it commands from its elevation an extent of scenery unsurpassed anywhere in Europe. The view from it ranges from the sea-mouth of the Firth of Forth on the east to the first glimpses of the Stirlingshire Highlands on the west, and again due north across the levels of the New Town, and the flashing waters of the Firth below them, to the bounding outline of the Fifeshire hills. When, in 1743, before there was as yet any New Town at all, Allan Ramsay took up his abode in this villa, he must have been considered a fortunate and happy man. His entry into it was saddened, indeed, by the death of his wife, which occurred just about that time; but for fourteen years of widowerhood, with two of his daughters for his companions, he lived in it serenely and hospitably. During the first nine years of those fourteen he still went daily to his shop in the Luckenbooths, attending to his various occupations, and especially to his circulating library, which is said to have contained by this time about 30,000 volumes; but for the last five or six years he had entirely relinquished business. There are authentic accounts of his habits and demeanour in his last days, and they concur in representing him as one of the most charming old gentlemen possible, vivacious and sprightly in conversation, full of benevolence and good humour, and especially fond of children and kindly in his ways for their amusement. He died on the 7th of January 1758, in the seventy-second year of his age, and was buried in Greyfriars Churchyard.

LADY WARDLAW AND THE BARONESS NAIRNE

"Stately stept he east the wa', And stately stept he west; Full seventy years he now had seen, With scarce seven years of rest. He lived when Britons' breach of faith Wrocht Scotland mickle wae; And aye his sword tauld, to their cost, He was their deadly fae.

High on a hill his castle stood, With halls and towers a-hicht, And guidly chambers fair to see, Whare he lodged mony a knicht. His dame, sae peerless ance and fair, For chaste and beauty deemed, Nae marrow had in a' the land, Save Eleanour the Queen.

Full thirteen sons to him she bare, All men of valour stout; In bluidy fecht with sword in hand Nine lost their lives bot doubt: Four yet remain; lang may they live To stand by liege and land! High was their fame, high was their micht, And high was their command.

Great love they bare to Fairly fair, Their sister saft and dear: Her girdle shawed her middle jimp, And gowden glist her hair. What waefu' wae her beauty bred, Waefu' to young and auld; Waefu', I trow, to kith and kin, As story ever tauld!"

Here we see the old hero Hardyknute in peace in the midst of his family, his fighting days supposed to be over, and his high castle on the hill, where he and his lady dwell, with their four surviving sons and their one daughter, Fairly Fair, one of the lordly boasts of a smiling country. But suddenly there is an invasion. The King of Norse, puffed up with power and might, lands in fair Scotland; and the King of Scotland, hearing the tidings as he sits with his chiefs, "drinking the blude-red wine," sends out summonses in haste for all his warriors to join him. Hardyknute receives a special message.

"Then red, red grew his dark-brown cheeks; Sae did his dark-brown brow; His looks grew keen, as they were wont In dangers great to do."

Old as he is, he will set out at once, taking his three eldest sons with him, Robin, Thomas, and Malcolm, and telling his lady in his farewell to her:--

"My youngest son sall here remain To guaird these stately towers, And shoot the silver bolt that keeps Sae fast your painted bowers."

And so we take leave of the high castle on the hill, with the lady, her youngest son, and Fairly fair, in it, and follow the old lord and his other three sons over the moors and through the glens as they ride to the rendezvous. On their way they encounter a wounded knight, lying on the ground and making a heavy moan:--

Hardyknute, stopping, comforts him; says that, if he can but mount his steed and manage to get to his castle on the hill, he will be tended there by his lady and Fairly fair herself; and offers to detach some of his men with him for convoy.

"With smileless look and visage wan The wounded knicht replied: 'Kind chieftain, your intent pursue, For here I maun abide.

'To me nae after day nor nicht Can e'er be sweet or fair; But soon, beneath some drapping tree, Cauld death sail end my care.'"

Farther pleading by Hardyknute avails nothing; and, as time presses, he has to depart, leaving the wounded knight, so far as we can see, on the ground as he had found him, still making his moan. Then, after farther riding over a great region, called vaguely Lord Chattan's land, we have the arrival of Hardyknute and his three sons in the King of Scotland's camp, minstrels marching before them playing pibrochs. Hardly have they been welcomed when the battle with the Norse King and his host is begun. It is described at considerable length, and with much power, though confusedly, so that one hardly knows who is speaking or who is wounded amid the whirr of arrows, the shouting, and the clash of armour. One sees, however, Hardyknute and two of his sons fighting grandly in the pell-mell. At last it is all over, and we know that the Norse King and his host have been routed, and that Scotland has been saved.

"In thraws of death, with wallert cheek, All panting on the plain, The fainting corps of warriors lay, Ne'er to arise again: Ne'er to return to native land; Nae mair wi' blythesome sounds To boist the glories of the day And shaw their shinand wounds.

On Norway's coast the widowed dame May wash the rock with tears, May lang look ower the shipless seas, Before her mate appears. Cease, Emma, cease to hope in vain: Thy lord lies in the clay; The valiant Scats nae reivers thole To carry life away.

There, on a lea where stands a cross Set up for monument, Thousands full fierce, that summer's day, Filled keen war's black intent. Let Scots, while Scots, praise Hardyknute; Let Norse the name aye dread; Aye how he foucht, aft how he spared, Sall latest ages read."

Here the story might seem to end, and here perhaps it was intended at first that it should end; but in the completer copies there are three more stanzas, taking us back to Hardyknute's castle on the high hill. We are to fancy Hardyknute and his sons returning joyfully thither after the great victory:--

"Loud and chill blew the westlin wind, Sair beat the heavy shower; Mirk grew the nicht ere Hardyknute Wan near his stately tower: His tower, that used with torches' bleeze To shine sae far at nicht, Seemed now as black as mourning weed: Nae marvel sair he sich'd.

'There's nae licht in my lady's bower; There's nae licht in my hall; Nae blink shines round my Fairly fair, Nor ward stands on my wall. What bodes it? Robert, Thomas, say!' Nae answer fits their dread. 'Stand back, my sons! I'll be your guide!' But by they passed wi' speed.

'As fast I have sped ower Scotland's faes.' There ceased his brag of weir, Sair shamed to mind oucht but his dame And maiden Fairly fair. Black fear he felt, but what to fear He wist not yet with dread: Sair shook his body, sair his limbs; And all the warrior fled."

And so the fragment really ends, making us aware of some dreadful catastrophe, though what it is we know not. Something ghastly has happened in the castle during Hardyknute's absence, but it is left untold. Only, by a kind of necessity of the imagination, we connect it somehow with that wounded knight whom Hardyknute had met lying on the ground as he was hurrying to the war, and whom he had left making his moan. Was he a fiend, or what?

It seems strange now that any critic could ever have taken the ballad for a really old one, to be dated from the sixteenth century or earlier. Apart from the trick of old spelling, and affectation of the antique in a word or two, the phraseology, the manner, the cadence, the style of the Scotch employed, are all of about the date of the first publication of the ballad, the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The phrase "Let Scots, while Scots, praise Hardyknute," and the phrase "And all the warrior fled," are decisive; and, while there might be room for the supposition that some old legend suggested the subject to the author, the general cast of the whole forbids the idea that it is merely a version of some transmitted original.

Of Lady Wardlaw herself we hear nothing more distinct than that she was "a woman of elegant accomplishments, who wrote other poems, and practised drawing and cutting paper with her scissors, and who had much wit and humour, with great sweetness of temper." So we must be content to imagine her,--a bright-minded and graceful lady, living in Fifeshire, or coming and going between Fifeshire and Edinburgh, nearly two centuries ago, and who, while attending to her family duties and the duties of her station, could cherish in secret a poetic vein peculiarly her own, and produce at least one fine ballad of an ideal Scottish antique. This in itself would be much. For that was the age of Queen Anne and of the first of the Georges, when poetry of an ideal or romantic kind was perhaps at its lowest ebb throughout the British Islands, and the poetry most in repute was that of the modern school of artificial wit and polish represented by Addison and Pope.

In the year 1766, seven years after the birth of Burns, and five before that of Scott, there was born, in the old house of Gask in Strathearn, Perthshire, a certain Carolina Oliphant, the third child of Laurence Oliphant the younger, who, by the death of his father the next year, became the Laird of Gask and the representative of the old family of the Oliphants.

Somewhat stately and melancholic himself, and keeping up the ceremonious distance between him and his children then thought proper, the Laird of Gask had those liberal and anti-morose views of education which belonged especially to Scottish nonjuring or Episcopalian families. A wide range of reading was permitted to the boys and the girls; dancing, especially reel-dancing, was incessant among them,--at home, in the houses of neighbouring lairds, or at county-balls; in music, especially in Scottish song, they were all expert, so that the rumour of a coming visit of Neil Gow and his violin to Strathearn, with the prospect it brought them of a week extraordinary of combined music and reel-dancing, would set them all madly astir; but the most musical of the family by far was Carolina. She lived in music, in mirth, legend, Highland scenery, and the dance, a beautiful girl to boot, and called "the Flower of Strathearn," of tall and graceful mien, with fine eyes, and fine sensitive features, slightly proud and aquiline. And so to 1792, when her father, the valetudinary laird, died, some of his children already out in the world, but this one, at the age of twenty-six, still unmarried.

For fourteen years more we hear of her as still living in the old house of Gask with her brother Laurence, the new Laird, and with the wife he brought into it in 1795,--the even tenor of her existence broken only by some such incident as a visit to the north of England. During this time it is that we become aware also of the beginnings in her mind of a deep new seriousness, a pious devoutness, which, without interfering with her passionate fondness for song and music, or her liking for mirth and humour and every form of art, continued to be thenceforth the dominant feeling of her life, bringing her into closer and closer affinity with the "fervid" or "evangelical" in religion in whatever denomination it appeared. All this while, or for the greater part of it, there was an engagement between her and a half-cousin of hers, Captain Nairne. He was of Irish birth, but of the Scottish family of the Perthshire Nairnes, and heir, after his elder brother's death, to the Nairne peerage, should that peerage, which had been attainted after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, be ever revived. Of that there seemed no hope, and Captain Nairne's fortunes and prospects were of the poorest. Not till the year 1806, therefore, when he was promoted to the brevet rank of Major, and obtained the appointment of Assistant-Inspector-General of Barracks in Scotland, were the betrothed cousins able to marry, she then in her fortieth year, and he nine years older.

In 1830, six years after the recovery of his title, Lord Nairne died. This broke Lady Nairne's domiciliary tie to Edinburgh. She removed first to the south of England, to be with some of her relatives; thence to Ireland, where she lived a year or two; and thence in 1834 to the Continent, on account of the ill-health of her son, the new Lord Nairne, then a young man of six-and-twenty. For the next three years, she, her son, and her widowed sister Mrs. Keith, moved about, through France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, mainly for the recreation and recruiting of the sickly young Lord, who, however, died at Brussels in December 1837, in his thirtieth year, and was there buried.

The widowed Baroness, thus childless and lonely in the world, continued to live abroad for a year or two longer, chiefly in Germany and in Paris. Her consolations in her bereavement were in correspondence with her nephews and nieces at home, in readings in religious and other good books, in her interest in Christian missions and other movements of Protestant Evangelism, and in secret acts of charity in aid of such missions and movements, or in relief of private distresses. A foreign waiting-maid, who was long in her service abroad, described her afterwards in these words: "My lady was as near to an angel as human weakness might permit." But she was not to die abroad. In the year 1843, just after the Disruption of the Scottish Church,--in which event, though she remained a loyal Scottish Episcopalian as before, her interest was remarkably deep,--she was persuaded to return to Scotland and take up her residence once more at Gask: not now in the old house in which she had been born, but in the new mansion that had been built by her nephew, James Blair Oliphant, then Laird of Gask. Here she lived two years more, in the serene piety of a beautiful old age, and in deeds, every week or every day, of benevolence and mercy. She was able to visit Edinburgh once or twice; and it was there, in the year 1844, that she consulted Dr. Chalmers, whom she admired greatly and with whom she had already been in correspondence, as to fit objects for such charitable donations as her thrift enabled her to spare. She gave him, besides other smaller sums, the ?300 which enabled him to accomplish the object he had then most at heart by acquiring a site for the schools and church he had resolved to plant, and did plant, amid what he called the "heathenism" of the West Port, in the very labyrinth of closes in that rank neighbourhood which had been made hideous by the Burke and Hare murders of 1828. Dr. Chalmers alone knew of the gift; no one else. A few months more of invalid existence at Gask House, with failing memory, and somewhat paralytic, and the saintly lady's life was over. She died October 27, 1845, in the house of Gask, at the age of seventy-nine. Her remains rest in a chapel near that house, erected for Episcopal service on the site of the old parish church, in the midst of the scenery of her native Strathearn, which she loved in life so well.

That this woman had ever written a line of verse was a secret which she all but carried to the grave with her. And yet for fifty years, no less, people all round her had been singing her songs and talking about them with admiration, and phrases from them had become household words throughout Scotland, and some of them were universally spoken of as the finest Scottish songs, the songs of keenest and deepest genius, since those of Burns.

"The news frae Moidart cam yestreen Will soon gar mony ferly, For ships o' war hae just come in And landit Royal Charlie. Come through the heather, around him gather; Ye're a' the welcomer early; Around him cling wi' a' your kin; For wha'll be King but Charlie? Come through the heather, around him gather, Come Ronald, come Donald, come a' thegither, And crown your rightfu', lawfu' King! For wha'll be King but Charlie?"

"Dumfoundered, the English saw, they saw; Dumfoundered, they heard the blaw, the blaw; Dumfoundered, they a' ran awa, awa, From the hundred pipers an' a', an' a'. Wi' a hundred pipers an' a', an' a', Wi' a hundred pipers an' a', an' a', We'll up and gie them a blaw, a blaw, Wi' a hundred pipers an' a', an' a'."

THE LAIRD O' COCKPEN.

"The Laird o' Cockpen, he's proud and he's great: His mind is ta'en up wi' the things o' the state: He wanted a wife his braw house to keep: But favour wi' wooin' was fashious to seek.

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