s
wont to walk up and down the space in front of their classrooms with
Professors Drummond and Maclaurin, as 'the great poet, Allan Ramsay.'
The narrator also added, he felt a secret disappointment when thus
viewing for the first time a real live poet, and noting that he differed
neither in dress nor mien from ordinary men. From his studies among the
classics, and from the prints in the early editions of Horace and
Virgil, he had been led to imagine the genus poet always perambulated
the earth attired in flowing singing robes, their forehead bound with a
chaplet, and carrying with them a substantial looking lyre!

The year 1728 had witnessed, as we have seen, the publication of Allan
Ramsay's last original work. Thereafter he was content to rest on his
laurels, to revise new editions of his various poems, and to add to his
_Tea-Table Miscellany_ and _Scots Songs_. Perhaps he may have been
conscious that the golden glow of youthful imagination at life's
meridian, had already given place to those soberer tints that rise
athwart the mental horizon, when the Rubicon of the forties has been
crossed. In 1737, when writing to his friend Smibert, the painter (then
in Boston, America, whither he had emigrated), Ramsay states, with
reference to his relinquishment of poetry: 'These six or seven years
past I have not written a line of poetry; I e'en gave over in good time,
before the coolness of fancy that attends advanced years should make me
risk the reputation I had acquired.' He then adds in the letter the
following lines of poetry, from which we gather, further, that his
determination was the result, not of mere impulse, pique, or chagrin,
but of reasoned resolve--

'Frae twenty-five to five-and-forty,
My muse was neither sweer nor dorty;
My Pegasus would break his tether,
E'en at the shaking of a feather,
And through ideas scour like drift,
Straking his wings up to the lift.
Then, then my soul was in a low,
That gart my numbers safely row;
_But eild and judgment 'gin to say,
Let be your sangs and learn to pray_.'

By 1730, then, Ramsay's work, of an original kind at least, was over. In
that year, however, he published another short volume of metrical
fables, under the title, _A Collection of Thirty Fables_. Amongst them
we find some of the most delightful of all our poet's work in this vein.
_Mercury in Quest of Peace_, _The Twa Lizards_, _The Caterpillar and the
Ant_, and _The T