This essay discusses the evolving literary and cultural relationship between Ireland and Scotland in the writings and career of the nineteenth-century Irish poet Samuel Ferguson. By examining the correspondence between Ferguson and his Edinburgh-based publisher, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, it shows the ways in which Ferguson tried to frame his own youthful politics through the Scottish Toryism of Blackwood’s. Ferguson’s temporary interest in the Young Ireland movement and the Protestant Repeal Association in the 1840s is brought to an end in his poem and essay on the death of Thomas Davis. The essay argues that this poem, and the account of Davis which accompanies it, are modelled on the two essays that Ferguson wrote in 1845 on the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Ferguson’s strategy of reading Burns as a respectable poet with a naturally conservative sensibility is replicated in his account of Davis. The essay then suggests that in his later work Ferguson found that Scotland was both an awkward analogy for Ireland’s political situation and less welcoming site of publication for his version of Ireland than had been the case at the beginning of his career. His epic poem Congal (1872) shows the Irish-Scottish relationship under strain, as does his final correspondence with Blackwood’s.