Fergusson, like Ramsay, wrote both in literary English and in the vernacular. The former class of his poems comprises Odes, Pastorals, Elegies, Mock-heroics, in all of which the predominant influence of the Classical Renaissance is not less plainly visible than is the imitation of such English writers as Collins, Gray, and Shenstone. In many of his "Scots Poems" there is also an unmistakable English manner, shown by the frequent use of the heroic couplet and the coupling of substantives and adjectives; while the element of what would now be called "particularism" is marked simply by the choice of the subject and the distinction of dialect. Fergusson was in a special sense the poet of Edinburgh, the manners of which city he reproduced in verse with as much liveliness as Smollett had shown in the prose of Humphrey Clinker. He had, however, a model for his "Auld Reekie" in the "Trivia" of Gay, whose minutely detailed manner he copies in descriptions of the lighting and the law-courts, the "Bucks" and "Maccaronis," the street-cries and even the smells, of the Scottish Capital. Gay gives the necessary mock-heroic air to his subject by a lofty classical style: Fergusson, on the other hand, shows his affection for his native city by his appropriate use of a colloquial vocabulary which allows touches of homely humour and sentiment. His classical training was of good service to him in his patriotic verse; and the genuine spirit of the Renaissance breathes in his Eclogues, "The Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey," the "Dialogue between Brandy and Whisky," and "The Ghaists," poems which Burns has imitated in his "Brigs of Ayr," without (if an Englishman may presume to venture on a comparison of two Scottish poets) attaining an equal measure of artistic success. Fergusson's Elegies, written in rime couée, are better than Ramsay's, and though his lyrical description of manners in "Leith Races" and "The Election" does not equal Burns's "Hallowe'en," "The Farmer's Ingle" seems to me to have a more genuine classical movement than "The Cotter's Saturday Night":

But both Ramsay and Fergusson use the vernacular as if it were something exterior to themselves, a material useful for producing metrical effects proper to poetic diction: language is not with them, as it is with Burns, a lyrical instrument responsive to every inward movement of passion and imagination: in range of fancy, geniality of humour, and fineness of artistic taste, they stand on a level much below their great disciple, generous though the latter was in exalting their merits as the first explorers of the poetical region which he made so peculiarly his own.