SOURCE: "The Substitute Life (City)," in Robert Fergusson and the Scots Humanist Compromise, Edinburgh University Press, 1984, pp. 123-78.

In the following excerpt, Freeman discusses the political views that influenced Fergusson's poetry, characterizing Fergusson as a resolute Scots Tory, Jacobite and nationalist who was often "openly anti-England, Hanover, and Whig," and a "most uncompromisingly political poet."

When the Scots humanist pondered the nation that Scotland had become after the ousting of the Stewarts, the eclipse of the older religions and the church hierarchy, the dissolution of the Scots parliament, the severance of old continental alliances, and the change from a classical to a neoclassical culture, he saw discontinuity, an unnatural break in his nation's culture and history effected for an alleged utility. In his mind the Whigs built a new Scotland at the expense of its past. Certainly this is the feeling one gets in reading the local historians...