time, he delighted in music and the theatre, and
it was his own advanced taste and spirit that led
.him, in 1725, to open a circulating library for the
diffusion of fiction among the citizens of the time.
Three , years subsequently, in the narrow-minded
spirit of the dark age ? of Edinburgh, the magistrates
were moved to action, by the fear this new
kind of reading might have on the minds of youth,
and actually tried, but without effect, to put his
library down. Among the leaders of these selfconstituted
guardians of morality was Erskine Lord
Grange, whose life was a scandal to the age. In I 736
Allan Ramsay?s passion for the drama prompted him
to erect a theatre in Catrubber?s Close; but in the
ensuing year the act for licensing the stage was
passed, and the magistrates ordered the house to
. be shut up. By this spetulation he lost a good deal
of money, but it is remarked by his biographers
that this was perhaps the only unfortunate project
in which he ever engaged. His constant cheerfulness
and great conversatibnal powers made him
a favourite with all classes; and being fond of
children he encouraged his three daughters to
bring troops of young girls about his house, and
in their sports he mingled with a vivacity singular
in one of his years, and for them he was wont to
make dolls and cradles with his own hands. In
that house on the Castle bank he spent the last
twelve years of a blameless life. He did not give
up his shop-long the resort of all the wits of
Edinburgh, the Hamiltons of Bangour, and Gilbertfield,
Gay, and others-till 1755. He died in
1757, in his seventy-second year, and was buried
in the Greyfriars Churchyard, where a tomb marks
his grave. ?An elderly female told a friend of
mine,? says Chambers, that she remembered, as
a girl, living as an apprentice with a milliner in
the Grassmarket, being sent to Ramsay Garden,
to assist in making dead-clothes for the poet. She
could recall, however, no particulars of the same,
but the roses blooming in the deathchamber.?
The house of the poet passed to his son, Allan,
an eminent portrait painter, a man of high culture,
and a favourite in those circles wherein Johnson
and Boswell moved. He inherited considerable
literary taste from his father, and was the founder
of the ?? Select Society? of Edinburgh, in 1754, of
which all the learned men there were members.
By the interest of Lord Bute he was introduced
. to George III., when Prince of Wales, whose
portrait he painted. He enlarged the house his
father built, and also raised the additional large
edifices to the eastward, now known as Ramsay
Gardens. The biographers of the painter always
,assert that he madearomantic marriage. In his
youth, when teaching drawing to the daughters of
Sir Alexander Lindesay, of Evelick, one of them fell
in love with him, and as the consent of the parents
was impossible then, they were secretly united in
wedlock. He died at Dover in 1784, after which
the property went to his son, General John Ramsay
(latterly of the Chasseurs Bntanniques), who, at his
death in 1845, left the property to Murrdy of Henderland,
and so ended the line of the author of
?? The Gentle Shepherd.?
Having thus described the locality of the Esplanade,
we shall now relate a few of the temble
episodes-apart from war and tumult-of which it
has been the scene.
In the reign of James V. the Master of Forbes
was executed here for treason. He and his father
had been warded in the Castle on that charge in
1536. By George Ear1,of Huntly, who bore a
bitter animosity to the house of Forbes, the former
had been accused of a design to take the life of
the king, by shooting him with a hand-gun in
Aberdeen, and also of being the chief instigator
of the mutiny among the Scottish forces at Jedburgh,
when on the march for England. Protesting
his innocence, the Master boldly offered to
maintain it in single combat against the earl, who
gave a bond for 30,000 merks to make good his
charge before the 3rst of July, 1537. But it was
not until the 11th of the same month in the following
year that the Master was brought to trial,
before Argyle, the Lord Justice General, and
Huntly failed not to make good his vaunt.
Though the charges were barely proved, and the
witnesses were far from exceptionable, the luckless
Master of Forbes was sentenced by the Commissioners
of Justiciary and fifteen other men of
high rank to be hanged, drawn, beheaded, and dismembered
as a traitor, on the Castle Hill, which
was accordingly done, and his quarters were placed
above the city gates. The judges are supposed to
have been bribed by Huntly, and many of the jury,
though of noble birth, were his hereditary enemies.
His father, after a long confinement, and undergoing
a tedious investigation, was released from
the Castle.
But a more terrible execution was soon to follow
-that of Lady Jane Douglas, the young and beautiful
widow of John Lord Glammis, who, with her
second husband, Archibald Campbell of Skipness,
her son the little Lord Glammis, and John Lyon
an aged priest, were all committed prisoners to the
Castle, on an absurd charge of seeking to compass
the death of the king by poison and sorcery.
cc Jane Douglas,? says a writer in ?Miscellanea
Scotica,? ?( was the most renowned beauty in Britain
