Fergusson, ROBERT

Fergusson, ROBERT, a Scottish poet, was born at Edinburgh, 5th September 1750, the third son of an industrious clerk from Aberdeenshire. A bursary for boys of his name enabled him to get a good education at Dundee grammar-school and St Andrews University, where he took to writing verses, and discovered his disinclination for the clerical life to which he had been destined. Medicine proving equally distasteful, he found employment at Edinburgh in the office of the commissary clerk, contributing the while to Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine poems which quickly gained him such local reputation as unhappily proved his ruin. His society was eagerly sought, and in that convivial time he was led into excesses which permanently injured his health. At last he fell into a religious melancholy, which became complete insanity after an injury to the head received in a fall down-stairs. He died on the 16th October 1774, and was buried in the Canongate churchyard, where fifteen years later Burns, at his own expense, erected a memorial-stone with a poetical inscription over his grave. His poems were collected in 1773. There are editions by T. Ruddiman (1779), D. Irving (1800), Robert Chambers (1840), and A. B. Grosart (1851). As a poet Fergusson possessed vigour, fancy, fluency in versification, and an original vein of comic humour, but lacked imagination, energy, and passion. Such poems as 'The King's Birthday,' 'Braid Claith,' and 'Leith Races' are remarkably happy in hitting off the ludicrous side of local manners; 'The Farmer's Ingle' has a more lasting interest as the prototype of 'The Cot-tar's Saturday Night.' Burns had an admiration for 'his elder brother in the Muses' out of proportion to his merits. Grosart in his short monograph ('Famous Scots,' 1897) is too eulogistic.