Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 7.djvu/21

Rh

It is scarcely possible to conceive a more pleasing picture of ease and satisfaction than is exhibited in the above sketch ; and, the affair of the theatre in Carrubber's close excepted, Ramsay seems to hare filled it up to the last. He lost his wife, Christian Ross, in the year 1743; but his three daughters, grown up to womanhood, in some measure supplied the want of her society, and much of his time in his latter years seems to have been spent with his friends in the country. It appears to have been about this period, and with the view of relinquishing his shop, the business of which still went on prosperously, that he erected a house on the north side of the Castle Hill, where he might spend the remainder of his days in dignified retirement. The site of this house was selected with the taste of a poet and the judgment of a painter. It commanded a reach of scenery probably not surpassed in Europe, extending from the mouth of the Forth on the east to the Grampians on the west, and stretching far across the green hills of Fife to the north ; embracing in the including space every variety of beauty, of elegance, and of grandeur. The design for the building, however, which the poet adopted, was paltry in the extreme, and by the wags of the city was compared to a goose pye, of which complaining one day to lord Elibank, his lordship gayly remarked, that now seeing him in it he thought it an exceedingly apt comparison. Fantastic though the house was, Ramsay spent the last twelve years of his life in it, except when he was abroad with his friends, in a state of philosophic ease, which few literary men are able to attain. In the year 1755, he is supposed to have relinquished business. An Epistle which he wrote this year to James Clerk, Esq. of J Pennycuick, "full of wise saws and modern instances," gives his determination on the subject, and a picture of himself more graphic than could be drawn by any other person:

While he was thus planning schemes of ease and security, Ramsay seems to have forgotten the bitter irony of a line in one of his elegies,

At the very time he was thus writing, he was deeply afflicted with the scurvy in his gums, by which he eventually lost all his teeth, and even a portion of