Wit & humour > Gentle shepherd

iv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR.
love of the beauties of nature, and truth with in¬
nocence be combined—shall the Gentle Shepherd
be read and admired.
Allan Ramsay was born on the 15th October
1686 at Leadhills, in Lanarkshire. His parentage
was highly respectable—a zealous genealogist has
even traced his pedigree up to the noble house of
Ramsay, first Earls of Dalhousie, and of this the
poet was very proud. His father was manager of
the Earl of Hopetoun’s lead mines at Grawford-
moor, and his mother, Alice Brown, was the
daughter of a gentleman, who had been brought
from Derbyshire by Lord Hopetoun, to instruct
the miners in their art. His father dying when
the poet was in his childhood, and his mother
having contracted a second marriage with a small
landholder, by which she had a numerous family,
young Ramsay is supposed, from these causes, to
have been reared amidst great poverty, and to
have been employed, till he reached his fifteenth
year, with the children of the other miners, in
washing and preparing the lead ore for smelting.
He seems to have received no other education than
what he acquired at the parish school, and we