The Influences of Robert Burns

Robert Fergusson

While Burns was at Lochlea he became influenced by the enthusiasm for the Scots tongue, a strong influence was the work of Robert Fergusson. Fergusson died three years before Burns came to Lochlea. Originating from Tarland in Aberdeenshire, the son of a Baillie, his mother a Forbes, not of the line of baronets of Craigievar but of the branch of Tolquhon castle. After attending the university of St Andrews he became clerk in an Edinburgh lawyer's office, and joined the convivial company of a club which included David Herd and the painters Runciman and Raeburn among its members.

Fergusson composed poetry in english with as much faculty as James Thompson from Scotland and Oliver Goldsmith from Ireland, but due to his untimely death in a lunatic asylum at the age of twenty-four he never became their equal. But Fergusson embraced the fashion for the Scottish vernacular, using both the literary sources and his knowledge of the Doric dialect of Aberdeenshire. Although not popular at the time they fuelled Burns's imagination, this can be seen in: I'll meet