SOURCE: "Robert Fergusson and Eighteenth-Century Scotland," in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. XVII, No. 2, January, 1948, pp. 179-89.

Roy is a Scottish critic and educator. In the following excerpt, he argues that Fergusson's critical reception was impeded by his use of satire and traditional Scottish dialect during "an age when sentimentalism was the vogue."

Fergusson made his first appearance as an author by contributing three songs to the opera Artaxerxes, which was a translation of Metastasio's work of that name. The English version, which was produced at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, in 1769, was a miserable travesty of the original, and Fergusson's songs were on a par with the rest of the work. Although Tenducci sang them, the author was so ashamed of the versicles that he never acknowledged them. But he had at least the satisfaction of actually seeing his name in print, and the very fact that he...