The Scots Poetic Tradition:

When Robert Fergusson burst upon the literary scene of Scotland in the 1770's, the native poetic tradition was in a rather precarious state. In the early part of the century, a group of writers and editors, led by Allan Ramsay, had attempted with partial success to revive interest in the ancient and honorable Scots literary tradition, and to bridge an almost fatal gap in the development of a distinctive national literature. This gap, separating medieval from modern Scots literature, resulted from the long barren period of about 1570 to 1700, during which time the strong and bright current of poetic writing in Scots had been reduced to an intermittent trickle. So long and severe had been the blight upon Scots literature that, by the opening of the eighteenth century, the very names of the great makers of the medieval past—William Dunbar, Robert Henryson, King James I—were half forgotten, while many of their works survived only in obscure and scattered manuscripts. It was as though Scotland had chosen not to remember that she had once had a proud and distinguished literature.

In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the "golden age" of the old tradition, the situation had been very different indeed. Then the Scottish court had been the center for a brilliant, versatile national literature held in high esteem throughout Europe, and far surpassing in artistic quality the work produced in England during the same period. The Scots poetry of this fruitful age can be divided into three broad classification. First, there was the sophisticated courtly poetry with its "termes aureate," its dream-visions, love lyrics, and elaborate moral allegories. This poetry was essentially medieval and international in character, though expressed in a distinctively Scots literary language. In the fifteenth century this "aureate" tradition is represented by such poems as "The Kingis Quair" of James I, "The Testament of Cresseid" of Henryson, and "The Goldyn Targe" of Dunbar, and in the sixteenth century by the graceful lyrics of Alexander Scott, "The Cherrie and the Slae" of Alexander Montgomerie, and the courtly poems of Sir David Lindsay and Sir Richard Maitland. Second, at the other end of the scale, there was the folk poetry, consisting of popular ballads and songs of the common people. Finally, there was a third and very important type of poetry: the artistic treatment of folk themes. Into this broad category fall such poems as the fifteenth-century "Christis Kirk on the Green" and "Peblis to the Play" (attributed to James I); Henryson's "Fables"; Scott's "Justing and Debait"; much of the best work of Dunbar, Lindsay, and Maitland; and a great bulk of poems by unknown authors.

What happened in Scotland to account for the sudden withering of this vigorous poetic tradition toward the close of the sixteenth century? Among many possible causes, three may be adduced as certain. One was the triumph of Knoxian Calvinism, which proscribed poetry along with other "lewd" entertainments and brought such powerful social and moral pressure to bear that it succeeded in virtually stifling poetic creation in Scotland except among a handful of the aristocracy. A second severe blow was the removal in 1603 of the court, which had always been the center of poetic patronage, from Edinburgh to London. Finally, the overwhelming influence of the great English poetry of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries persuaded the few Scottish gentlemen who (like Drummond of Hawthornden) continued to practice the art to turn their backs upon the old native tradition and to follow the Elizabethan English style. The result was an almost complete break in the development of sophisticated poetry in the Scots tongue, though the folk poetry did continue to thrive obscurely in oral transmission through the long winter of the seventeenth century despite the Kirk's disapproval. From the whole seventeenth century only a handful of new art poems in Scots have come down to us, written by country gentlemen of the type of Drummond or the Sempills of Beltrees. Among these sporadic efforts "The Life and Death of Habbie Simson" (ca. 1640) by Robert Sempill of Beltrees should be mentioned as the prototype of the comic-elegy genre which became immensely popular in the next century. But, generally speaking, the seventeenth century is a dismal and almost fatal hiatus in the history of Scots poetry.

The revival of interest in the native poetic tradition, which took place in the early decades of the eighteenth century, came in the wake of a renewed sense of Scottish nationalism. The parliamentary Union of 1707, which reduced Scotland politically to the status of a British province, provoked a profound cultural reaction. Many Scots, suffering from a feeling of injured dignity and political betrayal, were stirred to reassert their country's ancient cultural identity and to resist assimilation by England. The result was an extraordinary cultural resurgence, which produced an imposing array of internationally famous philosophers, physicians, architects, lawyers, historians, and men of letters; and this renaissance turned Edinburgh into "the Athens of the North," one of the most dynamic intellectual centers in Europe. In literature, some (like Thomson and Boswell) tried to outdo the English in their own literary idiom; others (like Ramsay and his followers) attempted to reinvigorate the native poetic language and tradition.

The Scots poetic revival in the eighteenth century, then, was essentially a nationalistic movement, the effort of some sections of a small and economically poor nation to reaffirm its cultural integrity. It was heralded by the publications of James Watson's epoch-making anthology, A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, both Antient and Modern (Edinburgh, 1706, 1709, 1711), and pioneered by the versatile Allan Ramsay. Ramsay's work as an editor and publicist of Scots poetry (The Ever Green, 1724; The Tea-Table Miscellany, 1724) met with instantaneous success; moreover, his original poetry in the vernacular—though by no means first-rate—restored to vigorous life several traditional Scots genres. In the latter respect, however, Ramsay's achievement was limited. The Scots tongue had been so long in disuse as a vehicle for serious poetry that Ramsay felt able to use it, for the most part, only for comic verse and songs; in his serious poetry, Ramsay usually reverted to labored neoclassical English. Even so, Ramsay's many-faceted and untiring effort as a restorer of literary Scots was of great historical importance and formed an indispensable foundation for the later work of Fergusson and Burns.

The personal influence and example of Allan Ramsay stimulated several younger writers to follow his lead; but, during the long period from about 1730 to 1770 (Ramsay himself virtually stopped writing in 1728), no Scots poet of comparable stature appeared. As a result, the vernacular revival, so auspiciously launched in the first quarter of the century, seemed to be in serious danger of petering out altogether for lack of adequate leadership. This danger, however, was fortunately averted by the sudden emergence in 1772 of a compelling new voice in Scots poetry—that of an obscure Edinburgh legal clerk, Robert Fergusson….

The tragic brevity of Fergusson's career—he did all of his best work in two short years—has tended to obscure the true nature of his achievement. Eclipsed as he was almost immediately by Burns, Fergusson has usually been relegated by historians of literature to the anomalous position of a "forerunner"; seldom has he been treated as a poet in his own right. This approach has encouraged the view of Fergusson as a boy-poet with a lucky gift, who dashed off a few vivid sketches of Edinburgh life and then died and whose only importance is that he happened to have stimulated Burns. But Burns knew better; his poetic instinct recognized the astonishing power and maturity of Fergusson's work which he valued above Ramsay's as, up to his own time, the finest Scots poetry of the century. And Burns was right.

With Auld Reikie—Fergusson's final and climactic masterpiece of comprehensive realism—his significant poetical career came to an end. It is worthwhile at this point to look back over the Scots poems of 1772-73 and to summarize as concisely as possible the distinguishing features of Fergusson's work and to come to some general conclusions as to the true nature of his achievement from both the historical and purely literary points of view.

Fergusson's Qualities as a Poet:

The historical importance of Fergusson's work is two-fold: it lies both in his innovation and development of forms and genres and in the intrinsic quality of his performance within these forms and genres. The changes and innovations he made in particular Scots poetic forms not only represent an original contribution to the growth of the tradition in general, but are of more specific interest for their profound effect upon the work of Burns. In the first place, Fergusson was the first Scottish poet to exploit the full potentialities of the "Habbie" stanza, a form which had come to be used exclusively for the comic elegy and the rimed epistle. Perceiving the possibilities of this stanza, Fergusson broke through the narrow limitations and stereotyped formulas of the "Habbie" tradition, and applied the stanza to several new purposes and kinds of subject matter. In "The Daft-Days," "The King's Birth-Day," "Caller Oysters," "Caller Water," and other pieces, he developed an original type of Scottish poem: the poem of humorous social description in the six-line stanza. In "Braid Claith" he used the same meter for pure satire, while in the "Elegy on Scots Music" he adapted the "Habbie" stanza as a vehicle for serious rather than comic poetry. Finally, in "To the Tron-Kirk Bell" he revived the ancient "flyting" tradition and used the Habbie stanza for the first time in Scottish poetry for a "flyting" poem. In all of these ways Fergusson's development and extension of the "Habbie" tradition led directly to Burns's even more versatile use of the form.

Fergusson brought about almost equally important developments in other genres, especially in the "Christis Kirk" tradition and in Scottish pastoralism. In "Hallow-fair" and "Leith Races" he introduced a modification of the traditional stanza, a modification which was to be adopted by Burns in "The Holy Fair" and in "Hallowe'en." In "The Election" he extended the subject matter of the genre to include political as well as social satire, and in so doing gave Burns the hint for his further development of the "Christis Kirk" form as a vehicle for clerical satire. In the realm of Scottish pastoralism, Fergusson departed even more radically from eighteenth-century tradition. Though his first effort in this genre, the "Eclogue on Wilkie," is conventional enough (being closely modeled on the pastoral eclogues of Ramsay), in "An Eclogue" Fergusson went far beyond Ramsay in the direction of realism and developed a new type of Scottish pastoralism, treating country life from a humorous point of view, with intimate, homely details and convincing character types, yet remaining within the conventional form of the pastoral eclogue.In "The Farmer's Ingle" he portrayed Scottish farm life with the same kind of unpretentious realism, but with a serious rather than a comic emphasis, while his daring and successful experiment with Spenserian stanzas determined Burns's choice of the same form for his "Cotter's Saturday Night." Fergusson demonstrated in these two poems that interesting and meaningful poetry could be made out of the most ordinary and homely details of rural life, and Burns was quick to take the hint.

Several other innovations which Fergusson introduced may be listed briefly. In "Plainstanes and Causey" and in "A Drink Eclogue" he created an entirely new poetic form, the "flyting eclogue," by combining the old Scottish "flyting" genre with the pastoral eclogue form; and, in so doing, he provided Burns with the models for his "Brigs of Ayr." Furthermore, in several of his poems Fergusson treated themes of satire which had been virtually untouched by earlier eighteenth-century poets in Scotland. He introduced legal satire in "Plainstanes and Causey," the "Rising" and "Sitting of the Session," other poems, and a sharp element of political satire in "The Ghaists" and "The Election." In Auld Reikie, moreover, there is a very suggestive passage of religious satire, a theme which Ramsay had already touched upon in his "Elegy on John Cowper," and which Burns was to develop brilliantly. The theme of Scottish patriotism, also touched upon by Ramsay, was given far more conspicuous emphasis by Fergusson in such poems as "Elegy on Scots Music," "The Ghaists," "To the Principal and Professors," "Hame Content," and "A Drink Eclogue"; so it passed on to Burns. Finally, Fergusson was chiefly responsible for domesticating the English meditative nature poem in Scottish eighteenth-century verse. He attempted this genre with increasing success in the odes to the "Bee," "Butterfly," and "Gowdspink"; he supplied Burns with Scottish precedent for his "To a Mouse," "To a Mountain Daisy," and other works of this type.

In one respect Fergusson stands alone among Scottish poets: no other comes near him in his brilliant poetic treatment of city life. It was, of course, perfectly natural and appropriate that he should find the materials for his poetry in the life of the Edinburgh he loved and knew intimately, just as it was natural for Burns to write about the rural community in which he lived. But Fergusson's Edinburgh poems form a class by themselves; there is nothing comparable to them in Scottish poetry; and, indeed, in their scope, their vividness, their penetrative, many-sided vision, they must rank among the finest poetic treatments of city life in all British literature. What Fergusson did for Edinburgh life, Burns was presently to do for Scottish farm life; and Burns was to follow Fergusson's lead in building his poetry out of the stuff of everyday experience.

In all of these ways, then, Fergusson was breaking new ground, making his individual contributions to the growth of the great vernacular tradition of which he is a part, and preparing the way for Burns. But Fergusson did more than this: he wrote poems which are important, not merely because they broke with the tradition or modified the tradition in the several ways noted above, but also because they are permanently valuable in themselves as works of art. Fergusson's work has never received adequate recognition for its own sake. Most historians of literature and commentators on Fergusson tend to neglect the intrinsic quality of his work, or to brush over it with brief, uncritical appraisals; they speak as though Fergusson's poems had no life and being of their own—as though they existed only because of Burns. Yet, as I have tried to demonstrate in previous chapters, Fergusson's vernacular poetry, aside from its historical significance or its influence on Burns, is vitally interesting, often powerful, and eminently readable for its own sake. It has, moreover, a unique and highly personalized flavor which sets it apart from the work of any other Scottish poet.

Several characteristics of Fergusson's work distinguish it from that of Hamilton of Gilbertfield, Ramsay, Ross, and other eighteenth-century predecessors. In the first place, there is his bold poetic imagination, essentially a comic imagination, revealing itself both in his daringly original conceptions of entire poems and in his shrewd, penetrating grasp of significant detail. Such poems as the sharpedged and powerful "Braid Claith"; the delightful fantasies, "Plainstanes and Causey" and "To My Auld Breeks"; and such brilliant comic extravaganzas as "Hallowfair," "Leith Races," "The Election," and Auld Reikie—all these show that he possessed creative powers of a high order. Fergusson's imagination, though narrower in its range than Ramsay's, is infinitely finer in quality, more daring and, at the same time, more sensitive and perceptive. His humor has greater depth and richness than Ramsay's, and certainly more delicacy. His view of life is predominantly comic: he has the rare faculty of finding humor everywhere in the life around him, and, what is even rarer, the ability to select, organize, and communicate his experience through poetic art. He far surpasses Ramsay in his unerring choice of significant details, in his keen eye for humorous incongruities, and, consequently, in his ability to make the most unpromising materials richly suggestive and meaningful.

Fergusson's poetry is, furthermore, remarkable for its pictorial qualities and for its sane and comprehensive realism. Many of his poems are series of vivid little pictures, each illustrating a different aspect of the whole subject and contributing to the total effect. Particularly deft at using dramatic contrast as a satiric method, he shows in poem after poem a surprisingly mature insight into human motives and behavior and an unfailing skill at revealing human incongruities. Fergusson's satire, moreover, is generally good-natured and tolerant in tone, except when he is dealing with sham or meanness of soul. His reaction to a situation is usually two-fold, both intellectual and emotional, the one modifying the other; his keen-eyed satiric vision is often balanced by a degree of sympathy with the human failings of others or by his recognition of compensatory good qualities. This broadminded attitude in Fergusson, his clear-sighted, yet comprehensive, balanced realism, is one of the most fundamental and attractive features of his work.

Fergusson's style is an inseparable part of his poetic imagination and personality. When we consider the tragic brevity of Fergusson's career, the high degree of technical skill and the distinctive personal style which he managed to develop are equally astonishing. His craftsmanship is generally precise and finished, yet he does not allow his disciplined attention to form and technique to inhibit the vitality of his expression. His mastery of particular verse forms, as we have seen, increased rapidly and steadily during his two most prolific years, until he was producing toward the end almost consistently brilliant poems, little masterpieces of conscious, skilled artistry. Fergusson's technical superiority to Ramsay shows most clearly in such poems as "The King's Birth-Day," "Braid Claith," "Hallow-fair," "Leith Races," "The Election," and "To My Auld Breeks," in which he succeeds in reproducing the natural, vigorous rhythms of actual speech, while remaining within the rigid limitations of the verse form. Fergusson handles difficult and exacting stanza forms with ease and fluency, especially in the later poems. For vigor combined with perfection of form, many passages in Fergusson are unsurpassed in Scottish poetry, even by Burns. Burns's work was, in fact, greatly benefited by the examples of technical brilliance set by Fergusson.

The personal flavor of Fergusson's style is more difficult to define than its technical virtues. Though he seldom brings himself directly into his writings, Fergusson's poetry communicates a sense of his buoyant and attractive personality, characterized by audacity, irreverence, impish waggery, geniality, shrewdness, tolerance, sensitivity, keen observation, dry penetrating wit, and abounding vitality. He has a wonderfully rich and suggestive command of Edinburgh vernacular, the "brave metropolitan utterance," as Stevenson called it; and he exploits the subtle possibilities of that language as Ramsay never did. In his command of his own vigorous mother tongue, Fergusson shows the imaginative instinct of the true poet. He has a fine feeling for words, an unerring sense of the right word, for the precise, expressive idiom. The sharpness and conciseness of his imagery, its rich suggestiveness, may be easily illustrated from any of his better poems. Take, for example, these lines from "Hallow-fair"—

Upo' the tap o'ilka lum
The sun began to keek …

or these from "To My Auld Breeks,"—

As mony a time
Wi' you I've speel'd the braes o' rime …

or from "To the Principal and Professors,"—

Mair hardy, souple, steive an' swank,
Than ever stood on Samy's shank.

Fergusson's style, as may be seen from the last lines cited above, has not only muscular vitality and precision, but a peculiar kind of "pawkiness," a quietly humorous flavor. He has a way of giving droll and original expression to almost any idea. This "pawkiness" is an integral part of Fergusson's style and of his distinctive, lovable poetic personality.

Something should be said, finally, about Fergusson's precocious grasp of characterization. As we have seen, he became adept at revealing character briefly and vividly, both through direct description and through dialogue. He shows, in such portraits as those of the barber in "Braid Claith," Robin Gibb in "The Rising of the Session," the cobbler in "The Election," and the bruiser" in Auld Reikie, an almost Chaucerian ability to suggest the whole character of the man in a few bold strokes through highlighting significant details. He manages in a few trenchant lines to reveal the essence of characters and scenes in a flash, without stooping to caricature. Perhaps his greatest successes in characterization, however, are achieved through dialogue in which the poet, instead of describing the character, makes the character reveal himself. The speakers in Fergusson's brilliant duologues—Sandie and Willie, Plainstanes and Causey, Brandy and Whisky—are all made real and convincing by this method. Plainstanes, in particular, is a triumph of humorous and dramatic characterization. Similarly, the speeches of Sawny and Jock Bell in "Hallow-fair," of the captain in "Leith Races," and of "John" and "cooper Will" in "The Election" are superbly effective in giving concrete, precise, and vivid impressions of the several speakers. Fergusson's mastery of poetic dialogue is, in fact, unsurpassed in eighteenth-century Scottish verse for vigor, naturalness, and power of suggestion. The depth of understanding Fergusson shows in his delineation of character, his clear-sighted perception of the essential elements and motives in human behavior, are extraordinary in so young a poet.

Influence on Burns:

The intrinsic excellence of Fergusson's best work has historical importance as well as purely esthetic value. His poems appeared just in time to save the vernacular revival from dying out altogether. Their sprightliness, craftsmanship, and broad popular appeal served to refresh the lagging vernacular tradition in poetry and to give renewed impetus to the whole movement. Fergusson's sudden emergence, moreover, helped to reassemble and restimulate a popular reading public for Scots verse, without which the tremendous success of Burns would have been impossible. But the intrinsic brilliance of Fergusson's poems did more than this: it provided Burns with examples of high quality in vernacular poetry such as he could never have found in the works of Ramsay. Fergusson's careful workmanship, his mastery of language, and, above all, the boldness and brilliance of his poetic imagination opened Burns's eyes to the full possibilities of the vernacular as a poetic medium.

Fergusson showed Burns that he need not go far afield for the subject matters and language of his poetry, that the light of imagination could be thrown over the humblest objects of the life around him; and, above all, he demonstrated to him, as Ramsay never could, how to make finely wrought, interesting, and meaningful poetry out of such homely subjects from everyday life as "braid claith," "caller oysters," and "auld breeks." Ramsay, too, had treated common life vigorously in some of his works, but he lacked the bold imagination and the artistry necessary to give such subjects permanent value as works of art. Within the relatively narrow range of his best work, Fergusson gave Burns examples of high quality, power, and precision in vernacular poetry; and Burns never forgot the lesson or underestimated its value to him in his own creative practice.

We know from Burns's autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore and from a notation in his First Commonplace Book that he "discovered" Fergusson's poems for the first time about August, 1784. As Frank Beaumont has pointed out, the contrast between Burns's poems written before and after his reading of Fergusson attests to the impact of Fergusson's poems upon Burns's creative imagination. The experimental poems of the Mount Oliphant period (1766-1777) are mostly feeble imitations of the genteel English poets—Pope, Addison, Shenstone, Gray, and others—and of Shakespeare. During Burns's residence at Lochlea farm, though he was still very much under the spell of Shenstone's "Elegies," his powers began to mature steadily, as evidenced by such promising pieces as "The Death and Dying Words of Puir Mailie," and two good songs, "Mary Morison" and "The Rigs o' Barley." Despite these promising indications, the bulk of Burns's work during these early years is definitely inferior and imitative.

Then, in late 1784, he discovered Fergusson; and a new and vital development of Burns's genius was almost immediately apparent. Shenstone, the "divine Shenstone," his former bosom favorite, was eclipsed and forgotten; for Burns, stimulated by the brilliance and suggestiveness of Fergusson's poems, turned his energies toward the native poetic tradition where his real strength lay, and began to pour out, with breathtaking speed and fecundity, that magnificent series of vernacular masterpieces written in 1785 and 1786, beginning with the "Epistle to Davie"; "Holy Willie's Prayer"; "Death and Doctor Hornbook"; the epistles to Lapraik, Simson, Goldie, and M'Math; "Hallowe'en"; "To a Mouse"; "The Jolly Beggars"; "Address to the Deil"; and so on to "The Twa Dogs", "The Holy Fair," and many others. Fergusson was unquestionably the primary literary force behind Burns's upsurge of creative activity during these, his greatest and most fruitful years.

In poem after poem Fergusson's influence can be seen operating on Burns's imagination, suggesting themes, ideas, verse forms, satiric devices, descriptive methods, expressive words and phrases which stuck in Burns's subconscious memory. So profound and interpenetrative was this influence that we must conclude that Burns read and reread his Fergusson, virtually memorizing the poems until they became a part of his own thought and feeling. In almost every major poem that Burns wrote during these two wonderful years, traces of Fergusson can be discerned—stimulating, suggesting, and, to some extent, directing Burns's creative activity.

The many different ways in which Fergusson's poems operated on Burns's imagination have already been touched on and need only be summarized briefly. In the years before he met with Fergusson's work, Burns had used the "Habbie" stanza very seldom, in some three or four poems. Fergusson's brilliant handling of the form, however, seems to have opened Burns's eyes to its possibilities since, shortly after his reading of Fergusson, he began to use it with increasing frequency in poem after poem. Similarly, Fergusson's work in the "Christis Kirk" stanza prompted Burns to try his hand at the form; and it is significant that in his first attempt, "Hallowe'en," Burns used Fergusson's special form of the stanza. Other Scottish poetic forms used by Fergusson in his own original way were soon taken over by Burns, including the rimed epistle, the duologue form ("The Twa Dogs" and "Brigs of Ayr"), the serious description of farm life in Spenserian stanzas ("The Cotter's Saturday Night"), the meditative nature poem ("To a Mouse"), and Fergusson's original "flyting eclogue" ("Brigs of Ayr"). Besides taking over these poetic forms and genres developed by the Edinburgh poet, Burns modeled several poems directly and, no doubt, consciously on Fergusson: "The Cotter's Saturday Night" on "The Farmer's Ingle," "Scotch Drink" on "Caller Water" and "A Drink Eclogue," "The Holy Fair" on "Leith Races" and "Hallow-fair," "Brigs of Ayr" on "Plainstanes and Causey," and so forth.

But Fergusson's influence was far more diffuse and inter-penetrative than these obvious manifestations would indicate. We find Burns taking up again and again themes and methods of satire which he found in Fergusson, and re-working them in the light of his own experience. Traces of Fergusson's style; of Fergusson's quietly humorous tone; of Fergusson's distinctive kind of insinuative, "pawky," satiric humor; of his actual phraseology—all of these crop up in poem after poem of Burns, often in poems which are generally unlike anything that Fergusson ever wrote. Sometimes too, Burns made use of suggestions from Fergusson's worthless English poems, a fact which proves how thoroughly saturated his mind was with all of Fergusson's works, good and bad.

On the whole, however, Fergusson's example was of incalculable value to Burns; no other poet had so decisive an effect upon his work. Fergusson seems to be ever-present in Burns himself, his influence operating just beneath the surface of Burns's conscious mind, acting as a kind of poetic catalyst, prompting and stimulating Burns to creative activity. Burns, in fact, found himself in Fergusson; he saw in Fergusson's unfulfilled career the key to his own poetic ambitions and desires, and he set to work with a will to continue and complete what Fergusson had so brilliantly begun.

In comparing the poetry of Fergusson and Burns, one must recognize the greater range and maturity of Burns's imagination. There is no hint in Fergusson, for example, of the spontaneous and powerful lyric impulse which made Burns one of the great song writers of all time, nor of Burns's deep feeling of kinship with nature so movingly expressed in such poems as "To a Mouse." Moreover, for all Fergusson's imaginative audacity, he shows little of Burns's social and political radicalism, of the sweep and passion of Burns's art. Burns's essentially passionate nature, bursting the bonds of restraint that the Kirk would have imposed upon him, leads him to attack the Kirk itself and to a freer and franker expression in a greater variety of matters than Fergusson would have dared to undertake. Burns dares to go to the roots of his own being and to speak his heart out in his poetry. He feels compelled to do so. There is none of this intense subjectivity in Fergusson; rather, he tends to be reticent about himself in his writing.

Fergusson is, in fact, essentially conservative in his attitudes. He was living in times which, notwithstanding the unrest in Scotland resulting from the Union of 1707 and the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, were generally stable, politically and socially. Though Fergusson is quick to satirize the abuses and shortcomings he perceives in the society of his day, he never goes so far as to attack the social structure itself. The American and French revolutions, however, coming a few years after Fergusson's death, and accompanied by a general upheaval of European society, acted as direct and potent stimuli upon the imagination of Burns; and they partially account for the radical, and defiantly democratic elements in his poetry. Burns's naturally rebellious nature and the fact that he was a peasant rather than a graduate of St. Andrews also had much to do with the intensity of his political views. Fergusson lived in less exciting years, but he seems also to have possessed a kind of genial tolerance, a willingness to accept the world as he found it, without feeling compelled to change it. Thus the vivid little world of his art is generally undisturbed by current philosophical questions. Fergusson excels at humorous social description, and within this relatively narrow range the vitality and artistry of his work has seldom been surpassed in Scots poetry, even by Burns.

In coming to a final evaluation of Fergusson's achievement, we must never forget his youthfulness, the extreme brevity of his career, and the crushing difficulties under which he worked. All of his best poetry was produced during a period of twenty-four months, and his poetical career was ended when he was twenty-three. Burns during the first twenty-three years of his life produced nothing comparable to Fergusson's achievement. Fergusson, then, like his English contemporary Chatterton, is one of the unfulfilled possibilities of our literature. Up to the moment of his collapse, as we have seen, Fergusson was increasing in stature and maturity as a creative artist. Had he lived, there is little doubt that he would have seriously rivaled Burns, at least as a satirist and as a writer of humorous descriptive poetry, if not as a lyricist. Additionally, it may safely be said that, had it not been for Fergusson's achievement, Burns would not have been the Burns that we know as the great national poet of Scotland. Part of Burns's glory belongs, in a very real sense, to Robert Fergusson.

But judged on merit alone, Fergusson's poetry deserves higher rank and recognition than it has hitherto received. Though small in bulk and relatively narrow in scope, his work is unquestionably the finest body of poetry produced in Scotland during the eighteenth century before Burns. Fergusson deserves a permanent place among the classics of Scottish poetry, ranking not too far below Dunbar and Burns. In the wider field of British literature, he remains necessarily a minor poet-but a minor poet of extraordinary quality and interest. He breaks new ground in poetry, not by breaking with the established poetic traditions, but by putting the traditions to new uses. As the English Romantic poets a generation later were to exploit such older forms as the Spenserian, stanza, blank verse, and the heroic couplet, so Fergusson revitalized the traditional forms of Scottish verse.

Aside from a place in literary history, Fergusson's work has a perennial freshness and enduring appeal. He makes old Edinburgh live again as no other writer has ever done. Fergusson's objective realism; the sharpness, vividness, and finished artistry of his style; the genial, insinuative tone of his humor; and the bold, yet sensitive and highly personal quality of his imagination combine to make his poetry especially attractive to modern tastes. It is to be hoped that in the years to come his reputation will increase, that there will be a rediscovery, a new and more genuine appreciation of Fergusson as one of the little masters.