rst of his known productions; and we may well
believe that the jovial shopkeepers were delighted with the sensation of
possessing a poet of their own, and held many a discussion upon the new
verses--brimful of local allusions and circumstances which everybody
knew--over their ale as they rested in the village changehouse, or among
the fumes of their punch in their evening assemblies. Verses warm from
the poet's brain have a certain intoxicating quality akin to the toddy,
and no doubt the citizens slapped their thighs and snapped their fingers
with delight when some well-known name appeared, the incidents of some
story they knew by heart, or the features of some familiar character.
The satisfaction of finding in what they would call poetry a host of
local allusions about which there was no ambiguity, which they
understood like their ABC, would rouse the first hearers to noisy
enthusiasm. And thus encouraged, the cheerful bard (as he was called in
those days) went on till his fame penetrated beyond the club. Another
elegy of a more serious description was so highly thought of that it was
printed and given to the world by the club itself. That world meant
Edinburgh, its many tradesmen, the crowded inhabitants of all the lofty
"lands" about that centre of busy social life where the Cross still
stood, and the old Tolbooth gloomed over the street, cut in two by its
big bulk and the fabric of the Luckenbooths, a sort of island of masonry
which divided what is now the broad and airy High Street opposite St.
Giles's into two narrow straits. The writers and the advocates, the
professors and the clergy, Councillor Pleydell and his kind, were not
the first to discover that Ramsay the wigmaker had something in him more
than the other rough wits of the shops and markets. And by and by the
goodwives in their high lodgings, floor over floor, ever glad of
something new, learnt to send one of the bairns with a penny to the
wigmaker's shop in the afternoon to see if Allan Ramsay had printed a
new poem: and received with rapture the damp broadsheet brought in fresh
from the press, with a fable or a song in "gude braid Scots," or a witty
letter to some answering rhymester full of local names and things. There
was no evening paper in those days, and had there been it was very
unlikely it would have penetrated into all the common stairs and crowded
tenements. But Allan's songs, of which Jean or Peggy would "ken the
tune," and the stories that w