The praise of rustic good, the oblique criticism of luxurious living is here in Fergusson as it is in 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' but it is brought in naturally and without posturing, this is true, also of Fergusson's handling of the patriotic note, a note which is sounded too stridently in Burns poem. When Fergusson goes on to describe the family's conversation, he does not, as Burns does, suddenly begin moralizing about the possibility of 'a wretch, a villain, lost to love and truth' seducing one of the farmer's daughters and proceed to execrate this hypothetical character, but instead mentions casually how they gossip about the affairs and illegitimate children of their neighbors (and one must remember how common illegitimate children were in the eighteenth century Scottish countryside)

The children are ready for bed now, and have their bedtime story before they retire for the night. Finally, everybody is ready for sleep: the oil lamp is flickering low, conversation lags, and tacksman (farmer) and cotter eke to bed maun steer. Fergusson ends the poem with a superb stanza of simple benediction

THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT
Inscribed to R.Aiken, Esq.
Burns is not content to stay within the limits of his model. The very fact that he dedicated 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' to Robert Aiken, the bustling, sentimental, but extremely practical Ayr lawyer, is an indication of his desire to keep an eye on a city audience, for, although 'Orator Bob' was a convivial and democratic soul who admired Burns Scots poems and spoke the Doric himself, apparently his purpose in this poem is to stand for the genteel man of feeling. Or was it that Burns did not lose sight of the fact that Aiken could be influential and he was the main subscriber to the Kilmarnock Edition putting his name against 145 copies of the total 612 which were printed ( more than twice as many as Robt Muir at 72 copies.)

The opening stanza (which sounds as though it had been added to the poem as an afterthought) is full of the posturing which Burns was led into when he wrote with the genteel tradition too much in mind.

Here is that touchy emphasis on pride again, that unnecessary disclaimer of mercenary motives, which appears quite ludicrous when embodied in a Spenserian stanza, and a preposterous sentimentalism which could actually suggest that the plump and prosperous little lawyer would have been happier in a cottage than in his comfortable house in Ayr! The two lines which contain this fantastic suggestion ring false even to the casual ear.
But if we forget this absurd opening and treat the second verse as the real beginning, we have at once what promises to be a grand poem

This is a richer verse than the opening of 'The Farmer's Ingle' the line is slower and more musical, and fits perfectly the sense of weariness that hangs over the stanza and culminates in the long, slow last line. Burns is clearly reaching out to something more elababorate than the simpler (but effective) verse of Fergusson, and if he could have kept the whole poem in the key of this stanza the achievement would have been remarkable.
The third verse is not quite so successful (the 'aged tree' in the second line sounds rather like a stage property, and the last line is too propositional and lacks the weight such a line requires if it is to balance the stanza adequately). But the tone has not yet changed

In addition to the defects noted, one might object also to 'the lisping infant, prattling on his knee,' as too stylized and conventional a picture to fit a realistically drawn cottage interior. We should prefer the 'bairnies' of 'The Farmer's Ingle.' Nevertheless, the poem has not yet gone off the rails. (We are ignoring the opening verse, and considering the poem as beginning with the second.) In the next stanza the verse is lighter and not quite so well adapted to the elaborate Spenserian stanza (Burns would have done better to use Fergusson's simpler form)

The only serious fault to find here is the last line, which has a curious, stilted air, and like the final line of the preceding verse is not adequate to balance the stanza as a whole.
The next verse is a curious mixture of Scots realism and eighteenth-century convention and it marks the beginning of a serious confusion in the poem

Terms like 'social hours' hardly sort well with such straightforward expressions as 'each tells the uncos that he sees or hears,' while in the last four lines the juxtaposition of a personified Anticipation pointing the way like Washington crossing the Delaware and the simple, realistic statement that
The Mother, wi' her needle and her sheers
Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new
is even more awkward.
There is something, too, rather overdeliberate and sententious about the picture of the father intervening in the conversation periodically in order to utter moral sententiae

The picture which follows, of a 'neebor lad' coming in to see Jenny is tight with self-consciousness, in spite of some happy touches. The mother seems overconcerned lest the boy be some wild, worthless rake, and the description of her inquiring his name 'with heart-struck, anxious care' is out of key with the general picture of a typical cotter's Saturday night, suggesting rather that this is a particular crisis in Jenny's life.

Burns stance becomes more and more artificial such that when he, the greatest of all celebrators of the way of a man with a maid in its most unsophisticated form, pauses to contemplate the possibility of Jenny's seduction, we do not have to know anything of the history of the poet's own, relations with women to notice at once the absurd artificiality of the stanza in such a context

The ruined maid, who comes from The Man of Feeling and other sentimental works of the period, is an artificial and melodramatic figure in this humble cottage. This verse is, in fact, full of melodramatic gestures, such as 'Curse on his perjur'd arts' - we almost see the villain in a black cloak and curled black moustache and the redundant, conventional language ('Is there no Pity, no relenting Ruth?') shows how far away from good writing Burns could get when he moved into a tradition in which he was not at home. The point was not that Burns was wrong to write in English, he could write excellent English verse, and some of his best songs are in English, but this is poetic diction of the worst kind and is clearly linked to the artificial pose which Burns, at this stage of the poem, was endeavoring to maintain.
It is perhaps not wholly irrelevant to add that in terms of the mores of the Scottish peasantry in Burns day, a 'maid' was not 'ruined' if she was seduced before marriage. There were many cases of the birth of a child preceding the marriage of the lovers, who subsequently became perfectly respectable citizens, and the history of Burns own relations with Jean Armour, by no means unique in this respect, bears this out. But there is no need to judge the stanza on the basis of sociological accuracy in order to see what is wrong with it. On purely technical grounds it can be seen to be impossible in this context.
It is with relief that we turn back, in the next verse, to the simple activities of the cottagers

This is admirable, and the subsequent picture of family prayers shows how Burns could introduce dignity and religion into his picture without artificial posturing. This is the true tone of rustic worship and something on which Fergusson does not touch.

The next three verses, giving the theme of their prayers and praises, have no trace of Scots in their diction. This is perfectly appropriate, as well as historically accurate, for the Scottish rustic of the period would in fact move into the language of the King James Bible on such occasions. Burns makes this transition natural and effective and we get a sense of a conscious move from the secular to the religious in the family behavior.

More questionable is the sixteenth verse of the poem, with its quotation from Pope's 'Windsor Forest' (duly acknowledged by Burns in a footnote) and the rather doubtful attempt at metaphysical sublimity in the last line

In that verse Burns attempt, both to be his subject and to stand outside it and show it off to a genteel audience spoils the poem. We return from this moralizing to the cottage scene

That second line sounds rather forced beside Fergusson's
The fient a chiep's amang the bairnies now
and when we are presented with another picture of the parents prayer, we begin to wonder impatiently whether these cottagers do not spend all their time at their devotions.

The poem moves into its conclusion, in the nineteenth stanza, with a fine line, simple and impressive, which promises well

but once again Burns moves into his exhibitionist moralizing

The patriotic emotion which follows is genuine enough, and the expression has a certain power in spite of its conventional abstractions

But he overdoes the patriotic note, and in his final stanza seems to forget altogether the real theme of his poem

There is probably no poem of Burns in which the introduction of an artificial personality has spoiled a potentially fine work to the extent that it has in 'The Cotter's Saturday Night.' The main trouble is that the poet has kept shifting his attitude, and with it his diction, between several incompatible positions. He is at one time the sympathetic, realistic observer, at another he is almost the cotter himself, at still another he is the sophisticated moralist acting as guide, showing off his rustic characters for the benefit of a sentimental, genteel audience. That audience appreciated the exhibition Burns prepared for them. Henry Mackenzie mentioned the poem as an 'advantageous' example 'of the tender and the moral,' and The English Review of February, 1787, singled it out as 'the best poem in the collection.' 'It is written,' wrote this reviewer, 'In the stanza of Spenser, which probably our bard acquired from Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence' and Beattie's 'Minstrel.' It describes one of the happiest and most affecting scenes to be found in a country life, and draws a domestic picture of rustic simplicity, natural tenderness, and innocent passion that must please every reader whose feelings are not perverted.'

In spite of, perhaps because of, such praise, Burns must have known that there were incongruous elements in the poem, and known exactly what they were. It would he going too far to say that he must have known that these incongruous elements were faults, for his taste was never sure when he moved into the English sentimental tradition. He seems to have been trying to give scope and dignity to his work by grafting on these suggestions from Gray and Shenstone and Beattie. He was making the same mistake that Matthew Arnold made when he denied high seriousness to Burns for neither realized that high seriousness can be achieved in all sorts of ways (including the use of irony) without being overtly present. Burns imagined that these moral gestures, these melodramatic attitudes and self-conscious displays of himself as a man of feeling would add that high seriousness. In fact, of course, they only spoiled the poem, and (as Matthew Arnold conceded) there is more real 'high seriousness' in
We twa hae paidl'd in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin' auld lang syne
than in any of the poems he wrote with an eye on the genteel tradition of his time. There is certainly a far more profound understanding of the relation between the sexes in 'The Ranting Dog, the Daddie O’t,' the poem he wrote for Jean when she bore his child out of wedlock, than in any of his remarks about Jenny and the risks she ran from country rakes in 'The Cotter's Saturday Night.' The critic of Burns can always appeal from Burns as a self-conscious man of feeling to Burns the inspired Scottish poet. If Burns did not know what was wrong with his picture of the cotter, there were dozens of his own poems that could have told him.
One other aspect of this poem, though, is that while Burns often satirised the people who abused their professed religious belief, he never satirised religion in itself and this poem, perhaps more than any other shows his understanding of the Bible and his respect for the truths contained within it.

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