Glen Collection of printed music > Printed text > Allan Ramsay

64 FAMOUS SCOTS
demonstrated by the rapid filling up of a list of sub-
scribers, containing the names of all that were eminent
for talents, learning, or dignity in Scotland.' The
volume, a handsome quarto, printed by Ruddiman, and
ornamented by a portrait of the author, from the pencil
of his friend Smibert, was published in the succeeding
year, and the fortunate poet realised four hundred guineas
by the speculation. Pope, Steele, Arbuthnot, and Gay
were amongst his English subscribers.
The quarto of 1721 may be said to have closed
the youthful period in the development of Ramsay's
genius. Slow, indeed, was that development. He was
now thirty-five years of age, and while he had produced
many excellent pieces calculated to have made the name
of any mediocre writer, he had, as yet, given the world
nothing that could be classed as a work of genius. His
sketches of humble life and of ludicrous episodes occur-
ring among the lower classes in Edinburgh and the
rustics in the country, had pleased a wide clientele of
readers, because they depicted with rare truth and
humour, scenes happening in the everyday life of the
time. But in no single instance, up to this date, had
he produced a work that would live in the minds of the
people as expressive of those deep, and, by them, in-
communicable feelings that go to the composition of
class diff"erences.
As a literary artist, Ramsay was destined to develop
into a genre painter of unsurpassed fidelity to nature.
As yet, however, that which was to be the distinctive
characteristic of his pictures had not dawned upon his
mind. But the time was rapidly approaching. Already
the first glimmerings of apprehension are to be detected