SOURCE: "Robert Fergusson's Auld Reikie and the Poetry of City Life," in Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. 1, No. 2, October, 1963, pp. 99-110.

MacLaine is a Canadian critic who specializes in Scottish poetry. In the following excerpt, he discusses Fergusson's description of eighteenth-century Edinburgh in "Auld Reikie," comparing the style and form of the poem with that of John Gay's "Trivia."

The most famous poem in British literature devoted wholly to description of city life is John Gay's Trivia. But this fascinating work stands by no means alone; rather it is representative of a vast body of little-known poetry in this genre, extending from the time of Chaucer to the present. William H. Irving in the final chapter of John Gay's London (Cambridge, Mass., 1928), an encyclopedic and eminently useful study of this kind of verse, notes that prior to the Romantic movement which brought more personal, humanitarian, symbolic, or even...