Robert Fergusson

Robert Fergusson was born in Edinburgh on 5 September 1750, the son of a clerk from Aberdeenshire. He was educated at the High School of Edinburgh, Dundee Grammar School and the University of St Andrews, but his father's death forced him to leave without a degree and take work copying legal documents in the Commissary Clerk's office in Edinburgh. From 1772 his poems appeared in Walter Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine, and a collected volume was published in 1773. Writing in the Scots of Edinburgh's streets, he pictured the city's taverns, festivals and characters in The Daft Days, Leith Races and Auld Reekie, and country piety in The Farmer's Ingle. In 1774 he fell into a religious melancholy, suffered a head injury in a fall, and was confined in the city's public asylum, where he died on 16 October 1774. In 1787 Robert Burns, who revered him, placed a headstone over his unmarked grave in the Canongate Kirkyard.

Faith: Raised in the Church of Scotland; in his last year a religious crisis led him to renounce his convivial life and, by some accounts, burn some of his manuscripts before his final illness. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Robert Burns · James Hogg · Walter Scott