FERGUSON, or FERGUSSON, ROBERT, was born at Edinburgh about 1750, and educated at the University of St. Andrews, where he received some encouragement from one of the professors named Wilkie, who employed him to transcribe his lectures. An anonymous biographer (Life prefixed to Fergueon's Poems, edition of 1807) has employed considerable research in discovering certain freaks of a kind neither Indicroue nor in good taste, in which he appears to have Indulged during his residence at St. Andrews : one of these was near being the came of his expulsion; but the sentence was recalled, and be remained as it appears for four years, during which time ha subsisted on a bursary or exhibition founded by a person of his own name. On leaving St. Andrew's, he paid a visit to au uncle from whom he had expectations of employment, but after a few months left his house under circumstances of which his anonymous biographer gives a very unsatisfactory account. During the remainder of his life he was employed in the office of the cornmimary-clerk of Edinburgh, with the exception of a few months spent in that of the sheriff clerk ; and was a constant contributor to Ituddiman's 'Weekly Magazine,' from which his poems were afterwards collected. The local celebrity
which these productions obtained for him gave him so frequent opportunities of convivial and other excess, as to ruin hie health, and terminate his life at the early ege of twenty-four years. Ills last days were passed in a mad-house, his debauchery having ended in repent ance which took the form of melancholy, when a serious accident having canoed the fracture of his skull, his mental faculties became wholly deranged, and he died October 10,1774, aged only twenty-four.
Ferguson's poems are written partly in English and partly in Low land bcotch. Those in Lowland Scotch have been admired by persons conversant with the idiom in which they are written; but to an English ear they want the charm which makes Burns pleasing even when he is scarcely intelligible. In mire of his English verses, a little more may be said; but we suspect that the painful circumstance. of his life created an interest aboutidol to which much, if not meet, of Ilia celebrity 1. owing.