SOURCE: "Democracy and Lyric Poetry, Scottish and English," in A History of English Poetry, Vol. VI, Macmillan & Co., 1910, pp. 52-83.

In the following excerpt, Courthope briefly summarizes Fergusson's poetic achievement, focusing on his use of the Scots vernacular.

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...