space in the previous century. And
the view from Ramsay's shop--from which by this time the wigs had
entirely disappeared, and which was now a refined and cultured
bookseller's, adorned outside with medallions of two poets, Scotch and
English, Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden--was bounded by the gate
of the Netherbow with its picturesque tower, and glimpses through the
open roadway, of the Canongate beyond, and the cross lines of busy
traffic leading to Leith. It was thus a wide space between the lines of
high houses, more like a Place than a street, upon which the two gossips
gazed, no doubt with a complacent thought that their living presence
underneath carried out the symbol of the two heads above--the poets of
England and of Scotland--and that in the teeming street below them were
many who pointed out to each other this new and delightful combination.
They were not great poets, either of these round, fat, oily men of
verse. And yet the association was pleasant. Perhaps the duchess's
coach-and-six, in which the English bard had been conveyed from London,
might drive through the open port, as the two stood delighted, watching
the pedestrians hurry out of the way and the great lawyers and officials
preparing to pay their devoirs to her Grace as she drew up before the
bookshop. No doubt they thought it a scene to be remembered in the
history of letters. She was at Penicuik House on a visit to the Clerks,
who were friends and patrons of Allan, and no doubt had supped or drunk
a dish of tea at New Hall, where the Lord President (who was only the
Lord Advocate in those days) often took his case in his cousin's house,
where Ramsay was a familiar and frequent guest. When Allan made wigs no
longer, when all his occupations were about books, and everybody in
Edinburgh, gentle and simple, knew him as the poet, he would be still
more free to make his jokes and his compliments to all those fine
people. But at no time was the genial little poet "blate," as he would
himself have said. There was no shyness in him. He "braw'd it," as he
says, with no doubt the finest of periwigs, long before he had ceased to
be a skull-thatcher, and swaggered through the wynds and about the Cross
with the best. The Edinburgh shopkeeper has never been "blate." He has
always maintained a freedom of independence which has nothing of the
obsequiousness of more common traders, and which gave the greater value
to the sly compliment which he would insi