Andrew Hook, writing in the 1980s, pointed out that a tendency to privilege vernacularity has distorted Scottish literary historiography. He noted: ‘Use of the vernacular has often been accepted almost as a test of Scottish virility; cultural nationalism has always been happier with the Scottish vernacular than with Scots English’. While this position has undoubtedly begun to change, the perception in Ulster, certainly, is still that Orr's vernacular work is his most significant. He is admired and promoted by Ulster Scots cultural activists and even, tacitly, by some scholars, primarily as a vernacular writer. The result is that until very recently little attention has been granted to the much larger body of work he produced in the standard register. This amounts to a distortion of Orr's poetic persona, for as the discussion in the previous chapter has shown, many of Orr's formal English works make a significant contribution to our understanding of how the literature and philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment underpin the Irish identity he constructed for himself and assist in securing the platform from which he addressed the nation of Ireland as a whole. Nevertheless, it is likely that Orr's vernacular work will continue to be considered his finest in the purely literary sense.

The purpose of the discussion in this and the two following chapters is to establish clearly the nature of James Orr's relationship to the eighteenth-century Scottish vernacular tradition.