CHAPTER XIV. EARLY SCOTTISH LITERATURE.

For purposes of convenience the development of "Ynglis" literature north of the Tweed and Esk, may be treated in this place.

Originally the "Scots" or Scottish tongue was Gaelic, the language of the Irish Scots who, landing in Argyll about a.d. 500, finally gave a dynasty and its existing name, to "Scot" land. When the dynasty acquired the Anglicized Lothian and much of Cumberland, it adopted the English speech, consequently the writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Scotland used a form of northern English or "Ynglis," and knew not Gaelic. They called their speech "English" till the long wars with England led them to draw a distinction and patriotically style it "Scots" or "Scottis". Thus by 1562, Ninian Winzett upbraids John Knox for "knapping English" in his writings, and forgetting the "Scots" that he learned at his mother's knee. Gaelic was no longer reckoned "Scots," it was Ersch, Yrisch, or Erse. Even before the days of Edward I, the town seal of Stirling, on the Forth, describes the Gaelic-speaking men north of Forth as Scoti bruti. The Scottish writers did not know, and therefore despised Gaelic, from which they have scarcely borrowed anything. Latin and French they knew, and enriched their tongue by borrowing from these sources.

The one verse of Scottish poetry that may have survived from the end of the thirteenth century, the lines on the death of Alexander III, are charming, but, if they were written at the time, or shortly after, they must have been modernized, more or less, when Wyntoun, the rhyming chronicler, quoted them about 1420, twenty years after the death of Chaucer.

[Pg 130]

Barbour.

Setting aside the enigmatic Huchown already discussed, John Barbour, author of "The Brus," a history of King Robert Bruce in rhyming octosyllabic couplets, is the first poet of English speaking Scotland. He remains one of the most spirited and readable; the most like Sir Walter Scott, who used his book in poetry and in prose historical writing.

By 1357 Barbour was Archdeacon of Aberdeen: he was probably born at least ten years before Chaucer. In 1357 he went, with others, to study at Oxford, probably at the Scottish college, Balliol. He also visited France, for studious purposes; he held a position in the Exchequer, and, after finishing "The Brus" in 1376, received a pension from Bruce's grandson, Robert II: other pensions he received: he died in 1396. He had written other works, lost or disputable, and a romantic genealogy of the Stuarts, who were really Fitz Alans, and of ancient Breton origin, not, as was fabled, of the old Scoto-Irish dynasty. "A Buik of Alexander" (the romance of Alexander the Great), is attributed to Barbour with much probability.

Barbour possesses, unlike most of the narrative poets of the Middle Ages, one supreme advantage. He is not telling, for the twentieth time, the Tale of Troy, of Alexander the Great, of King Arthur, or of any dim mythical hero. The events in the history of Scotland which his own father witnessed, make one of the best stories in the world. Bruce was far from a faultless hero, but his adventures are picturesque facts, not inventions: though sometimes Barbour tells the same story twice, with variations. His many defeats, his wanderings in the heather, with a little company or with a single attendant; his flight over sea; his crossings of perilous lochs in frail boats; his single combats; the desperate chivalrous valour of his brother Edward; his own sagacity as a strategist and tactician; his kindness of heart; his love of the romances; the sufferings of his loyal friends, men and women; all his days of almost desperate warfare; all his escapes when surrounded in the hills of Galloway and of Argyll, are matters of historical fact, and can often be traced in English documents of[Pg 131] the time. His "crowning mercy" Bannockburn, is as historical as Marathon or Waterloo.

When we think of the wild scenes in which Bruce warred and wandered, Loch Trool, Loch Awe, the whole of the Lennox, the uplands of Don and Dee; when we remember the blending of English armed knights, and of the plaided clans in the ranks of his enemies; his own combination of the Islesmen with "the dark impenetrable wood" of the Lowland spears; the many-hued silks of the standards; the cowled friars who prayed while the warriors fought; the fair ladies who shared the hero's dangers, we see that Barbour has a theme fresh, brilliant, and unique for his poem. He has a true story which is more thrilling than any invented romance.

Barbour notoriously, perhaps in the interests of poetic perspective, rolls up three Bruces, the grandfather, the father, and the hero himself, into one personage. Yet his statements of the numbers of the English engaged are sometimes corroborated by the English muster rolls. Before he has written three hundred lines he strikes the sonorous keynote of his narrative in that praise of Freedom which is worthy of the poet who fought at Marathon.

"Ah! freedom is a noble thing!"

In what other mediaeval romance can these lines be equalled? What wearies us in Barbour is the common defect of mediaeval poets, the occasional display of learning, references to what Cato did, or Hannibal, or Scipio, and the like, but Barbour is not tedious when, after giving a minute portrait of the good Lord James of Douglas, he compares him to Hector, though, for valour,

To Hector dare I none compare
Of all that ever in world were.

The story never drags, adventure follows adventure, and there is none of the weary exaggeration of romance. Bruce does not slay his thousands, like Arthur. When he, a mounted man in armour, Ms the better of three plaided clansmen, MacNaughton, who is of the hostile party, cries

[Pg 132]

Surely, in all my time,
I never heard, in song or rhyme,
Tell of a man that so smartly
Displayed such great chivalry.

But Bruce is soon obliged to give his horse to one of the ladies, and go on foot, like Prince Charles, living on such venison as his arrows may procure. Barbour has to invent no fanciful dangers; he knows the racing tides and dangerous shoals of Argyll—

The waves wide that breaking were,
Weltered as hills, here and there.

Unlike Chaucer, Barbour has a scorn of astrology: no man ever (he says) made three correct prophecies, by knowledge of the stars! He is far from scrupulous, and does not blame Douglas when, like Achilles, he slays prisoners of war: apparently because he could not take them with him in his retreat, and secure their ransoms. Barbour has not, of course, the genius of Chaucer; but he has a touch of the genius of Scott, he has spirit, and a true sense of loyalty, chivalry, and patriotism; these, with his subject, place him beside Chaucer in so far as that he may still be read with unaffected enjoyment.

Wyntoun.

Between Barbour and the first true Scottish disciple of Chaucer, James I, comes the author of a Chronicle in rhyming octosyllabic couplets "The Orygynale Cronykil". This is Andrew Wyntoun, who was a canon of St. Andrews Cathedral, and prior of St. Serfs on a little island in Loch Leven, the loch of Queen Mary's captivity. Wyntoun appears to have been an old man when, in 1413, the first Scottish university was founded at St. Andrews, by a bull of the Anti-Pope, Pedro de la Luna. The place must, with its Augustinian canons, have been a seat of learning before 1413, but the new university was very poor, and a thing of small beginnings.

Wyntoun's book commences with Adam and Eve, and is at fifth hand and fabulous till the author approaches his own time.

Mythical as is his work when he approaches his own date he,[Pg 133] with Fordun, the really industrious author of the prose "Scotichronicon" (died about 1384), is one of our few sources of information about Scottish affairs. Wyntoun is amusing, but does not pretend to high poetic merit.

The Kingis Quhair.

To people who only know King James I of Scotland in history, his poem, "The Kingis Quhair" (book) must be rather disappointing. Fortune was his foe, as he says in the poem, and the foe of his House.

Born in July, 1394, young James was made prisoner in March, 1405-1406, and, for about eighteen years was a captive in England, or was led with the army of Henry V against his natural ally, Charles VII, the Dauphin of Jeanne d'Arc. The ransom demanded from James when released, in 1423, was ruinous; of his hostages, noblemen, some died in England; he found his country full of anarchy and treason; the disorders he suppressed with illegal vigour; he seized earldoms to which he had no right, he made powerful enemies, and, in 1437, he was slain by Robert Graeme and a band of Highlanders, at the Black Friars' in Perth. In England he had married Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, who lived to avenge him on his murderers with unheard-of cruelties.

When a man of James's intellect, character, and experiences writes a poem on his own taking at sea by faithless foes, his own long captivity, and his own love-story, we naturally expect something of poignant personal interest. But we expect what his time, his taste, and his rank forbade him to give. Never was poetical tradition so crushing to originality as the tradition of the "Roman de la Rose".

For centuries each mediaeval poet aimed at saying just what his forerunners had said, and in much the same style: Barbour, of course, is an exception; he does not open with a sleepless night; a book read in bed; a dream of a May morning; a walk to a pretty river, a palace near the river, and all the rest of it. Barbour writes "like a man of this world".

But King James follows the fashion of allegory. He cannot[Pg 134] sleep; he reads Bo?thius in bed, Bo?thius "full of moralities". He lies thinking over his sorrows when (this is original), the bell for matins rings, and

Ay me thought the bell
Said to me, tell on, man, quhat the befell.

He did not think that the Voice was a real Voice, "impression of my thought causes this illusion," said he, and though he had "spent much ink and paper to little effect," he sat down, made a mark of the cross, and set to work at his tale, first comparing his life to a ship in perilous seas, and then briefly mentioning his capture when about three years past the age of innocence (which was seven, he was, when taken, four years past seven). Birds, beasts, and fishes, he says, are free, why does Fortune make me thrall? He looks out of his window into a green garden; the nightingales sing; he sees, and describes very prettily, a fair lady walking with her two maidens, and falls in love. In all probability this is a mere imitation of the first sight of Emily by Palamon and Arcite, in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale". James would meet Jeanne in society: he was not a close prisoner, we are told that he knew many English ladies, and the course of his true love ran smooth enough. But the description is charming, as is the address to the nightingale which follows.

After this long and excellent passage of true poetry, fashion compels the King to visit the Palace of Venus and see the lovers of old times, converse with Venus and with Pallas, and visit Fortune with her Wheel, and take his place on it; then he awakes not "seeing all his own mischance". A white turtle-dove brings him flowers, and a glad message in letters of gold; and he blesses birds and flowers and even his prison wall, and

the sanctis marciall
That me first causit hath this accident.

The poem ends with an invocation of the shades of his "masters dear," Gower and Chaucer.

The manuscript, of about 1488, ascribes the poem to King James, so does Major or Mair, a not too trustworthy historian.[Pg 135] The language is northern English, mixed with Scots, with many borrowings from Chaucer. The story indicated is true of James and of no one else, but the usual attempt has been made to deprive him of the authorship—wholly without success. The measure is the "rhyme royal" of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde". The scansion is remarkably correct, and the lines have a melody not common in the works of Chaucer's followers. There is a strong moral element in the reflection and discourses.

Henryson.

Not a King like James I, nor a courtier priest, like Dunbar, his junior, but a schoolmaster of the Benedictine Abbey-school at Dunfermline, Robert Henryson had, among Scottish poets of his day, the greatest share of the spirit of their master, Chaucer. He may be the Robert Henryson who, already a Bachelor of Arts, joined the University of Glasgow in 1462, but nothing is certainly known of him. He wrote his "Morall Fabillis of Esope"

by request and precept of a lord,
Of whom the name it needs not record,

to he apparently had a patron destitute of vanity, and not ambitious of publicity. Henryson regarded ?sop, the mythical Greek slave, as "a noble Clerk," and made his own use of the tales of talking beasts, birds, and fishes, which are told among savages in most wild countries, and reached him, some of them by way of India, filtered through Latin, French, and English authors.

The animals are perfectly human in character, and give to Henryson, as later to Prior and La Fontaine, the opportunity to show his own wit, humour, and tolerant gentle nature. The tales are told in the seven line stanza, rhyme royal, of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde". Even to-day they may be read with unfeigned pleasure, for their humorous and human studies of character, for their unostentatious pictures of nature, of the little nest of the field mouse, the moors, the stubble fields, the warm storeroom of the burgess's house, where the town mouse has her hole, and for the unaffected sympathy with our wild kindred of fur and feather. The chatter of the hens, the widows of Chanticleer, when the fox,[Pg 136] who has claimed old family friendship with the cock, flatters his vanity and carries him away, is far more pleasing than Dunbar's satire on his revolting Widow and two married women. One hen, Pertok, makes bitter moan for the cock, the common husband of them all, but Sprutok declares her intention to sing, "Was never widow so gay"; she enumerates the faults of the dear deceased; Pertok comes into her way of thinking; and Toppok speaks of the faithlessness of their late Lord. Heaven has punished Chanticleer, who, after all, cheats the fox, and returns to his harem.

"The Two Mice" is especially humorous, and as sympathetic as Burns's poem "The Twa Dogs". The tale is so vivid that we feel the keenest anxiety when Gib, or Gilbert, "our Jolly Cat," pounces on the country mouse; the town mouse knows her hole, and has fled thither. The horror of the town mouse when she has rural dainties placed before her by the country mouse, her mincing airs of patronage, are delicately touched; in short, with the Fox's confession to the priestly Wolf, and the Trial of the Fox; and the strained law which the Wolf administers to the Lamb, the fables are animated and delightful poetry in their kind: the Morals, as when the hard lot of the poor husbandmen is described, are far from contemptible. Had Henryson left nothing else we must recognize in him a true son of Chaucer.

His "Testament of Cresseyde" begins from a bitter winter night, when alone and snug in his warm room, he mends the fire, takes a drink, lays down his Chaucer, and ends the tale of fair false Cresseyde, whom Chaucer pitied. Chaucer was not the man to have created, like Thackeray, that other Cresseyde, Beatrix Esmond in her matchless bloom of triumphant beauty, and later to have drawn her as the old Baroness Bernstein. What Chaucer held his hand from,—the mediaeval tale of the punishment of false Cresseyde,—Henryson, not without a passion of pity, undertook. The gods sent on Cresseyde's beauty the plague of leprosy, a terrible malady scarcely known by name to the Greeks, but as common in the Middle Ages as in ancient Israel.

Diomede deserts Cresseyde; she becomes the common "spoil of opportunity," and returns to her father Calchas, priest of Venus. But "into the Kirk" Cresseyde is ashamed to go. In a trance[Pg 137] she comes into the presence of Saturn, a frozen god, and of the other old deities. Saturn then condemns her. The lady awakes and sees in her glass that she is a leper. She goes to the lazar-house, she dwells and begs with the lepers: Troilus rides past, and knows her not, but, in some faint way, memory of his love for Cresseyde wakes in him, and for his lost love's sake he gives to the leper lordly alms, "a purse of gold and many a gay jewel".

And nevertheless not are are uther knew.

But another leper recognized Troilus, and Cresseyde, smitten to the heart, made her moan and her Testament, leaving to Troilus the royal ring and red ruby that he had given her long ago. So she died, and Troilus raised a tomb of marble to

Cresseid of Troyis toun,
Sumtyme countit the flour of Womanheid.

In the poem of this adventure there are but 616 lines; and it contains the poignant essence of romance; all passion and pity. Nothing in the poetry of Scotland excels, perhaps nothing but here and there the cry of a ballad, or of Scott's "Proud Maisie," approaches in excellence this work of the schoolmaster of Dunfermline.

His "Robene and Makyne," or love-dialogue between a lad and lass, the girl first wooing and repulsed; then wooed and scornful, is in a charming measure, and may have imitated some ancient French pastourelle.

The "Orpheus and Eurydice," that sad and beautiful tale—told by Maoris in New Zealand, and by Iroquois in America—of the man who seeks his dead wife in Hades, has merit in Henryson's version. The passage of Orpheus to and through Hades, where his music consoles Tantalus and Theseus, and wins the grace of Persephone, is excellent; the tragic close is not successfully handled, and the long Moral is tedious. A number of moral poems do not transcend the common course of those things, and Henryson lives by his "Fables," his "Testament of Cresseid," and "Robene and Makyne".

These, with the sympathetic kindliness of his unrepining[Pg 138] nature place him, if an individual opinion may be given, high above his more famous contemporary, Dunbar.

Dunbar.

William Dunbar, whom Scott declared to be the greatest poet of Scotland prior to Robert Burns, took the degree of Bachelor of Arts at St. Andrews in 1477. Much later, lads of seventeen or even of fourteen, graduated, so Dunbar may have been born (in East Lothian) so early as 1460. His language, with some southern English tincture, is that of the most Anglicized part of Scotland. The Earls of Dunbar were a great shifting power on the Border, and Dunbar's name, at least, was noble, he may have come of Cospatrick's line (Earls of March).

A favourite Scottish form of verse was the "Flyting" (scolding) or humorous raillery, and Dunbar's opponent, Walter Kennedy, represented a very old Celtic clan of Galloway and Ayrshire: Dunbar banters him on his "Irish" dress and accent. Dunbar was brought up to be a Churchman, and was a novice in the Order of St. Francis, "begging with a pardon in all Kirks". From 1479 to 1491, he was travelling abroad, preaching and begging in France, far from honestly, he says:—

"I wes ay reddy all men to begyle," like Chaucer's Pardoner, but perhaps Dunbar was merely copying Chaucer. He is thought to have been attached to the Scottish Embassy in Paris, and he may have read, in print, the works of the famous burglar poet, Francois Villon. His recognized Masters, however, were Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate.

From 1500 to the great defeat of Flodden (1513) and the death of James IV, Dunbar was a priest and poet at the Court of that magnificent prince, in whose days Scotland was peaceful, comparatively rich, and addicted to letters and the arts. Her poets, a century after Chaucer, and eighty years after their Royal leader, James I, were all Chaucerians, but were confessedly more vigorous, tuneful, more original in genius, and much less prolix and pedantic than the English Chaucerians, Lydgate, Gower, and Hawes. But what Dunbar lacks in length, he more than makes up for in breadth. He made Court poems on the Royal marriage[Pg 139] of "The Thistle and the Rose" (Margaret, the Rose, was really as prickly as the Thistle). He was but thriftily rewarded, and emitted many rhymed petitions for money. Benefice he got none.

Probably, like Dean Swift, he was thought no credit to his cloth, even in days far from respectable. As Chaucer was styled "Old Grizzle," so the Scot speaks of himself as "this gray horss, Auld Dunbar". At about 48, and in sickness, he wrote his "Lament for the Makaris," the dead "makers" or poets, including Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, with the recurring burden, Timor mortis conturbat me, "Fear of Death disturbeth me". In 1511 he was with the Queen at her reception in Aberdeen, which he celebrated, as he had already made immortal the filth and stench of Edinburgh, a town famous for its dirt till after Dr. Johnson's time. His humorous poems, his satires on society and clergy, are coarser than the English poetic attacks. His Three Wanton Wives, "Two Married Women and the Widow," is inspired by Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," or rather by the prologue.

Historically, these poems are full of matter, with their pictures of a society not more pure than that to which Piers Plowman preached, but they have not the gentle and humane wit of Chaucer. Like all the poets following Chaucer, Dunbar shines in descriptions of gardens and woods in spring, though May, in Scotland, is not always what his fancy painted it, indeed these vernal glories are borrowed from the verse of sunny France—

The sun rises fair in France,
And fair sets he,
But he has tint the bonny blink
He has in my ain countrie,

writes the Jacobite exile, accustomed at home, only to a "blink" or gleam of the sun through clouds. After 1520, or thereabouts, Dunbar saw no more of the sun.

Dunbar, with his satires, "flytings," Court poems, allegories of the usual kind, rhymed petitions, poems of penitence and faith, and the rest, was versatile enough, and wrote in many forms of verse, even in the old unrhymed alliterative cadences ("The tua[Pg 140] Mariit Wumen and the Wedo"). To his glory be it said that this, his longest piece, is only of 530 lines. He also used the heroic rhymed couplet, "Riding Rhyme," and the rhymed octosyllabic couplet, strophes of various arrangements, and even the tripping French triolet.

One allegorical poem, "The Golden Targe," full of classical mythology and the usual praise of May, contains the lines

O reverend Chaucere, Rose of rethoris all,
As in our tong are flour imperiall,

"rethoris," being masters of rhetoric.

Dunbar escapes from Venus and other gods, and from a crowd of allegorical people—including Danger, of course,—at the end of 278 lines. Apparently Scotland did not love the long-winded style. The "flyting" combines with rhyme copious alliteration.

For wealth of strange coarse terms of abuse Dunbar may compare with Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais. A poem to the young Queen is unspeakably nauseous. In short to be plain, it is not easy to see why Dunbar has been reckoned above James I and Henryson; while Barbour, with a chivalrous heart and a spirited story, is infinitely more agreeable and profitable than the Court-haunting priest of James IV. In Scotland, Dunbar at no time has been so popular as the poets already mentioned. He praises Chaucer, but the lesson of Chaucer he never fully learned.

Blind Harry.

Blind Harry, or "Henry the Minstrel," is a mysterious personage. Who was Harry? John Mair or Major (1469-1550) (?) is not an accurate historian; the Antiquary, in Scott's novel, calls him "a pillar of falsehood". Major says that, in his own infancy (say 1480) a man blind from his birth wrote "Schir William Wallace," and supported himself by chanting it to the nobles. The manuscript is of 1488. A few entries of small sums paid to "Blind Harry" occur in the Royal accounts, ending in 1492, and Harry was dead when (1508) Dunbar printed his Lament for poets dead and gone. Harry may have become blind, but can hardly have been blind from his birth. Though he calls himself "a borel man,"[Pg 141] an unlettered man, he had some education; he was not a ballad maker, but produced a romance of nearly 12,000 lines. He says that he had a Latin source, a narrative written by Wallace's chaplain, John Blair, of which nothing is known.

He is full of anachronisms, and tells long adventures of Wallace with Edward I and his Queen which never occurred. Tradition, already mythical, is his chief source, his Wallace is but little more historical than Grettir in the Icelandic Saga, and like him has dealings with a ghost, that of a slain man, which appears with its head in its hand. Wallace, whose wife, it is said, was slain by the English, is a very bloodthirsty hero; his manslayings and burnings of houses are many. Harry has not too high an opinion of Bruce. His hero, Wallace, has always been, thanks mainly to Harry, the most popular of Scottish heroes. Harry tells his tale with abundant energy; he hates the English infinitely more than the chivalrous Barbour did, and he is perfectly free from the influence of the "Roman de la Rose". His verse is not wholly correct; eight consecutive lines have the following rhymes,—"been, keen, saw, mean, seen, raw, knaw, teir, faw," indeed some passages have a kind of stanza formation, in the Second Book (lines 260-360).

We must not look on Harry as an unlearned maker of Border ballads. He had read Wyntoun, and Chaucer (though he does not make Chaucer his model), and he borrows from the alliterative romance of "Arthur" ascribed to the mysterious Huchown. Moreover, it has been proved, and anybody can see it, that he stole adventures of Robert Bruce from Barbour's poem, and made Wallace, not Bruce, their hero. Harry takes some of Bruce's battles and transfers them to Wallace. "Harry nearly uproots Barbour." Whereas Bruce, on the eve of Bannockburn, cut down Sir Henry Bohun, as he charged, with a blow of his axe, Harry declares that Wallace dealt this very stroke on Bruce's spear and horse's neck. To Wallace he attributes the famous campaign in which Bruce drove Edward II within the walls of York (1322).[1]

Harry is, in short, a mystery, and his book, wholly worthless[Pg 142] as history, is a colossal perversion of Barbour "The Bruce," with other matter from pure fancy or from unknown legend, while great parts are played by men of Harry's own time, English in-evading knights of 1483.

The Buke of the Howlat.

Sir Richard Holland, or de Holand, a cleric, and a partisan of the House of Douglas during its encounters with the Crown, and its fall under James II, wrote, to please his patroness, the Countess of Moray, and to flatter the Douglas, "The Buke of the Howlat," the Owl. The poem, in stanzas of thirteen lines, rhyming and alliterative, begins with the usual dream and leads up to a kind of allegorical "Parliament of Fowls". The allegory is entangled, the poet's real desire is to glorify his patrons with their motto,

O Dowglas, O Dowglas,
Tendir and Trewe!

"Trewe" they had been, to Bruce and to Scotland, but they became the allies, against king and country, of Edward IV and Henry VIII, while "tender" the Douglases never were. The most interesting passage describes the voyage of the good Lord James towards the Holy Land, with the heart of Bruce. In Spain he meets the Saracens in battle, and throws among them the Heart, in its jewelled case—

Amang the hethin men the hert hardely he slang,
Said, "Wend on as thou was wont,
Throw the batell in front,
Ay formost in the front,
Thy foes amang."

There fell the Douglas, above the heart of his king, that was rescued by Logan and Lockhart, and brought back to Scotland; a noble feat of chivalry, nobly told. Here Holland "stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet".

It may be said of these Scottish poets that while, in initiative and in models they owe almost all to England, their long and desperate war with that country gives them a martial fire and spirit to which the English poetry of the time furnishes no rival. Laurence Minot does not stir the blood!

[Pg 143]

Gawain Douglas.

Gawain Douglas was of the family of the Red Douglases, Earls of Angus, who rose on the ruin of the turbulent Black Douglases, of the House of Bruce's good Lord James, when they failed in their alliance with England against the Crown of Scotland. The Red Douglases also rose high, and had their own feud with the Crown and alliance with or servitude to Henry VIII and the Protestant cause. Gawain was a younger son of the Earl of Angus called Bell the Cat, who hanged the artistic favourites of James III. As an old man he was present at Flodden (1513) where James IV died so gallantly, and his grandson, now Earl of Angus, married Dunbar's "Rose," Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV. Gawain himself, born about 1473 or 1474, was educated at St. Andrews University, took orders, and, being of a powerful House, received rapid clerical promotion.

His poems were written in the peaceful and prosperous years of James IV, between 1501 and 1513, the date of Flodden and of the completion of Gawain's translation of the "?neid" of Virgil. His earlier works "The Palice of Honour" and "King Hart," are merely rhymed allegories after the manner of the unceasing "Roman de la Rose," and have no special interest. What is true about one of these belated last allegories is true of another: they are no longer to be read for mere literary pleasure. In his "?neid," Douglas introduces original prologues to the books of the "?neid," rather in the manner of Scott's poetical epistles between the cantos of "Marmion". He describes winter, spring, and summer in Scotland. He criticizes, not unfavourably, the theology of Virgil, whom the Middle Ages regarded, now as a magician (like Ovid among the Italian peasantry to this day), and now as an inspired prophet of the coming of Our Lord. He attacks Caxton for printing a translation of Virgil, not from the original Latin, but from a French version. His criticism of Caxton is full of detail, and severe. He himself is "bound to Virgil's text," and he does not treat it, as a rule, with the licence of Chapman when rendering Homer into English verse; but Gawain remarks,[Pg 144] truly, that sometimes of one word he must make three, must occasionally expand in exposition, and add, in colouring.

Sum tyme I follow the text als neir I may,
Sum tyme I am constreinit are uther way.

His remarks on the task of the translator show considerable reflection. On comparing the poem with the Latin it seems more close in sense to the great untranslatable original than might have been expected in an uncritical age and country. It is the first attempt in our language at the rendering of a great ancient classic, and, as such, looks forward to the new times, and to the Renaissance which, in Scotland, was mainly confined to Biblical criticism.

After Flodden, Gawain was immersed in politics, and in a long and futile struggle to obtain, through English influence, the Archbishopric of St. Andrews. For this he fought a triangular duel (nor were the weapons of the flesh unused), with Hepburn, the Prior, and Forman, a clerical diplomatist, who was successful. Gawain obtained the petty Bishopric of Dunkeld, on the Tay, and died when on a political mission to London (1522). Gawain is almost the only Scottish example of a nobleman and a Churchman, in his age, distinguished for devotion to literary scholarship. There are a number of Scots poems, of this date, such as "Christ's Kirk on the Green" and "Peebles at the Play" (the best of them), which show much command of lively metre and rude descriptive powers where rustic merriment and horseplay are to be painted. But their dialect is usually uncouth, and they are only appreciated by special students.

Sir David Lyndsay.

The most popular of the old Scottish poets was not so poetical as Henryson, but gave pleasure by his genial character, his extremely coarse humour, and his attacks on the Churchmen and on abuses in the State. This author, Sir David Lyndsay, was born, perhaps at his family place, the Mount, in Fife, about 1490. His name "Da. Lyndsay" (if it be his) appears in the register of St. Andrews University besides that of the man whom[Pg 145] he hated so much, and attacked in verse after his murder, the great Cardinal Beaton. By 1511, Lyndsay was a page at Court, and acted in a play at Holyrood. In 1512, Lyndsay was Master of the Household, or chief attendant of the infant Prince, later James V. He was present when the apparition described in "Marmion" gave a warning, in church, to James IV, just before Flodden, and told Lyndsay of Pitscottie, the amusing chronicler, that he tried to arrest the figure "but he vanished away as if he had been a blink of the sun or a whiz of the whirlwind". Till 1522 his chief business was to teach and amuse the boy, James V;

I bore thee in mine arm
Full tenderly,

and, later, told him fairy tales such as the story of the Red Etin, or disguised himself as "the grisly ghost of Guy".

About 1528 Lyndsay wrote "The Dreame" (the usual allegorical dream), in 1529 he was made chief herald, "Lord Lyon King of Arms," and as such went on many foreign embassies. In 1539-1540 his great play, "The Satire of the Three Estates," was acted before the Court; it is the only early Scottish drama that survives. There are two Parts, and three interludes full of matter wonderfully coarse. The play is all in favour of reforms, and is full of the satire of the Churchmen and pleadings for the poor which ensured its popularity. There are some seventy characters, most of them allegorical personages. The King delighted in the satire, and as Lyndsay attacked the vices of the clergy and the Pardoners, not the doctrines of the Church, he ran no risk of martyrdom. The verse is in many forms and different sorts of stanzas, in rhyming couplets of eight syllables, or of ten or more.

After James's death and the murder of Cardinal Beaton, Lyndsay wrote a poem, "The Tragedy of the Cardinal" in which his ghost accuses himself of many sins and crimes, and is sure that Boccaccio would write "my tragedie," if Boccaccio were still alive. Lyndsay died early in 1555. His most popular poem, probably, was a good-humoured romance, "Squire Meldrum," about the fighting adventures, at home and abroad, of a young Fife laird of the period. He wrote many other things, humorous or grave,[Pg 146] admonitions to the King, and a reply to a "Flyting" or scolding, of the King against him, in verse; unluckily the Royal lampoon is lost. A Lament for James's first wife who died young; a very humorous set of verses on the King's dog; and a "Dialogue between Experience and a Courtier," with shorter pieces, grave or gay, make up Lyndsay's contribution to the literature of his country. They are full of historical hints, but, merely as poetry, are now seldom read, as Henryson may be read, for pleasure. The Reformation, breaking out in 1559, distracted men's minds from secular literature, to which, for more than a century, Scotland contributed nothing of real importance except the "History of the Reformation" by John Knox, the Reformer. This work is written in such English (not Scots) as Knox could command, for in origin it was meant to be read in England, and to justify the proceedings of the Reformers. It is partly derived from memory of the events and the memory is sometimes strangely inaccurate. Public documents are inserted at full length, in one case with some lack of candour, and actions are denied which, later, were acknowledged. The book, as history, needs to be cautiously studied, but as a picture of the men and women of the age, especially of Knox himself and Queen Mary, it is most vivacious, and may be read with interest and amusement. Knox's other works, theological, epistolary, and political, were written to meet the needs of the moment, and are of little value except to historians and students of the career and character of the author.

[1] See proofs by Mr. George Neilson, in Blind Harry's "Wallace," "Essays and Studies," by Members of the English Association, 1910.