Footnote 1
Ramsay had probably known Millar since the latter’s arrival in Edinburgh in 1720, as the thirteen-year-old apprentice of Ramsay’s friend James McEuen. From 1713 Ramsay ran a wigmaker’s and printseller’s shop in Niddrie’s Wynd, close to McEuen’s High Street premises. He joined the bookselling trade in 1720, and in 1722 relocated to the east side of the Luckenbooths, next to McEuen and facing the Market Cross. He also owned a shop directly opposite McEuen, on the south side of the Cross. McEuen was the first to advertise copies of Ramsay’s
Poems (1723), in Glasgow. See
The Works of Allan Ramsay, ed. A. M. Kinghorn and A. Law (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1970) vol. 4, 64.
×Footnote 2
On 18 September 1733, Ramsay bought land at Edinburgh’s Castlehill, to construct his “Bower on the Castle Bank”, also called “the Guse-Pye” for its octagonal shape. The house was built during the winter of 1733–4; in early May 1734 Ramsay wrote to Sir John Clerk “I am now putting on the Roof and have it soon finished.” Martin Burns envisioned the house and its commanding view across to Fife: “stretching down to North Lock [sic] and free from neighboring houses, the grounds suggested a country retreat. Yet the house was within easy reach of the bustling High Street.” See
M. Burns, A Bibliography of Allan Ramsay (Glasgow: Jackson, Wylie, 1931) 39. Allan Ramsay the younger’s undated manuscript biography describes his father retiring to the house “about the year 1738”. The house still stands in Ramsay Gardens. See
I. G. Brown, Poet and Painter: Allan Ramsay Father and Son, 1684-1784 (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1984), 22; “A Life of Allan Ramsay, as given in the Laing Manuscript”,
Works of Allan Ramsay, vol. 4, 74. See also Ramsay to Clerk, May 1734,
Works of Allan Ramsay, vol. 4, 195.
×Footnote 3
desired you, i.e., asked you.
×Footnote 4
do it, i.e., pay it.
×Footnote 5
Henry Millar (c.1710–1771), Andrew’s third brother, minister at Neilston, Renfrewshire. He would have been in Edinburgh to attend the annual General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, held from 10–20 May 1735.
×Footnote 6
J. Thomson, Antient and Modern Italy Compared: Being the First Part of Liberty (London: A. Millar, 1735). Millar had commissioned 3,000 copies in quarto and 250 copies on fine paper, delivered on 8 January 1735. A Scottish piracy of Pope, An Epistle from Mr Pope to Dr Arbuthnot, includes an advertisement for “Liberty: A Poem, by our countryman Mr. James Thomson . . . to be sold by A. Millar and Allan Ramsay, at their shops in London and Edinburgh”. According to D. Foxon, this is the only example of a piracy openly revealing its source. See English Verse (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975) 1, 619, 795.
×Footnote 7
Hermann Boerhaave,
Elements of Chemistry, being the Annual Lectures of Herman Boerhaave, M.D. (London: J. and J. Pemberton, J. Clark, A. Millar, and J. Gray, 1735). This two-volume quarto was a deluxe edition with engravings. Boerhaave (1668–1738) was probably the most famous living medical professor in Europe, particularly acclaimed in Scotland through a long tradition of Scottish students travelling to Leiden to attend his lectures. When the University of Edinburgh’s Faculty of Medicine was founded in 1726, all the professors were Boerhaave’s former students. Boerhaave was also a close friend of Ramsay’s patron, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik.
×Footnote 8
H. Boerhaave,
A New Method of Chemistry . . . Translated from the Printed Edition, Collated with the Best Manuscript Copies, trans. P. Shaw and E. Chambers (London: J. Osborne and T. Longman, 1727). This single quarto volume with engravings was so popular that it was reissued the same year with “a copious index.”
×Footnote 9
craved, i.e., earnestly asked.
×Footnote 11
John Nairn, a successful but obscure merchant, of Greenyards, Stirlingshire (fl.1708–1747). In 1736, he joined with James Blair to challenge Robert Freebairn over his patent as King’s Printer. See
Narratives of the Proceedings of the Arbiters in the Submission betwixt Robert Freebairn . . . in Craig’s Close (Edinburgh: n.s., 1736).
×Footnote 12
Ramsay had run an auctioneering business at his premises in Brown’s Close since 1722.
×Footnote 13
dispose, i.e., sell at auction.
×Footnote 14
An Address of Thanks from the Society of Rakes, to the Pious Author of An Essay upon Improving and Adding to the Strength of Great Britain by Fornication (Edinburgh: A. Ramsay, 1735). Ramsay’s poem was a riposte to Daniel Maclauchlan’s
Essay upon Improving and Adding to the Strength of Great Britain and Ireland by Fornication, Justifying the Same from Scripture and Reason (1735), itself a failed attempt to replicate Swift’s
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Parents of Poor People from becoming a Burthen to their Parents or Country (1729). Maclauchlan was a young Presbyterian minister in the conservative parish of Ardnamurchan; despite his effort to protect his identity by anonymous publication in London, he was deposed and excommunicated this same year. See
Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, ed. H. Scott (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1924) vol. 4, 106.
×Footnote 15
Possibly a reference to religious attacks on Ramsay’s circulating library. See
R. Wodrow, Analecta, (Glasgow: Maitland Club, 1842) vol. 3, 515–6.
×Footnote 16
paction, i.e., agreement. See Ramsay to Millar, 15 July 1732: “I empower you to take up for me five guineas from the printers of my Poems, the unpaid moiety [half] as agreed on between them and Mr M’Euen, who had instructions from me to transact with them, and to whom they paid the first moiety.”
×Footnote 17
ken, i.e., know.
×Footnote 18
i.e., of the
Tea-Table Miscellany. No surviving copies of this edition have been traced; Millar published the ninth edition in 1733.
×Footnote 20
wel, i.e., good, agreeable.
×Footnote 21
Ramsay had sold prints before turning to bookselling in 1720. The Dutch engraver and print maker Pieter van Gunst (1659–1724) was active in London during the early years of the century, where he was commissioned to provide illustrations for book publishers. His series of prints titled
The Loves of the Gods were copies of mezzotints made by the prolific engraver John Smith (1652–1743), after paintings attributed to Titian (destroyed by fire at Blenheim Palace, 1861). See
A. Griffiths, “Early Mezzotint Publishing in England I. John Smith”, Print Quarterly 6 (1989) 243–57. A collection of Gunst’s engravings from Smith is held in the British Museum (1917.1208.521–29). See
T. Clayton, The English Print (London: Paul Mellon Centre, 1997).
×