Ramsay, ALLAN, Scottish poet, was born in the parish of Crawford, Lanarkshire, October 15, 1686. His father was manager of Lord Hopetoun's mines at Leadhills, and his mother, Alice Bower, was the daughter of a Derbyshire miner. At fourteen he was put apprentice to a wigmaker in Edinburgh, and followed that calling till his thirtieth year, by which time he had become known as a poet, having issued several short humorous satires and realistic descriptions, which were printed as broadsides, and sold in his shop or on the street for a penny each. He had also written (1716–18) two additional cantos to the old Scots poem of Christ's Kirk on the Green, felicitous pictures of rustic life and broad humour. Ramsay now abandoned wig-making, and commenced business as a bookseller in the High Street, with a sign of Mercury over his door. Later he removed to the Luckenbooths, and there flourished under the heads of Drummond and Ben Jonson, adding to his business a circulating library—the first established in Scotland. Down to 1755, when he retired to a villa of his own erection, 'honest Allan's' career, worldly and literary, was eminently prosperous. Neither Puritan nor profligate, social in his instincts, yet careful and industrious, Ramsay never allowed his pride and vanity as a poet to withdraw him from business. One brief cloud overcast the poet's successful career. He built a theatre in Edinburgh at his own expense, which was almost immediately shut up by the magistrates, in virtue of the act passed in 1737 prohibiting all dramatic exhibitions without special license. Besides his loss he suffered much from the attacks of the churchmen of the day. His application to Lord Advocate Forbes for 'some canny post' was unsuccessful; yet his misfortunes had left him a decent competency, and he spent the last two or three years of his life in cheerful retirement in the quaint but picturesque octagonal house he had built on the north side of the Castle Hill, and here he died 7th January 1758. He had the gratification of seeing his only surviving son, Allan Ramsay (1713-84), fast rising into distinction as a portrait-painter; in 1767 he was appointed principal painter to the king. A complete edition of the elder Allan's poems with a biography was published by Chalmers (1800); a fine edition, with the music of the songs, and engravings by David Allan, in 1788. A good selection is that by J. Logie Robertson (1887). A monument to Ramsay by Steell was erected in Edinburgh in 1865.
The following are his principal works: Tartana, or the Plaid (1721); a collected edition of his Poems, published by subscription in 1721, by which it is said the poet realised 400 guineas; Fables and Tales (1722); Fair Assembly (1723); Health, a Poem (1724); The Tea-table Miscellany, a collection of the most choice songs, Scottish and English (1724), to which a second volume was published in 1725, a third in 1727, and a fourth in 1740; The Evergreen, 'being a collection of Scots Poems wrote by the Ingenious before 1600,' published in 1724; The Gentle Shepherd, a Pastoral Comedy (1725); a second collection of Poems (1728); Thirty Fables (1730). See the Life by Oliphant Smeaton ('Famous Scots,' 1896).