SOURCE: "Robert Fergusson: Pastoral and Politics at Mid Century," in The History of Scottish Literature: 1660-1800, Vol. 2, edited by Andrew Hook, Aberdeen University Press, 1987, pp. 141-56.

In the following excerpt, Freeman discusses Fergusson's defense of Scottish traditions that were threatened by radical social change during the eighteenth century, observing that his poems oppose themes of "shelter, nature, pastoral," and "artifice, false appearance, counterpastoral."

Robert Fergusson, whom Burns pronounced 'By far, my elder brother in the Muses', Wordsworth greatly admired, and Scott, Stevenson, Muir and MacDiarmid, recognized as one of the foremost of Scottish poets, was dismissed by literary worthies in his own day as 'dissipated and drunken', 'coarse', tending to the representation of 'blackguardism'….

Culturally, he was wholly out of step with the Anglicized, Whig, Moderate Presbyterian Scotland of the mid-eighteenth century, however nationalistic it could be in its support of militia movements, Ossianic heroes, or such native...