Allan Ramsay

The author traces the life and career of an eighteenth-century Scottish poet and man of letters, chronicling his family background, apprenticeship as a wigmaker, marriage, and entrée into Edinburgh's literary circles. It describes his participation in convivial clubs, his move into bookselling and editorial work on popular song and miscellany collections, the composition of a notable pastoral, and his venture into theatre. Later chapters recount domestic circumstances and portraits and offer critical readings of his pastoral, elegiac, satirical, and song-writing output, closing with selections from miscellaneous poems and a summative appraisal.