Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Ramsay, John (1802-1879)
RAMSAY, JOHN (1802–1879), poet, born in Kilmarnock in 1802, received a limited education. After residing for several years with an uncle at Dundonald, Ayrshire, he was apprenticed to carpet-weaving in Kilmarnock, and soon began to versify while attending to his loom. Subsequently he became a grocer in Kilmarnock, but, meeting with reverses, relinquished the business, and for fifteen years travelled through Scotland selling his poems. Finally, he became the agent of a benevolent society in Edinburgh. He died at Glasgow on 11 May 1879.
While a carpet-weaver Ramsay contributed verses to the ‘Edinburgh Literary Journal,’ edited by Henry Glassford Bell [q. v.] In 1836 he published his collected poems under the title of ‘Woodnotes of a Wanderer,’ which reached a second edition in 1839. ‘The Eglinton Park Meeting,’ the leading piece in the volume, is a humorous and fairly vigorous description in ‘ottava rima’ (modelled perhaps on ‘Anster Fair’) of a review of the Ayrshire yeomanry by the Marquis of Hastings in 1823. ‘Dundonald Castle,’ in somewhat laboured heroic couplets, is energetic and picturesque.
[The Contemporaries of Burns and the more recent poets of Ayrshire; Rogers's Modern Scottish Minstrel; Grant Wilson's Poets and Poetry of Scotland; Irving's Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen.]