ABSTRACT
Allan Ramsay was a lover of literature and a classical scholar of some distinction, and he was certainly a man of sensibility, moved by association. Pleasure in the rewards of patronage, and the fame and immortality conveyed by artistic or literary achievement, are other Horatian notions that feature prominently in the Ramsay mind. The elder Ramsay appears as a Scottish equivalent of the Horace of the conventional view, 'a genial but rather superficial character whose most typical activity was drinking wine and uttering proverbial wisdom under a tree'. There were substantially more translations of Horace into English in the period 1660—1800 than of any other Latin or Greek author. James Boswell had made his trip under the guidance of the Scottish antiquary and Roman cicerone Andrew Lumisden, and both men wrote accounts of their visit in the form of rough memoranda and more polished letters.
