In one sense the poems in the Kilmarnock volume which were written under Robert Fergusson’s influence are a divergence from Burns’s deepest impulses, even though his method of composing them was fundamentally the same as in his song-writing. Instead of a tune to which he could set his own words Fergusson supplied a pattern or a theme to be adapted to his own experience. The parallels between ‘The Plane-stanes and the Causey’ and ‘The Brigs of Ayr’, between ‘The Daft Days’ and ‘Hallowe’en’ or ‘The Holy Fair’, between ‘Caller Oysters’ and ‘Scotch Drink’ or ‘To a Haggis’ are too obvious and have been too often mentioned to need reiteration. Burns borrowed, but he did not copy; even borrowed phraseology he made his own. His imitations almost invariably surpassed their originals both in poetic fire and in the epigrammatic quality essential for quotability. Yet in these forms of verse he showed no inventiveness. His own phrase that Fergusson had roused him to _emulating_ vigour is literally true. That Fergusson’s impetus failed to sweep Burns on to discover similar themes of his own reveals him as after all on foreign ground. Nevertheless, by demonstrating that poetry could still be written in the vernacular, Fergusson had done inestimable service. Beyond that his influence brought Burns to a dead end. The unhappy young lawyer’s clerk had no music in his soul. Allan Ramsay rather than Fergusson showed the way to the sort of poetry without musical setting in which Burns found his genuine freedom and inspiration. The imitations of Fergusson end with the lines ‘To a Haggis’, written in December, 1786; Ramsay supplied the models for the vernacular epistles which Burns never wholly ceased to write until a few months before his death. And between the poetic epistle as Burns wrote it and the dramatic monologue in which he also excelled there is little basic difference. The writer of a poetic epistle is usually dramatizing himself. Like the professional humorist, he assumes a role which is a projection or exaggeration of one phase of his own temperament, but which is not really himself as the working-day world knows him. For Burns to pass from such self-dramatization as marks the epistles to Lapraik, Simpson, Rankine, and Smith to the pure drama of ‘The Auld Farmer’ or even ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ involved merely an extension of imaginative scope and not a different technique.