I: The Close of the Middle Ages in Scotland

I: The Close of the Middle Ages in Scotland

I

In 1488, raised by the rebellion which dethroned and killed his father and of which he repented his own share, wearing an iron girdle while he lived, James IV was crowned at Scone. Though patrons cannot create poets, and though James was no great patron, it is deeply appropriate that the court poetry which will mainly concern us in this chapter should have been written under such a king; for in him and in it alike, as also in the dress and architecture of the period, all that is bright, reckless, and fantastical in the late medieval tradition finds superb expression. He was primarily a knight, only secondarily and disastrously a king; ‘not a good captain’ notes the Spanish ambassador, ‘for he begins to fight before he has given his orders’ and is ‘more courageous than a prince should be’. ‘He luvid nothing so weill’, says Pitscottie, ‘as able men and guid hors and used great jousting’, so that the fame of his tournaments drew knights-errant from all Europe. At the same time he shared with the poets a hearty relish for low life and loved to ‘ludge in poore mens houses’ unattended and disguised. His very vices were chivalrous; no avarice, no countenance shown to ‘pick-thanks’, but a weakness for loving par amors. He was mercurial, willful, restless, and inquisitive; much like Arthur himself (in Gawain and the Green Knight), who hated to be still for long—‘so busied him his young blood and his brain wild’. The price was Flodden, and if he half killed Scotland he did it in character. A ‘lufe letter’ from the Queen of France containing a ring and a claim on his services as her true knight helped to speed him on that last journey, and the very act whereby he made defeat certain was a repetition of Byrhtnoth’s heroic folly at Maldon. His master-gunner had the English at his mercy while they were crossing the bridge and begged on his knees to be allowed to open fire. ‘I sall hang thee’, replied the king, ‘if thou shoot ane shot this day, for I am determinate to have them all before me on ane plain field and essay them what they can do’; and so it came about that in later times men could point to no great house in Scotland that had not a grave on Brankstone Moor.

But during much of his reign there had been (by Scotch standards) ‘guid peace and rest’. Sumptuary laws, as early as 1458, show that some at least of the commons had become sufficiently prosperous to ape the dress of their betters. At his accession the university of St. Andrews had already existed for seventy-four years and that of Glasgow for thirty-seven. In his reign Aberdeen was founded and an important enactment obliged all freeholders to put their sons to grammar school until they had ‘perfect Latin’. The printing press of Chepman and Myllar dates from 1507. James himself has been pronounced illiterate by Buchanan, but the humanist probably means only that his Latin was not Ciceronian. In reality the king was something of an intellectual, ‘weill lernit in the art of medicine’ and proficient in several languages which included not only Latin but even ‘the speech of the savages who live in some parts of Scotland and on the islands’. The new forces of humanism and Protestantism had not yet much altered the medieval character of Scotch civilization in his time. Lollardry had made itself felt, but James had shown in 1494 that he was no persecutor; Boece was a humanist, Major a scholastic. During the reign an effective Scotch navy was being built up, and the names of such captains as Sir Andrew Wood and Sir Andrew Barton were famous; the battleship and broadside which figure so unexpectedly in the Golden Targe were topical. Interest in scientific experiment is represented in 1507 at Stirling when Abbot Damian of Tungland attempted to fly with artificial wings before a large audience. Since he risked (and almost lost) his life we may assume that he was sincere, and the mockery lavished upon his failure is perhaps unworthy; if he had succeeded in finding the pernicious secret he sought he would have received ample praise from the historians of progress.

Such is the contemporary background of the brilliant poetry written by Douglas and Dunbar; a word about its ‘background’ in a different sense will not be amiss. When they began their work Scotch poetry had already a considerable achievement behind it and was by no means a local or provincial department of English poetry. Its history belongs to an earlier volume of the present series, and it will here be enough to remind the reader of the principal strands of which that history is woven. I distinguish five.

I. The forthright narrative in octosyllabic couplets as in Barbour’s Bruce.

This is of Norman and Anglo-Norman origin, but becomes tougher and harder when written by poets of Germanic blood and speech. It is used for many purposes which have now been abandoned to prose, but in epic and metrical romance can achieve some of the highest qualities of poetry. Blind Harry’s Wallace, which falls outside my period, has substituted decasyllabics for octosyllabics but belongs on the whole to this kind. A purer example is the anonymous History of Sir Eger, Sir Gryme, and Sir Gray-Steel. We possess this only in very late texts (one in the Percy Folio and one printed at Aberdeen in 1711), but it goes back in some form to the fifteenth century; in April 1497 ‘twa fithelaris’ received a payment of nine shillings for singing it at court. It may be much older, and, again, it may in 1497 have been very different from the texts we have. But it is not likely to have been inferior to them, and in them it is far too good to be bandied to and fro from volume to volume of this series and described in none—as may easily happen to a text whose historical position is uncertain. Percy has called it ‘a well invented tale of chivalry scarce inferior to any of Ariosto’s’. This is true; not, of course, that its poetical character is at all like that of the Orlando Furioso, but that its ‘well invented’ plot or fable would have suited Ariosto in one of his graver and less fanciful moods. Its poetry is at the opposite pole from his; hard, plain, vivid, and economical in manner, effortlessly and unobtrusively noble in sentiment. The adventures are as palpable as those in Homer. I never realized what fighting an enemy who wore full armour would be like until I read in this poem:

I strake him while that I might stand,

While there came blood through the steel;

He wants some teeth I wote right weel.

Equally convincing is Eger’s account of his recovering consciousness after being defeated and left for dead:

Beside me ran a river strand,

And there I crap on feet and hand,

And from mine eyes I washt the blood

And drank while that I thought it good.

The Romantic idea of steadfast devotion amidst strange perils has never been better summed up than in Grime’s words to the lady:

And ever I had mind of you

The Land of Doubt when I rode through.

It is, of course, a poetry with strict limitations; what we admire is the perfection of taste (as if vulgarity had not yet been invented) and the sureness of touch within those limitations. It will also be noticed that it does faultlessly what poetry soon after became incapable of doing at all. From this sort of heroic narrative we were to descend into fustian about Mars and Bellona. The ‘Renaissance’ involved great losses as well as great gains.

II. A fairly large body of poems which combine rhyme and alliteration in various patterns and which, whether the connexions can still be traced or no, must be fairly closely related to the north-west midland poetry of the English fourteenth century. This is a sophisticated kind with a developed poetic diction in marked contrast to the plainness of the octosyllabic narratives. In Golagros and Gawain it achieves great nobility. But the impulse is almost spent by the time we reach the sixteenth century and the form is henceforward used chiefly for comic purposes. This brings us to the next of the five strands I am distinguishing.

III. Our knowledge of comic poetry, like our knowledge of the lyric, in this period depends mainly on the praiseworthy taste of some sixteenth-century Scotchmen for compiling anthologies. The three which most concern us are the Bannatyne MS. (1568), the Maitland Folio MS. (1580), and the Maitland Quarto MS. (1586). The poems which these contain are of all sorts—devotional, moral, political, amatory, and sportive. Some are by famous hands—Henryson, Douglas, or Dunbar—some bear the names of authors who cannot be certainly identified, and most are anonymous. Only a minority of them can be dated. But one at least of the comic pieces, Cowkelbie Sow, is earlier than 1501, when it is mentioned in Douglas’s Palice of Honour; ‘The Gyre Garling’ was an established nursery tale in the childhood of James V, say by 1519; and a number of others show the peculiar Scotch taste in such matters so fully developed that it is reasonable to regard the genre as one of the things which Dunbar found ready to his hand.

This comic poetry has often been misunderstood by English critics, for memories of Chaucer and Dickens are here almost a hindrance. Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll would be a far better introduction to it; Rabelais, Aristophanes, and Lucian better still. Bannatyne No. CCXXX is a good specimen to begin with. It relates (in rough four-beat couplets) the creation of the first Highlander. God and St. Peter were out for a walk in Argyll one day when St. Peter, observing a certain unsavoury object on the path, jokingly suggested that God might like to create something from it. One stir of the almighty ‘Pykit staff’ and ‘vp start a helandman, blak as ony draff’. Questioned about his plans, the new creature announced that he would be a cattle-thief. God laughed heartily, but even while He was doing so (it is like Mercury and Apollo in Horace’s ode) the Highlander had contrived to steal His pen-knife. All the characteristics of the genre are present here. It is primarily nonsense poetry, and in the interests of nonsense makes free use of blasphemy and indecency. The blasphemy is not intended to move ironical smiles, nor the indecency to move prurient titters; what both want from the audience is a hearty guffaw. And there is no human comedy; the joke lies in the extravagance, the nonsensicality. ‘The Gyre Carling’ (or ‘Giant Quean’, Bannatyne CXCIX) tells us how ‘North Berwick law’ came into existence by a physical accident which befell a giantess in an overhearty fit of laughter. This is in rhyming alliterative stanzas followed by ‘wheels’. So is ‘Kynd Kittok’ (Bannatyne CXCVII). This poem, anonymous in the manuscript, and in the old print, has been attributed by many to Dunbar; but there is an indulgent twinkle of the eye in it, a gentleness amid its fantasy, which seems to me foreign to his temper. The disreputable ‘guddame’, Kynd Kittok, ‘died of thirst and made a good end’, stopped at an ale house near Heaven for the night, arrived at the gate next morning something the worse for wear, and managed to steal in without St. Peter’s notice; which was the worse for him since, during her seven years’ residence as Our Lady’s hen-wife, she ‘held him in strife’. The end of the poem leaves her once more outside the gate and permanently established at that same neighbouring ale house, where future travelers, we are told, will find it worth their while to call on her. In this poem, as in the ‘First Highlander’, we are allowed to hear God laugh, and His laughter is very different from that of Paradise Lost. At Kynd Kittok’s surreptitious entry into Heaven, ‘God lukit and saw her lattin in and lewch His hairt sair’. It is a note rarely struck in later Scotch literature. In other places the comic supernaturalism is drawn not from Christianity but from northern superstition. In ‘the Gyre Carling’ we have ‘the King of Fary . . . with elffis mony ane’. The same ‘eldritch’ material, as they would have called it, is used in ‘The Laying of Lord Fergus Gaist’ (Bannatyne CLXXCI). Here, in lines which hop and dance (as the ghost itself is said to do) between octosyllabics and the rhythm of Skelton, a formidable battery of spells is prescribed for laying the least formidable of all recorded ghosts; a timid yet merry spirit, almost as big as a gnat, which will fall in a swoon ‘cryand mercy petously’ at your conjurations, but which is also an expert thief—God, Abraham, and the Man in the Moon have all been among its victims. One is relieved that the poem should have a happy ending in which the ghost marries ‘the littil spenzie fle’ and becomes the father of ‘Orpheus king and Elpha quene’. Wilder and more ‘eldritch’ even than this is the Dreme of ‘Lichtoun Monicus’ (Bannatyne CLXV); a dream which has, for once, no allegorical significance. In Cowkelbie Sow (Bannatyne CCCCI) the element of extravagance is supplied not so much by the events as by the preposterous connexions between them. A sow is sold for three pennies. One of the pennies is lost. The finder spends it on a pig and decides to give a party (here follows a list of the guests). When they set about killing the pig it flees with a yell which brings all the pigs of the neighbourhood to its rescue (here follows a list of pigs). This roused the owners of the auxiliary pigs . . . here follows a list of owners . . . and so on. The humour of the thing depends on the real inconsequence and apparent logic with which each new catalogue and each new story branches out of what has gone before. I am speaking of Pars Prima, which, I would willingly believe, was originally the whole poem. But in Bannatyne it is preceded by a prologue in wretched shambling couplets reminiscent of Heywood and followed by two moral tales (of no value) which relate the adventures of the two remaining pennies. Pars Prima is in rough trimeters of Skeltonic type.

In some of these poems a satiric element no doubt occurs; a poet who liked Highlanders would not have written Bannatyne CCXXX. But it would, in my opinion, be quite misleading to describe them as satires. They are satiric, when at all, only incidentally, and to concentrate our attention on that side of them is to miss the real point—the northern wildness, the grotesque invention, the eldritch audacity which likes to play with ideas that would ordinarily excite fear or reverence. The comic diablerie of Burns’s Tam-o-Shanter is the nearest parallel in later Scotch literature.

IV. Of the pure lyric before Dunbar we have few certain specimens. We may have more than we know; the very numerous pieces in the three anthologies which we tend to label ‘school of Dunbar’ may include work by his masters as well as by his imitators, for dawn and evening are hard to distinguish. However that may be, I think we can infer from the finished perfection of his poems, and of certain other poems not very like his, a considerable lyric activity in fifteenth-century Scotland. Of those that look to me early work, Bannatyne CCLXIX (‘In May in a morning I movit me one’) is neither better nor worse than most of its kind; Bannatyne CCLXXIII (‘Flowr of all fair heid’) is perhaps richer. Far beyond these in restraint and vitality is ‘Tayis Bank’ (Bannatyne CCLXXVIII) in which some like to discover an allusion to Margaret Drummond, one of James IV’s mistresses, poisoned in 1501. The poem is in eights and sixes and uses alliteration not merely as ornament but as part of its structure. Pearl, or poetry of the same kind as Pearl, is close behind it:

This myld meik mensuet Margrite

This perle polist most quhyt,

Dame Natouris deir dochter discreit,

The dyamant of delyt.

But the marvel is how freely the poet moves in this heavy armour and how fresh and spontaneous the song sounds. The building of the poem is simplicity itself; a May morning, a pleasant landscape, the appearance of a beautiful lady, and then her withdrawal. No words pass between the lady and the poet, nor does he suggest that he is her lover. When she has gone he remains as before, sitting on the hillside and listening to the birds’ song:

Quhair Tay ran doun with stremis stout

Full strecht under Stobschaw.

The absence of comment, or even of apparent emotion, is the making of the poem. The setting, and the lady, seem to exist in their own right; we have simply been shown something. Quite different is ‘The Murning Maidin’ (Maitland Folio CXXX). Here, in a more complex stanza, we have a tale of false love and misery turned by a second and truer love to a happy issue. The pathos of the Mourning Maiden herself, deserted, starving, and armed as a huntress yet unable to shoot the deer because she ‘may not se thame bleid’ is not subtle, but it is strong; and because it has engaged our feelings the conclusion is deeply satisfactory.

Some poems in the anthologies bear names which occur in Dunbar’s list of dead poets; if we can trust the ascriptions and if an identity of name means (as it need not) an identity of person, then, since the ‘Lament for the Makaris’ was printed in 1508, we can date some lyrics earlier than that. Patrick Johnston, since we have his christian as well as his surname, may with some confidence be taken for the same man as Dunbar’s ‘Patrik Johnestown’. His single surviving poem, ‘The Thre Deid Pollis’ (Bannatyne LXVI), is a charnel house morality in which three death’s-heads warn us that we shall shortly resemble them. The macabre element is submerged under the moral instead of strengthening it as it would have done in the hands of Dunbar. Sir John Roule’s ‘Cursing’ (Bannatyne CLXVIII and Maitland Folio XLVI) is one of the duller specimens of eldritch humour. Shaw is another poet who lives for us in one poem only (Maitland Folio CXLVI), but this one is well worth remembering. It is built on a comparison between the dangers of court life and those of navigation, and this conceit, commonplace enough in itself, comes to life because Shaw has apparently really sailed a ship. I do not indeed understand his technicalities, and have no notion how to huke hail a bolyn, and only a vague one of the ‘bubis ye not suspek’, or the flaggis to be looked for at ‘Sanct Tabbis Heid and Buchan Ness’. But the note of well-informed urgency catches our imagination. Clerk—who may or may not be Dunbar’s Clerk—is most memorable for his two comic pieces, ‘In Secreit Place’ and ‘Robin’s Jock come to wow our Jynny’ (Bannatyne CLXVII and CCI). They are human and realistic and quite distinct from the eldritch class, depending on the pleasure (not all unkindly) which the gentles took in laughing at the manners of the peasantry. In the first the poet overhears a rustic assignation; much of the humour turns on the language, in which exaggerated dialectalism and terms of endearment border on nonsense:

Quoth he ‘My claver, my curledoddy,

My hony soppis, my sweit possoddy,

Be not o’er bustious to your billie’.

The indecencies which lurk behind some of the strange words are also part of the joke; they cannot perhaps be defended against the charge of prurience so confidently as the equal indecencies of the eldritch style. As for the second piece, the very title ‘Robin’s Jock came to wow our Jynny’ indicates the sort of humour (and a very good sort too) which we are invited to enjoy. Clerk had other moods, represented by Bannatyne CCCXXXI, which is either a dim anticipation or a poor copy of Dunbar, and by Bannatyne XXXVI, a poem on the Passion, mostly lifeless, but containing one line that any sacred poet might envy. It is put into the mouth of the Savior,

My Fader said, ‘Go to thy deid, my deir’.

The four pieces (three in Bannatyne and one in Maitland Folio) attributed to Kennedy are in Dunbar’s sententious manner. Mersar, by mere reiteration, attains a certain weight in ‘Eird apone Eird’ (Maitland Folio CLXIII), but the rest of his work, where it is not diluted Dunbar (as in the pleasant ballade, Bannatyne CCCLX) is of little merit; it is mostly heavy erotic advice in the halting metre of Lydgate. It is no injustice to the comparative literary civilization of the two countries at this period to say that Mersar writes like an Englishman.

V. Finally, we have the full-blown high style, from which I am anxious, if I can, to remove the epithet ‘Chaucerian’. Admittedly, the man who introduced it into Scotland—James I—was influenced almost exclusively by Chaucer. But even in the King’s Quair, and still more in Henryson, new elements begin to appear. The most obvious of these is what the critics call aureation, that is, the use of polysyllabic coinages from Latin (celsitude, jocundity, lachrymable, &c.) as an ornament to style. It is possible that this was an element in Chaucer’s own style though it is no longer observable there by the modern reader who, of course, notices as aureate only those words which have not been incorporated into modern English. It may well happen that what is now a common word began its English life as an ‘aureate term’. It is, therefore, conceivable that readers who came to Chaucer’s verse from that of Havelok and Handlyng Synne felt it to be more rich and exotic in vocabulary than we ever can. But when all allowance has been made for that possibility, it remains certain that aureation was not a major characteristic in Chaucer. After Chaucer it becomes a major characteristic in British and French poetry alike. Lydgate, Hoccleve, and Skelton all practice it; and so do those contemporary French poets who are called the grands rhétoriqueurs. It is, in fact, one of those literary phenomena (like the ‘conceit’) which spring up over an area far wider than a nation and for which no simple cause is usually to be found. It is this widely diffused Anglo-French school to which the so-called ‘Chaucerians’ of Scotland really belong; a school whose allegorical method descends not from Chaucer but, along with Chaucer, from Guillaume de Lorris, Machault, Deschamps, and the like, and in which Chaucer is, for British poets, an early and distinguished practitioner; in whom, however, the characteristic style is still undeveloped. The poetry of this school does not naturally and immediately appeal to a modern reader, but the taste for it can be recovered. In its weaker disciples aureation, I grant, becomes less a kind of poetry than a substitute for poetry; but of what literary fashion could this not be said? In the good poets the aureation can be enjoyed. The long, surprising words are to be savoured slowly on the tongue and pronounced with deliberate pomp. Their effect is one of costliness, ‘far fetched’—

mádma fela

Of feorwegum frætwa gelæded—

must be felt as an adjective of praise. They are in language what the gorgeous armours of tournament were in life; the proper expression for a vision of brightness, largesse, ceremony, exhilaration. And we must continually remind ourselves, naïve though the reminder be, that the rhétoriqueurs did not know that they were at the end of the medieval tradition. No shadow of a Reformation, or Machiavelli, or an omnicompetent state, fell (for them) across the sunny heraldic scene. They looked forward to a long succession of still more splendid feudal courts, more famous tournaments, fairer ladies, more generous princes, poems yet richer and more enameled, and wrote as men who ‘think warm days will never cease’.

Of these five kinds of poetry let it be noticed that none is ‘popular’ in the negative sense of being confined to the lower classes. Any poet may write in them all; nearly all poets write in more than one. It is their familiarity with many different, and equally reputable, kinds, and, as its result, their sharpened awareness of each, which separates the Scotch ‘Makers’ from Chaucer. We have no evidence that Chaucer felt before him any choice between diverse kinds; ever regarded alliterative verse or tail-rhyme stanzas (save for parody) as real and equal alternatives to the kind of verse he wrote himself. In that sense he was probably a less conscious and sophisticated artist, less of a professional, than Douglas and Dunbar. As with kinds, so with language. Chaucer uses dialects other than his own for dramatic and comic effect. But the Scotch poets recognize dialectal differences (almost in the Greek way) as being proper to different species of composition. Thus in alliterative metre, or on eldritch or bawdy matter, they became broadly and exaggeratedly Scotch; for moral lyric they use what I take to be the language they spoke; in courtly allegory or panegyric they are aureate. Poetry is for them a complex instrument and there are clear rules for using it. For good or ill they are professional to the finger tips; docti poetae. To approach them with the expectation that (because Edinburgh is not now in all senses a capital) their poetry will be rugged or simple is to ensure total misunderstanding.

Our century opens with the appearance (1501) of the Palice of Honour by Gavin Douglas, a young churchman of a great house, almost exactly the same age as the king. The problem of the poem ‘Where does true Honour lie?’ was one that probably had more than literary interest for the poet; and if his own political career after Flodden does not suggest that he solved it very well in practice, we need not thence assume that he did not ask it in good faith. It was perhaps not very easy during the regency of the Queen Dowager to see where Honour lay. Not, certainly, a modern will reply, in those intrigues with England (he almost begs Henry VIII to invade) of which Douglas stands convicted by his own letters. But even that was not quite obvious. The intrigues were family intrigues, the ambitions family ambitions. ‘Your blood is maid forever’ was the bait the tempter, Adam Williamson, held out to him. External greatness for one’s house—that certainly was one of the things that Honour meant in 1514. The word was ambiguous; it wavered before men’s eyes with the same dazzle as (in later ages) ‘Nature’ or ‘Wit’ or ‘Democracy’. But there is no denying that Douglas was wiser about it in 1501 than he was twelve years later; for when it comes to virtue, experience, as Kant tells us, is the mother of illusion.

The poem is substantially an original work and owes little to the Séjour d’Honneur or Octovien de St. Gelais. In the dream which it relates the various paths to Honour are represented by various processions or courts on progress. Sapience and her court pass by and ‘To the Palice of Honour all thay go’. That may be the true path—nay, that certainly is one of the paths—to Honour; the way of intelligence, whether practical like Ulysses’, or contemplative like Pythagoras’. One might become a great philosopher or a great statesman; only in the latter event—this is where Douglas’s youthful vision was clearer than his mature vision—one must distinguish very carefully between true wisdom and ‘craftynes, deceyt, and wit abused’. Sinon and Achitophel follow Sapience in vain on her journey to the Palice; ‘our horsis oft, or we be thair, will founder’. Then there is, of course, the way of virginity (the court of Diane goes by). Women and men too have won immortal Honour by the triumph over the flesh. ‘Bot few I saw with Diane haunt’, says the poet. The truth is, he is in haste to describe the court of Venus which next rode by; the dazzling glory of courtly love and (no doubt) of a poetical career spent in its celebration. He spends stanza after stanza on it; and yet perhaps he likes even better the court that follows next. This is the ‘court rethoricall’:—

Yone is the court of plesand Steidfastnes,

Yone is the court of constant merrines,

Yone is the court of joyous discipline.

Joyous discipline, the gay science, is poetry—and rhetoric too, for our modern distinction would have been unintelligible to the writer. When he represents this court as rescuing him from the anger of Venus, and when he follows it through the whole world to the Palice, he is in his own fashion saying like Keats and many another young poet:

Oh, for ten years that I may overwhelm

Myself in poesy!

But, like Keats again, he recognizes that there is a stage beyond that, and when we read the Palice we find that it is founded on the craggy rocks of moral virtue, that the officers of true Honour have such names as Charity, Conscience, and Justice, and that Honour himself, seen only for a moment through ‘a boir’, a keyhole, and, in that moment blinding the seer’s eyes, is God.

All this is, in my opinion, very well contrived and is, on the emotional level at least, a real resolution of the conflict with which the poet started; not a mere ‘moral’ stuck on as an afterthought. But to say only this is to leave out most of the quality of the work. That quality is prodigality, its vice is excess. The poet is still too delighted with the whole world of poetry, as he understood it, to control his delight. He is happily overwhelmed, like a surf-bather. All his reading, too often in the form of mere catalogue, pours into his poem. Everything that can be either gorgeously or terrifyingly described is introduced—May morning, desolate wilderness, journey, the pleasant plain by Hippocrene, stormy sea, late Gothic palace with ‘Pinnakillis, fyelles, turnpekkis mony one’, a magic mirror full of ‘excelland schaddouis gracious’, and the final presence chamber blazing with birds, flowers, and curious knots of burnished ivory and enameled gold. He has chosen for his work—inevitably—the most difficult metre he can think of; the nine-lined stanza which has only two rhymes, and even this varied at certain points in Parts I and II by the almost impossible addition of a tenth line and in Part III by a different nine-lined form which gives a concluding couplet. Aureation with its indefinite licence of coinage makes such verse possible. It may also be supposed that the dullness of mere lists of names was concealed from the writer by the pleasure he took in fitting them in. One may call such ingenuity perverse, but one must not call it affected—unless the very young cyclist is affected when he first revels in the discovery that he can ride with his hands off the handle bars; and amidst all this virtuosity the imagination of the poet is alert and sensitive. In his opening lines Dawn has a ‘russat mantill’ (Horatio yet unborn), ‘Eous’ lifting his head from the sea restores ‘the new colour that all the nicht lay deid’, sweating horses shine as if they had been oiled, streams chattering over stones make a ‘sober’ noise in contrast to the ‘birdis sang and sounding of the beis’, and the sea-nymphs sit on the rocks ‘dryand thair yallow hair’. Nor is the inner world neglected. Where the dream passes into nightmare and Douglas is alone in the frightful wilderness, his feelings are brought before us by the statement that, at this moment, the mere squeak of an unseen mouse would have been to him ‘mair ugsum than the hell’. But then, later, and just as it ought to be in a dream, all his fear vanished, ‘boy yit I wist not quhy’. Best of all is the passage in which, fearing that Venus may transform him into a beast (for angry goddesses have been known to do such things), he keeps on passing his hand over his face to make sure that it is still human.

It is worth noticing that these deliberate contrasts between scenes of beauty and scenes of terror are much helped by a variation in the language—a variation which would hardly have been possible to Chaucer and which depends on the fact, noticed above, that Scotch poetry had become a bow with more than one string. You rendered beauty by aureation; for terror (as for bawdy or invective) you became ‘boisteous’ and native. Thus in a stanza from the Prologue describing the May morning the rhyming words run lamentabill, sabill, circumstance, honorabill, amiabill, observance, plesance, amiabill, varyance; but in a stanza from Part I describing the ‘laithlie flude’ the list is routit, schoutid, fordeifit, doutit, sproutit, unleifit, leifit, moutit, reifit. Douglas could have learned this from Henryson, in whose Swallow and Other Birds the stanzas on the seasons undergo a similar change as we reach winter. The young student will soon discover that in the ‘Makers’ the hard words which send him to the glossary tend to bunch at particular places. This is not an accident; just as the increase of Doric forms in the lyric parts of a Greek play is not an accident.

We can date the Palice of Honour from Douglas’s own reference to it at the end of his Virgil. The lost works cannot be dated. Bale’s Index Britanniae Scriptorum credits him with ‘golden stories’ (aureas narrationes); Tanner’s Bibliotheca adds De Rebus Scoticis, Comoedias aliquot, and a version of Ovid’s Remedium Amoris. The punning poem ‘Conscience’, which survives, is of no importance. King Hart is, but we have no conclusive evidence that Douglas wrote it. The ascription to him in the Maitland Folio is in a much later hand; there is no mention of it in Douglas’s admitted works, nor in Bale, nor in Tanner. Lyndsay in his Papyngo refers to Douglas’s works as ‘mo than fyve’, but we can still reach that number without including King Hart. Internal evidence, while in no way excluding the traditional ascription, does not in any way support it. Our best reason, when all’s said, for supposing it to be his is that it is the work of a very considerable poet who was obviously not Dunbar nor Lyndsay, and no other candidate for its authorship has stronger claims than Douglas.

It is an allegory as different as possible from the Palice of Honour. It is in a simpler stanza, classically free from irrelevancies, and as stern as the Palice was luxuriant. Its theme is mortality, the inevitable shipwreck of all merely human hopes and pleasures, and this is enforced by images of great, sometimes of disquieting, potency. King Hart (the human soul) at home in his own castle and in his youth is ‘so fair, so fresche, so liklie to endure’. But from the very first:

About the wal thair ran ane water void,

Blak, stinkand, sowr, and salt as is the sey,

That on the wallis wiskit, gre by gre,

Boldning to ryis the castell to confound.

All his middle life is passed away from home, imprisoned by love in the house of the Lady Pleasaunce; and when at long last he is set free from that slavery it is only to find that life has slipped through his fingers and death is at the door. There is nothing new in this morality; nor nothing that can ever be old.

The plan of translating the Aeneid had been in Douglas’s mind ever since 1501, for in the Palice Venus commissions him to perform that work. He finished it in 1513, having spent only eighteen months on the actual translation; but it bears in almost every line the impress of a mind so long steeped in Virgil that when he set pen to paper he knew exactly what had to be done and many of his problems (we may suppose) had been subconsciously solved. If I speak of this great work at some length I trust the reader will bear with me. Its greatness easily escapes modern eyes. The public for which it was intended no longer exists; the language in which it was written now awakes false associations or none; its very original has been obscured first by classicism and then by the decay of classicism. An effort is required of us.

The XIII Bukes of the Eneados, as Douglas called his version, were undertaken partly as a correction of Caxton’s Eneydon (1490) which Douglas claims to have read ‘with harmes at his hert’, and he piques himself on the fidelity of his own version and even hopes that it will be fit for use in the schoolroom:

a neidfull wark

To thame wald Virgill to childryng expone;

For quha list note my versis one by one

Sall fynd tharin hys sentens every deill

And almaiste word by word.

(Dyrectiown of his Buik.)

The modern reader, whose Latin is likely to be better than his Scots, will test this claim most easily in the reverse manner—that is by keeping an open Virgil on his knees for glossary and comment while he is reading Douglas. He will find that almaiste word by word is an exaggeration: Douglas expands freely both for literary effect and also for the inclusion of explanations, and himself, in another place, has reminded us that Saint Gregory ‘forbiddis ws to translait word eftir word’. But if he often inserts, he never omits; and the two texts are generally so close that a glance at one serves to elucidate anything that is difficult in the other. At worst, Douglas is a very honest translator and always lets you see how he is taking the Latin; his mistakes—for some he makes—are never sheltered by the vagueness of Dryden or Pope. His Virgil differed from the received text of our own days. In it the division between Books I and II came thirteen lines later than in ours. It had the reading de collo fistula pendet, which modern editors reject, at iii. 661, and campus for campos at vi. 640, and lectisque for tectisque at vii. 12. I suspect that it also gave patriae for patrios at vii. 636; and at ii. 737 and vi. 203 it had readings I am unable to identify.

Poetically, the first impression which Douglas’s version makes on a modern English reader is one of quaintness. I am glad that the question of quaintness should cross our path so early in this book; let us get it out of the way once and for all. To the boor all that is alien to his own suburb and his ‘specious present’ (of about five years) is quaint. Until that reaction has been corrected all study of old books is unprofitable. To allow for that general quaintness which mere distance bestows and thus to be able to distinguish between authors who were really quaint in their own day and authors who seem quaint to us solely by the accident of our position—this is the very pons asinorum of literary history. An easy and obvious instance would be Milton’s ‘city or suburban’ in Paradise Regained. Everyone sees that Milton could not have foretold the associations that those words now have. In the same way, when Douglas speaks of the Salii ‘hoppand and singand wonder merely’ in their ‘toppit hattis’ it is easy to remember that ‘top hats’, in our sense, were unknown to him. But it is not so easy to see aright the real qualities of his Scots language in general. Since his time it has become a patois, redolent (for those reared in Scotland) of the nursery and the kaleyard, and (for the rest of us) recalling Burns and the dialectal parts of the Waverley novels. Hence the laughter to which some readers will be moved when Douglas calls Leucaspis a ‘skippair’, or Priam ‘the auld gray’, or Vulcan the ‘gudeman’ of Venus; when comes becomes ‘trew marrow’ and Styx, like Yarrow, has ‘braes’, when the Trojans ‘kecklit all’ (risere) at the man thrown overboard in the boat race, or, newly landed in Latium, regaled themselves with ‘scones’. For we see the language that Douglas wrote ‘through the wrong end of the long telescope of time’. We forget that in his day it was a courtly and literary language,

not made for village churls

But for high dames and mighty earls.

Until we have trained ourselves to feel that ‘gudeman’ is no more rustic or homely than ‘husband’ we are no judges of Douglas as a translator of Virgil. If we fail in the training, then it is we and not the poet who are provincials.

About this first mental adjustment there can be no dispute; but there is another adjustment which I think necessary and which may not be so easily agreed to. Virgil describes Aeneas, on hearing Turnus’s challenge, as laetitia exsultans; Douglas says ‘he hoppit up for joy, he was so glad’. To get over the low associations of the verb ‘hop’ in modern English is the first adjustment. But even when this has been done, there remains something—a certain cheerful briskness—in Douglas which may seem to us very un-Virgilian. Here is another example; Virgil writes:

Quamvis increpitent socii et vi cursus in altum

Vela vocet, possisque sinus implere secundos. (iii. 454.)

Douglas translates:

Ya, thocht thi fallowis cry out, Hillir haill!

On burd! ane fair wind blawis betwixt twa schetis!

It is admirably vivid; but it sounds very unlike the Virgil we knew at school. Let us suspend judgement and try another passage.

lumenque juventae

Purpureum et laetos oculis adflarat honores. (i. 590.)

Douglas says that Aeneas’ mother made him ‘Lyk till ane yonkeir with two lauchand ene’. The picture is fresh and attractive; yet somehow unlike the Aeneas of our imagination. But is that because Virgil has never said anything about the beauty of Aeneas, both here and in other places? On the contrary, Virgil quite clearly has told us that his hero was of godlike beauty. There has been something in our minds, but not in the mind of Douglas, which dimmed the picture; our idea of the great king and warrior and founder apparently shrinks (as Virgil’s and Douglas’s did not) from the delighted vision of male beauty. Douglas shocks us by being closer to Virgil than we. Once a man’s eyes have been opened to this, he will find instances everywhere. Rosea cervice refulsit: ‘her nek schane like unto the rois in May’. Do you prefer Dryden’s ‘she turned and made appear Her neck refulgent’? But refulsit cannot possibly have had for a Roman ear the ‘classical’ quality which ‘refulgent’ has for an English. It must have felt much more like ‘schane’. And rosea has disappeared altogether in Dryden’s version—and with it half the sensuous vitality of the image. Thus, again, Douglas translates omnibus in templis matrum chorus by ‘in caroling the lusty ladies went’. If this seems altogether too merry and too medieval, turn to Dryden again, and you will find that Dryden has flatly refused to translate those five words at all. And that brings us to the real point.

It is hard to blame Dryden for suppressing matrum chorus. In the style which he is using it simply cannot be translated. As long as we are under the spell of schoolroom ‘classicality’ we can do nothing; ‘women’, ‘wives’, ‘matrons’ are all equally fatal. But it will go at once and delightfully into the medieval line about ladies ‘caroling’. And the reason is that at this point there is a real affinity between the ancient and the medieval world, and a real separation between both of them and the modern. And as soon as we become aware of this we realize what it is that has made so many things in Douglas seem to us strangely un-Virgilian. It is not the real Virgil; it is that fatal ‘classical’ misconception of all ancient poets which the humanists have fastened upon our education—the spectral solemnity, the gradus epithets, the dictionary language, the decorum which avoids every contact with the senses and the soil. (Dryden tells us that though he knew mollis amaracus was sweet marjoram, he did not so translate it, for fear ‘those village words’ should give the reader ‘a mean idea of the thing’.) Time after time Douglas is nearer to the original than any version could be which kept within the limits of later classicism. And that is almost another way of saying that the real Virgil is very much less ‘classical’ than we had supposed. To read the Latin again with Douglas’s version fresh in our minds is like seeing a favourite picture after it has been cleaned. Half the ‘richness’ and ‘sobriety’ which we have been taught to admire turns out to have been only dirt; the ‘brown trees’ disappear and where the sponge has passed the glowing reds, the purples, and the transparent blues leap into life.

I must not be taken to mean that Douglas attends only to the more vivid and sensuous elements in his original, that he fails to respond to its grandeur. He has indeed his own theory of the style which a great poem demands from its translator, and develops it in his Ninth Prologue. He calls it the ‘knychtlike stile’ in which we ‘carp of vassalage’. This goes back to the doctrine of the three styles as we find it in Johannes de Garlandia; it has left its mark on Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia. It must be admitted that when Douglas says that the ‘knychtlike’ style should, among trees, prefer the laurel, the cedar, and the palm, to broom and heather, we seem to be heading for something as false as Dryden’s feeling about ‘village words’; yet the theory, at worst, is based not on the superstition of ‘the Classical’, but on some dim perception of social and psychological facts. In practice it means that ‘thar suld na knight reid bot a knychtly tale’ and that horses, hounds, and hawks will naturally interest such a reader more than goats. More important than his theory is his practice. He is not always great in the great passages; but he has often rendered the sublimity of Virgil in lines that no translator, and not many original poets, have surpassed:

The langsum luife drinkand inwart full cauld. (i. 749.)

Wet in the mindless flude of Hell, Lethe. (v. 854.)

Mychtfull in hevin and dym dungeon of helle. (vi. 247.)

And the paill furowr of Tysiphonee.

Walkis wod wroth amydwart the melee. (x. 761.)

He has even done more than this. One of the things that test a translator’s quality is that mass of small additions which metre inevitably demands. In Douglas what is added is often so Virgilian that when we turn back to the Latin we are surprised not to find it there. Thus caeco marte resistunt becomes ‘Quhen blindlingis in the battell fey thai fycht’; or Creusa cries ‘Quham to sall we be left in this waist hous’; or the single word fessum (iii. 710) gives the line ‘Wery and irkit in ane fremmyt land’. The words themselves are not in Virgil, but they are so true to the dominant emotion of the Third Book that it is, in a sense, from Virgil that Douglas is getting them. Even when, in the Tenth, there is really nothing at all to correspond to

Than thus fra deid to deid (deid to deid), from pane to pane,

Be catchit on and euery day be slane. (x. 60.)

I find it impossible not to forgive lines which so pierce to the very heart of the Aeneid.

He is not, of course, a perfect translator. He does not succeed with lacrimae rerum nor possunt quia posse videntur. He knew much more than Virgil about ships; hence while his landfalls are as good as Virgil’s (they could not be better) his storms and embarkations are so too good—in the sense that his poem as a whole smells much more strongly of salt water than the original; Palinurus becomes almost a character. He puts into his text explanations that a modern translator would relegate to the notes—stopping to tell us that nymphs and fauns are ‘fair-folkis’ and ‘elvis’ or that the ‘gammis Circenses’ were what we call ‘justing or than turnament’. At times these interpolated explanations are wildly wrong. Where Pallas, falling, bites the earth in Book X, Douglas says this was done on purpose ‘as was the gys’ in order that a warrior might not cry out in his death pains. Surely this is a happy error?

These faults—for so, I suppose, we must call them—are part and parcel of the general medievalization to which he subjects the Aeneid. The whole Virgilian underworld is mapped out in circles and limbos on the Christian pattern, the gods become planets, the Aegis is blazed like a ‘coat’, Mercury has a ‘fedrame’ like Volund, and Camilla a Turkish bow. Suos patimur manes is rendered ‘Ilkane of us his ganand Purgatory Maun suffir’, the Sibyl is a ‘holy religious woman clene’, and Chloreus ‘ane spiritual man’. In other words, Douglas pays for his freedom from the specific blindness of the renascentia by a specifically medieval blindness of his own. But the price is not really a very heavy one. The fact, noted above, that the medieval world and the ancient world (still more, the imagined prehistoric Italy of Virgil) have so much in common goes far to palliate the anachronism. Phrygios leones loses very little by becoming ‘The lionis that the Phrygiane armis bene’. Fulvo nutricis tegmine laetos and ‘Cleid in his nureis talbart glaid and gay’ belong to the same world of legendary emblem and symbolic costume. Only once, if I remember rightly, does Douglas foist upon Virgil the confidential manner of a medieval poet and pull him up from a digression with a ‘bot to our purpos’. At the very worst, I am convinced that even where Douglas is out, he is no further out in one direction than many Virgilians are out in the other. To the present day a reading of his version is the best possible preparation for a rereading of the Latin. Douglas gives us new eyes—unless, of course, we approach him with the assumption that wherever medieval Virgilianism differed from humanistic, the medieval must have been simply wrong.

An account of Douglas’s Aeneid which confined itself to his version of the text would be very incomplete. His work contains, in addition, Prologues to every book, a Thirteenth Book, an epilogue, a note between the Sixth and Seventh Books, and a Commentary, most unluckily incomplete and covering only part of the First. The Thirteenth Book is translated from the work of Maffeo Vegio, an Italian humanist of the fifteenth century who appears to have been dissatisfied with the abrupt ending of Virgil’s poem—and very un-Homerically abrupt it is—and had the audacity to continue it, working out the happy ending in full. He concludes foolishly enough, but his earlier scenes, at least if you read them in Douglas, are far from contemptible; it is a little odd that he refuses, as resolutely as Virgil himself, to make a character of Lavinia. The book which Douglas has given us is, therefore, a composite work, and it ought to be read as a whole. The mere presence of the Thirteenth Book and the Prologues shows no lack of respect for Virgil; but it shows a lack of that particular species of respect which came in with the renascentia. The sacrosanctity of the epic form and of the number twelve mean nothing to Douglas. He is ready to interrupt his master with comic, familiar, or devotional poetry of his own at the beginning of every book. The resulting volume is thus the fine flower of medieval Virgilianism.

The Prologues have a threefold interest, as poems, as criticism, and as familiar self-portraits of the artist. His habits both in winter and summer, his reading, his difficulties as a translator, his haunting consciousness that a man is not made a bishop in order to translate Virgil, and the excuses which he makes to himself, are here all faithfully set out. His delight in his own work, wrestling and successfully wrestling with his modesty, is expressed with humorous frankness:

Yit by myself I fynd this proverb perfyte,

‘The blak craw thinkis hir awin byrdis quhite’;

Sa faris with me, bew Schirris, will ye hark,

Can nocht persaue a falt in all my wark. (Prol. ix.)

His criticism is to be found chiefly in the First, Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Prologues. Much of it is simply a good statement of the ordinary medieval opinion of Virgil. He is a heathen poet and all his work, in a sense, is fenyeit; but under the derk poetrye lies great wisdome. He has described the stait of man baith life and deid and it is wonderful how often he is substantially right even about mysteries fell which we have learned by revelation. Augustine quoted him freely, we must remember, and Ascencius in modern times has gone so far as to call him a hie theology sentencious. Presumably this wisdom was learned by Virgil from Sibillis sawis. On the moral plane, his story is plainly full of nobilitie, and Aeneas a mirror of wirschap and manheid. Douglas defends his desertion of Dido (in the First Prologue), rejecting the opinion of Chaucer who was ever, God wait, wemenis frend and showing a much better understanding of Book IV than many modern critics. Douglas, in fact, regards the Aeneid much as Malory and Caxton regarded the Morte:

Weill auchtin eldris exemplis ws to steyr

Tyll hie curage, all honour till ensew. (Prol. xi.)

and while churlish wychtis are simply to be told that his translation is correct, nobillis are invited to amend it. This choice of nobles rather than scholars is significant.

For sheer poetry his best Prologues are the Seventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth—three nature poems of such discriminating sensibility and effortless technical power that they set us wondering why (in that field) we ever needed a romantic revival, just as Douglas’s translation makes us wonder why we needed a renascentia. The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress. The least good of these (the Seventh, on winter) leaves nothing to be improved, and much to be corrupted, by Thomson. Douglas himself in the midst of the scenes he describes—Douglas baking himself by the fire, and creeping into bed under claythis thrinfauld, Douglas watching the bitter moonlight shining in his room all night, Douglas next morning opening the window a lytill on char and hastily shutting it after a glance that prints the landscape indelibly on our imaginations—all this saves the poem from the flatness of mere description. Sometimes a single line evokes not only the momentary scene, but the sensation of many winter days on end:

The wind made wayfe the reid weyd on the dyk.

But the Twelfth and Thirteenth are better. The former is as hackneyed in subject as any medieval poem could be—a description of spring—but after we have read it, Chaucer and the Elizabethans in this kind seem tepid. It begins with a regular salvo of mythology and personification; but the shining figures which Douglas makes move across his sky are no more conventional or merely ornamental than the similar figures in Botticelli. Saturn draws off into dim distances behind the circulat warld of Jupiter—Aurora opens the windows of her hall—crystalline gates are unfolded—the great assault is ready and marches forward with banners spread,

Persand the sabill barmkyn nocturnall.

This is not simply a better or worse way of describing what we see. It is a way of making us see for always what we have sometimes felt, a vision of natural law in its angelic grandeur, a reminder of something that Chaucer ignores—of the pomp and majesty mingled even in the sweetest and most gracious of Nature’s workings. It is a true spiritualization (true, at least, to our experience) of the visible object; Douglas here reaches out in one direction to Wordsworth or even Blake, and in another to the Homeric hymns. The greatness of the opening, contrasted with the humbler sweetness that follows, enables Douglas to hit off to a nicety the experience of any man who wakes early and walks out on such a morning; for the intimate pleasures of the lanes and woods, once reached, as the dew begins to ascend, do thus decline from the more august splendours of the dawn—decline so amiably that we welcome the declining. Throughout this part of the poem his observation is admirable; his attention to shadows and his use of shadows to tell us about the light could hardly be bettered. The Thirteenth Prologue is gentler. It records a visionary meeting with Mapheus Vegius which the poet feigns as his excuse of the Thirteenth Book. The angry humanist appears Lyke to sum poet of the auld fassoune—for Douglas has been reading Henryson—and the interview is described with considerable humour. But the real value of the Prologue lies in the setting—a northern summer night, described in full, from its late twilight to its early dawn. The best lines (where nearly all are good) have been quoted, I doubt not, by many others; but they are so characteristic of the whole that I cannot help giving them again:

Yondyr dovn dwynis the evin sky away,

And vpspryngis the brycht dawing of day

Instill ane other place nocht far in sundir,

That to behald was pleasans and half wondir.

About Douglas as a translator there may be two opinions; about his Aenid (Prologues and all) as an English book there can be only one. Here a great story is greatly told and set off with original embellishments which are all good—all either delightful or interesting—in their diverse ways. The couplet in which most of the book is written seems very rough if we read ten lines. It seems less so after ten pages. When we have finished a volume we find it an admirable medium for narrative—a happy mean between the severity of Pope and the rambling of Keats. Often it has the ring and energy of Dryden; I would particularly recommend to the reader’s attention the twenty-four lines entitled Conclusioune of this Buik as an example of Douglas’s skill in bringing out the proper powers of this metre.

After the publication of his Aeneid (unless King Hart is later) Douglas concerns us no more. He is the queen’s man and flies from Scotland at Albany’s return, to live on an English pension and die of an English plague at London in 1522.

The poetical career of his older contemporary, William Dunbar, probably began earlier and ended later than his. Only some of Dunbar’s poems can be dated. The piece called ‘Learning Vain without guid Lyfe’, in virtue of its rather gratuitous subtitle ‘Written at Oxinfurde’, may be connected with a mission to England in 1501, and the panegyric on London was probably composed at the same time. The Thrissill and the Rois and the ‘Welcome to Queen Margaret’ date themselves by James’s marriage in 1503. ‘Against Treason’ (‘In vice most vicius’) comes from 1506 when Donald Owre was captured. The ‘Fenyeit Freir of Tungland’ and ‘Birth of Antichrist’, since both refer to Abbot Damian’s aeronautical experiment, cannot be earlier and are unlikely to be later than 1507; ‘Of Ane Blak-Moir’ concerns a tournament held in the same year. The Twa Mariit Wemen, the ‘Flyting’, The Goldyn Targe, the ‘Lament for the Makaris’, the ‘Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy’, and the poem on Lord Bernard Stewart are all earlier than 1508 when Chepman and Myllar printed them. The elegy on Lord Bernard Stewart dates from June in that year, ‘Blyth Aberdeen’ records the queen’s visit to that city in 1511. ‘To the Quene Dowager’ is, of course, later than Flodden, and Albany’s departure to France in 1517 gives us the date of ‘Ane Orisoun’. If we try to get more chronology than this we are thrown back on inferences from internal evidence which usually involve hazardous assumptions; as, for example, that men write more religiously in age than in youth or that poems on the amours of James IV must be earlier than the marriage of that chivalrous prince. Nor can I trace clearly any technical development in Dunbar’s work; when he first comes before us he is already fully armed and master of his weapon.

He himself would not have understood our desire to arrange his poems in a chronological order. They were not written to ‘unlock his heart’. He would have thought it more reasonable to group them (as poems are grouped in the Bannatyne MS.) by their kinds, and I am content to follow this method.

Firstly, then, we have the court poems in the high style, the fine flower of the composite tradition which descends from the Rose, with Chaucer, and with the rhétoriqueurs of France. In 1503, as we have already noted, he celebrated the King’s marriage in The Thrissill and the Rois, a triumph of fruitful obedience to conventions. By one convention the political match becomes an instance of l’ amour courtois, and this, by another convention, becomes of course a May morning dream. By a third convention, that of heraldry, we bid farewell to men and women and talk instead about a lion, an eagle, a thistle, and a rose; and the goddess Natura, out of Alanus, Chaucer, and others, as the patroness of flowers, beasts, and lovers alike, interlocks the whole. This minuet of conventions—which were felt not as arbitrary necessities but as the delightful accomplishments of the gay science—enables the poem to remain recognizably occasional and yet at the same time to become almost ‘pure’ poetry. We celebrate the royal wedding, as our duty obliges us to do; yet equally, we wander in a world of beautiful forms and colours where our dream wishes are gratified by seeing a lion lay its humbled head on a lady’s lap. This is what comes of having an art with rules and, therefore, a good understanding between the artist and his audience. Very similar in quality is the Goldyn Targe. Its simple allegory (that the poet is temporarily defended from love by reason) is little more than a peg, but an adequate peg, on which to hang its poetry—a poetry even more elaborate than that of The Thrissill and the Rois. The stanza is more complicated and the aureation is carried further. Every kind of delight, and one shock, is provided for the senses; a white sail like a hawthorn branch against the sky, reflected light cast up by water on the underside of leaves, singing birds, and finally a broadside from a battleship that went near to crack the rainbow with its loudness. The chief weakness of this brilliant poem is the multiplication of allegorical persons who remain (as in bad eighteenth-century poetry) mere names. Yet elsewhere no one knows better than Dunbar how to touch a personification into life; witness the poem ‘Quhome to sall I compleine’ where

Flattry weiris ane furrit goun,

And Falsett with the lordis dois roun,

And Trewth standis barrit at the dure,

or that quiet and sinister line ‘and than sayis Age, “My friend, cum neir”,’ from the ‘Meditation in Wyntir’.

Apart from these two allegorical pageants Dunbar’s tributes to the god of Love are few. ‘Bewtie and the Prisoneir’ is a neat but slightly frigid psychomachy; ‘To a Ladye’ (‘Sweit Rois’) is neither better nor worse than the innumerable sonnets which were soon to drive its kind out of fashion; and another poem ‘To a Ladye’ bears the significant subtitle ‘Quhen he list to feyne’. Dunbar is in fact no lover and it is to his credit that, despite its literary popularity, he so seldom assumes that character. The ‘Merle and Nychtingaill’, in which (as in ‘Quha will behold’) he rejects love, is as full of colour and music as anything he ever wrote. No attempt is made to give the debate between the two birds a dramatic turn, the merle being suddenly and inexplicably converted. Dunbar’s interest is not in the morality but, once more, in the world of ear and eye, in morning sunlight on running water and in the nightingale’s singing whose ‘sound went with the rever as it ran’.

A large number of Dunbar’s poems may be classified as petitionary. He was primarily the queen’s man and found it hard to get money out of James. Poems of this sort can easily become disagreeable and most unpoetically pathetic; in Dunbar’s we admire the almost unfailing skill and taste by which they become little works of art capable of existing in their own right. Thus in the ‘Birth of Antichrist’ the appeal for preferment is twisted into another joke at poor Abbot Damian. In ‘Solistaris in Court’ the statement of his own ‘sympilnes’ and dependence on the king is made to appear merely the climax (and structurally it is a good one) to a vivid satirical account of the other suitors. The poem ‘To my lordis of Chacker’ wins us at once by a certain merry impudence. In another, Dunbar, being sure of the queen’s favour, tells the king that he is praying for ‘your Grace, baith nicht and day’; but what he prays is that the king should become ‘John Thomosunis man’ (i.e. a hen-pecked husband). In the ‘Complaint to the King’ we have, what is hackneyed in itself, the unsuccessful suitor’s protest that unworthy rivals are winning the promotion which he lacks; but the whole poem is touched into life by the rollicking gusto with which Dunbar abuses these rivals, the driveling, shuffling, puff-cheeked, club-faced hashbalds, haggar-balds, and mandrakes. Burton could not have done it better. In the ‘Remonstrance’ a deeper note is struck; there is a manlier assertion of his poetic dignity and a more serious indignation. Of all the poems which he wrote in this (at first sight) unattractive genre hardly one lacks some outstanding excellence.

A third group of his poems is comic; if you will, satiric, though ‘abusive’ would be a better word. I am not certain that they often have any very serious satirical intention. Many are mere topical squibs on some episode that had amused the court for a day—on a burlesque tournament where a negress was made Queen of Beauty, on a ‘rag’ in the queen’s apartments which seemed funny to the participants though its humors have long since faded, on a detected amour of the king’s, on the death of the cheery old reprobate Andrew Kennedy, whose testament in shameless, reeling, goliardic vein does a man’s heart good to the present day. In reading many of these comic pieces we have to make a readjustment. We must sever the modern association which connects extreme indecency with technical coarseness of form and with low social rank, and must think ourselves back into a world where great professional poets, for the entertainment of great lords and ladies, lavished their skill on humours now confined to the preparatory school or the barrack-room. In this prevailing atmosphere of horseplay it is difficult to distinguish a lampoon that is really hostile from one that is merely a joke. The ‘Flyting’ is clearly in the latter class; but whether Dunbar had any serious quarrel with James Doig I cannot be certain. The most celebrated of all his so-called satires, The Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, is almost a flyting. Comparisons with the Wife of Bath’s prologue are here, to my way of thinking, wide of the mark. Chaucer creates a richly human personality; I do not think Dunbar is trying to do anything of the sort. He is playing a practical joke on his audience. That is the point of the beautiful idyllic opening which contains not the slightest hint of what is to follow. You are to picture the audience at its first recitation, and especially the ladies in that audience (for manners have changed), settling themselves to enjoy a serious allegory or a serious romance full of the ‘honour of love’, and then to imagine with what shattering detonation the main body of the poem burst upon them. The almost unparalleled grossness of the things the three women say is not there for the sake of character drawing. The fun lies in its sheer preposterousness and in the virtuosity with which the poet goes on piling audacity on audacity—and on the ludicrous contrast between this and their appearance. It is no nearer to real ‘satire on women’ than the impossibly red nose of an old-fashioned comedian is to real satire on drunkenness. If any one of the three women became even for a moment a live character like Alison of Bath or Doll Tearsheet the poem would be destroyed. If you cannot relish a romp you had best leave this extravaganza alone; for it offers you no other kind of pleasure.

In claiming that the Twa Mariit Wemen is mainly ‘Dunbar’s fun’, I do not mean to deny that his fun is of a ferocious kind. Rather, that is the point I would stress; that in him, as in so many Scotch poems of the period, and in him more than in any other, the comic overlaps with the demoniac and the terrifying. He also is of the ‘eldritch’ school; the wild whoop of his noisiest laughter has, and is meant to have, something sinister in it. By way of diablerie his comic poetry shades off into one of his kinds of religious poetry. In the ‘Visitation of St. Francis’ (‘This nicht befoir the dawing cleir’) St. Francis appears to Dunbar urging him to be fair. On Dunbar’s replying that he would rather be a bishop, the apparent St. Francis, who was really a devil, vanishes ‘with stink and fyrie smoke’. This, of course, is comic; even, if you please, a ‘satire on friars’. But can we be certain that it was quite so purely comic then as it is now—then, when no man doubted the existence of devils and few would have been surprised to find them disguised as friars? So in ‘The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins’. There can, on the one hand, be no question that these ‘sweir bumbard belly huddrounds’ and these highlanders whose clatter deeves the devil himself are intended to make us laugh. But notice, on the other hand, that we are laughing at torture. The grotesque figures skip through fire, jag each other with knives, and are constantly spewing out molten gold with which they are constantly refilled ‘up to the thrott’. Dunbar and his contemporaries seriously believed that such entertainment awaited in the next world those who had practiced (without repentance) the seven deadly sins in this. They believed and (doubtless) trembled; yet they also laughed. The mixture of farce and terror would be incredible if we did not remember that boys joked most about flogging under Keate, and men joked most about gallows under the old penal code. It is apparently when terrors are over that they become too terrible to laugh at; while they are regnant they are too terrible to be taken with unrelieved gravity. There is nothing funny about Hitler now.

Some of Dunbar’s finest work was done in religious poetry of a more ordinary kind. He does not deal much in solitary devotional feeling, like the Metaphysicals or the Victorians; he is public and liturgical. His two supreme achievements in this vein are his poems on the Nativity and on the Resurrection. The first of these (Rorate celi desuper) might almost claim to be in one sense the most lyrical of all English poems—that is, the hardest of all English poems simply to read, the hardest not to sing. We read it alone and at night—and are almost shocked, on laying the book down, to find that the choir and organ existed only in our imagination. It has none of the modern—the German or Dickensian—attributes of Christmas. It breathes rather the intoxication of universal spring and summons all Nature to salute ‘the cleir sone quhome no clud devouris’:

Sing Hevin imperiall most of hicht,

Regions of air mak armony,

All fishe in flud and foull of flicht

Be myrthfull and mak melody;

All gloria in excelsis cry,

Hevin, erd, se, man, bird and best;—

He that is crownit abone the sky

Pro nobis Puer natus est.

I would hesitate to read Milton’s Hymn on the same evening with this. The ‘Resurrection’ is equally, but differently, excellent. It is speech rather than song, but speech of unanswerable and thundering greatness. From the first line (‘Done is a battell on the Dragon blak’) to the last (Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro) it vibrates with exultant energy. It defies the powers of evil and has the ring of a steel gauntlet flung down.

The most widely remembered of his poems come in the class which he himself would probably have called ‘moral’. There is a real affinity between these and the Odes of Horace. Both poets keep strictly within the range of thought and feeling which will be familiar to all their readers and make commonplaces into poetry by the accurate weight of their strokes. The difference is that where Horace relies on the artful, yet seemingly chancy, development of the thought, Dunbar relies on mere songfulness. He does not, like Horace, progress, but he does wonders with the poignancy of repetition. Hence the metre and, above all, the refrain, are usually the making of the poem. His refrains are, indeed, among the best in the world; Quod tu in cinerem reverteris, ‘Best to be blyth’, ‘All erdly joy returnis in pain’, Timor mortis conturbat me.

To pick and choose among these gnomic lyrics, where nearly all are good, will perhaps only reveal the idiosyncrasies of the critic. ‘Learning Vain without guid Lyfe’ and ‘O Wreche be war’ seem to me to excel in eloquence; the ‘Meditatioun in Wyntir’ bites deep and has a pleasantly unexpected turn at the end; ‘Of the Changes of Lyfe’ gives us (what is rare in Dunbar) a glimpse of weather; and ‘None may Assure’ achieves grandeur in the stanzas on Domesday:

Quhat help is thair in lordschippis sevin

Quen na houss is bot Hell and Hevin?

In the ‘Lament for the Makaris’ I myself would have thought there was too much catalogue; but ‘the common reader’ has taken it to his heart.

Like most writers of ‘moral’ lyric, Dunbar finds that stern and sombre thoughts suit the medium best. Yet he has also, at times, another philosophy and valiant maxims, ‘Best to be blyth’ or

Be mirry, Man, and tak nocht far in mynde

The wauering of this wrechit world of sorrow,

or again, with more infectious nonchalance:

Man, pleis thy Makar and be mirry,

And sett nocht by this warld a chirry.

The strain is manly, yet has in it perhaps a deeper pathos than the laments.

If I see Dunbar at all correctly, such nicknames as ‘Scotch Chaucer’ or ‘Scotch Skelton’ are inept. He lacks what is best in Chaucer and Chaucer lacks what is best in him. He is not a story-teller nor a delineator of character, and his wild whoops of laughter have little in common with Chaucer’s human comedy. He has nothing of Chaucer’s confiding informality—we never see him in literary undress. On the other hand, he has at his command a resonant singing voice (a voice to lift a roof with) and a goblin energy which Chaucer has not. As for Skelton, though I can imagine a man, and not a foolish man, who preferred him to Dunbar, yet it must be insisted that, beside Dunbar, Skelton is not a writer at all. In a poem by Skelton anything may happen, and Skelton has no more notion than you what it will be. That is his charm; the charm of the amateur. But Dunbar is professional through and through; the accomplished master of one tradition that goes back to Beowulf and of another that goes back to the Troubadours. All his effects are calculated and nearly all are successful; the last line of each poem was in view before he wrote the first. His harsh and poignant sense of mortality—‘Deth followis lyfe with gaipand mowth’—he shares with many late medieval lyrists, notably with Villon, but Villon, so far as I know or remember, lacks his gay splendour. Horace (as I have suggested) and perhaps Dryden are the poets that seem to me to resemble him most, in the sense that all three are men of strongly masculine genius, professional to the point of virtuosity, and much in love with the languages they write. But, of course, Dunbar is very unlike them in his eldritch quality, and no two sorts of indecency could be more different than his and Dryden’s. He is likely to be underrated rather than overrated in our own age. He seems to tell us much about himself—his headache, his lean purse, his pretence that he has other reasons than poverty for not going with his friends to the tavern—but his poems are not ‘human documents’. We remain his audience, not his confidants, cut off from him (as it were) by the footlights; and though he can describe real Nature when he chooses, he prefers to transform her, giving his nightingale ‘angell fedderis’, making his animals heraldic, and turning even lawns and hedges into a kind of jewelry. For both reasons he will in our time be more often admired than loved; a reaction with which he would have been quite content. But he was a very great man. When you are in the mood for it, his poetry has a sweep and volume of sound and an assured virility which (while the mood lasts) makes most other poets seem a little faint and tentative and half-hearted. If you like half-tones and nuances you will not enjoy Dunbar; he will deafen you.

I have already suggested that some of the poems in the anthologies which resemble Dunbar may be by his predecessors; but it is reasonable to assume that many of them are by his imitators. If so, the anthologies provide some indication of his power and value as a model. Six pieces adopt, in varying degrees, the manner of his sacred macaronics. Two of these (Bannatyne XXI and Maitland Folio LVI) are unremarkable; but Bannatyne XXIV (‘Cum Haly Spreit moist superne’) and XXXIII (‘We that ar bocht with Chrystis blude’) are superior—for what such superiority is worth—to most modern hymns. ‘Jerusalem reioys for joy’ (Bannatyne XXXI) is in a different class; it might well be by Dunbar himself, and is full of colour and clangor and exultation. The comical eldritch vein is seen in ‘The Droichis Pairt of the Play’ (Bannatyne CLXXXII and Asloan). The ‘play’ was no doubt an interlude but the ‘Dwarf’s part’ is of little interest for the historians of drama. The dwarf represents Welth, not in the narrower modern sense, though there is a reference to merchants, but in the sense of plenty; he has come from strange lands in the east, where he has lived long with ‘the fary’, to banish Dearth from Scotland. Thus for the modern reader, though hardly perhaps for contemporaries, a primordial connexion between buffoonery and fertility rituals is recalled. I am not sure whether the part of the dwarf was performed by a real dwarf or by a man of gigantic stature; if the former, the joke lay in attributing to him an ancestry of giants (Hercules, Fin MaCowl, and Gog Magog); if the latter, the joke lay in his explanation that he had now become ‘for eild’ a mere dwarf (by the standards of his family)—‘This littill as ye may sie’. Either way, the humour is that of monstrosity—comic effects wrought out of nursery terrors by a Rabelaisian insistence on the magnified human body. Giants, in this kind of literature, are chronically flatulent; yet the extravagance gives the coarse jokes a quality they would not have without it and even a sort of crazy poetry:

He wold apoun his tais vp stand

And tak the starnis down with his hand

And sett thame in a gold garland

Aboif his wyvis hair.

From the opening words ‘Hiry, hary, hubbilschow’ the whole thing goes with an infectious zest which makes it a masterpiece of its kind. If anyone chooses to believe that it is by Dunbar, the internal evidence will not be against him. The Freiris of Berwick, on the other hand (Maitland Folio XLII), will seem like Dunbar only to those who think Dunbar like Chaucer. This excellent fabliau, in decasyllabic couplets, is by a real Chaucerian and ranks above all other attempts to continue the tradition of the comic Canterbury Tales.

The two poems by Clapperton (Maitland Folio LXXIX and LXXX) are also like Dunbar; but for all we know may be derived less from him than along with him from the old Provençal stock. The first of them, a song of the mal mariée with the refrain ‘Wa worth maryage for evermair’, is done with great spirit. The anonymous Christmas song and the complaint ‘Auld kyndnes is quyt forgett’ (Maitland Folio LXXIV and Bannatyne CXXVI) represent the school of Dunbar at its best; Maitland Folio LXXIII—with the all too true refrain ‘Thus wait I nocht quhairof to wryt’—at its worst.

But it must not be supposed that Dunbar dominates the minor poets completely. In the beautiful lyric by ‘Fethe’ or Fethy (Bannatyne CCCIX) the poignancy of the refrain, ‘Cauld, cauld culis the lufe that kendillis our het’, depends on a quality of rhythm which is quite unlike Dunbar’s; and so does the beauty of

The flesche is fawin, we umquhile brawin, I list nocht for to pley,

The medowss mawin, the claith is drawin, the grace is said away.

(Bannatyne CCCXXXV.)

When King James was at his prayers in Linlithgow on the eve of his fatal expedition, there thrust into his presence a strange man ‘clade in ane blew gowne’ who warned him to beware of this journey and of women. Pitscottie vouches for the story on the evidence of two ‘young men and spetiall serwandis to the kingis grace’ who were standing by. One of these men was David Lyndsay (1486–1555) afterwards Lyon King of Arms, the last major poet of the old Scotch tradition.

His works are a beautiful example of the ‘single talent well employed’. The Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, which holds an important place among our scanty materials for a history of the allegorical drama in Scotland, will be dealt with in another volume of this series; here it will be enough to say that this long morality stands apart from the rest of Lyndsay’s output by the looseness of the metre and the general popularity of the style, and that it is rich in pathos and low humour. In his remaining works he everywhere keeps well within the lines marked out for him by his great predecessors; there is no novelty in them, and he usually lacks the originality of Henryson and the brilliance of Dunbar and Douglas. But what there is of him is good all through.

His earliest poem, the Dreme (not before 1528), has grown as logically as the circles made by a pebble thrown in a pond. The centre is a vision of John Commonwealth ‘all raggit, revin, and rent, With visage leyne as he had fastit Lent’ hastening for the border to leave a Scotland which has no place for him. In order that the poverty of Scotland may be shown as the fault not of nature but of corruption, this is set in a picture of the country as a whole, and the country then set in a complete picture of the earth, earth among the planets, and all in the heavens. Hell is also described, and the total vision, which has thus become a humble relative of the Somnium Scipionis and the Divine Comedy, is enclosed in a dream and prefaced with a pleasingly realistic account of a winter morning’s walk on the sea-shore. It is readable work in a good, though familiar, tradition. The modern reader, no doubt, has to acquire the taste for such things, but the acquisition is easy and worth making. There is a more obvious appeal in the dedicatory epistle where the poet reminds the king how he carried him in his arms as a child, played games with him on the nursery floor, and told him stories about Thomas the Rymer, the reid etin, and the gyir carlyng. The stanzas on purgatory contain the first indication of Lyndsay’s Protestant sympathies.

The ‘Complaynt to the King’, written in octosyllabics that have the spring of Burns or Scott, is a begging poem which shares many of the merits of Dunbar’s efforts in the same kind. Like Dunbar, and perhaps in imitation of him, Lyndsay gets great fun out of ‘Flyting’ the king’s evil counselors; and he knew these lines were good, for he used them over again in the Thrie Estaitis. But the poem as a whole is gentler than Dunbar would have made it. The repetition of Lyndsay’s services to the infant king, which might so easily have reminded us of Mime’s Starenlied in the opera, is full of humour and affection. The conclusion is graceful in the highest degree. After jokingly asking for a loan, to be repaid

Quhen kirkmen yairnis no dignitie

Nor wyffis no soveranitie,

the poet rises into a more serious vein and hopes, in lines which recall the close of Il Penseroso, that, if the king after all prove unkind, God will grant him in his Latter aige such contentment on his small ancestral estate as Diogenes enjoyed in his tub.

In 1530 came the Testament and Complaynt of the Papyngo, an account in rhyme royal of the death and last words of the king’s parrot. Its complaynt is a sermon to its fellow-courtiers and to the king on mutability, with special reference to Scotch history of which the bird displays an extensive knowledge; its testament is made in the unwelcome presence of certain birds of prey who turn out to be monks and friars of the feathered world. The dying parrot inveighs against their hypocrisy and avarice, with the usual references to Constantine’s unfortunate liberality, while they vigorously defend themselves by throwing the blame on the secular clergy. So far, the satire has been ordinary enough; but we find real satiric invention, and even a strange beauty, when the popinjay, having provided for the poor by leaving her gay coat to the owl, her eyes to the bat, and her voice to the cuckoo, and for herself by committing her spirit to the Quene of Farie, is torn in pieces by her carrion executors the moment the breath is out of her body—hir angel fedderis fleying in the air. The poem is of historical interest for the list of Scotch poets in the prologue.

The years between 1533 and 1542 saw the production of several occasional poems—a ‘Flyting’, a ‘Complaynt’ for Bagsche the king’s dog (in which the supposed caninity of the speaker is never lost sight of amid the author’s moral and political opinions), an attack on the female fashion of syde taillis, and a burlesque ‘Justing’ on the lines of Dunbar’s ‘Tailyeour and Sowtar’. The ‘Deploratioun of the Deith of Quene Magdalene’ (1537), which begins dully enough, deserves to be remembered for an excellent concluding stanza and for a stirring picture of the pageantry which would have celebrated the queen’s coronation. ‘Kitteis Confessioun’ (1542) is an attack on the confessional in which the serious part—that is, the bulk of the poem—tends to be read with some disappointment because the opening has led us to expect a comic treatment. The first forty lines are not unworthy of Prior.

The killing of Cardinal Beaton in 1546 was the occasion of Lyndsay’s dullest poem, a Tragedie of the Cardinall in the tradition of Boccaccio’s De Casibus; but who could delay on this when we are already in sight of his masterpiece? Squire Meldrum (after 1550) ought to be in everyone’s hands; a lightly modernized and heavily glossed text at a reasonable price is greatly to be desired. This wholly delightful poem stands, as it were, at the triple frontier where the novel, the romance, and the biography all march together. The ideals of love and war are those of romance, but the hero is an historical person whom the author has known, a skilled physician and good footballer as well as a warrior and a lover, whose exploits are kept within the bounds of possibility—though, to be sure, when the enemy are English we may be told that ‘The Sutheron wes ay fyve for ane’. The circumstances of Meldrum’s battle with the English champion in France might have come straight out of Malory, but there is no leaping up from fallen horses and ‘foining like boars’ for hours on foot—only the long series of courses with the lance which may actually have occurred and which are described as lovingly as a modern writer of school-stories describes a cricket match. The sea-fight and the mêlée in the streets of a French town, more easily enjoyed by such laymen as ourselves, are among the very best things of their kind. They are in the hammer-like octosyllabics of the Bruce and almost any couplet taken from them at random would make the rhetorical battle poetry of Spenser and Drayton look like a tailor’s sword beside the sword of a trooper. The strange idea that the poem is a burlesque, unless it is based on the first fifty lines or so, may come from the love scenes where much chivalry, good sense, and wholesome sensuality are mixed with much humour. But the humour is not burlesque; in English medieval romance homely realism thus often blends with courtly love, and Risus, Jocus, and Petulantia are, at all times, the natural attendants of Venus. The hero’s Testament in rhyme royal, which follows the story in octosyllabics, would show, in real life, a levity not very suitable to a death-bed; as a purely poetical fanfare to round off a knightly tale, it is excellent. After committing his soul to God, Meldrum asks for a procession a thousand hagbutteris in gude ordour instead of monks and friars; no black for mourning but red for Mars, green for Venus, and blue for Mercury; and instead of requiems Alleluya with melodie and game and cannounis crak, ‘I will that day be heard no hevines’. His farewell to the sterne of Stratherne, my ladie Soveraine, whom he had loved par amors (with every intention, poor man, of marrying her in the end, but both found it greit vexatioun to tarrie upon dispensatioun) almost concludes his speech, but he has time to say quickly at the last ‘Sir Curat, gif me incontinent my crysme’. In short, while we are given to understand that he made a good end, we see him with our own eyes die game. It is a fitting conclusion to this unambitious but noble poem. We have greater stories in verse; perhaps none, even in Chaucer, more completely successful.

The Dialog betwixt Experience and ane Courteour (1553?), more familiarly known as the Monarche, is the last of his poems, and the most medieval in form and spirit, though it refers to Erasmus and to Diodorus Siculus whom Lyndsay had read in one of the early editions of Poggio’s Latin version. It opens with a May morning’s dream in rhyme royal where Lyndsay attempts, not very successfully, to rival the brilliant colouring of Dunbar and Douglas; it goes on to an octosyllabic history of the five great empires (the papacy being the fifth) preceded by an account of the creation and followed by an account of the Day of Judgement, and relieved from time to time by complaints and apostrophes in decasyllabic stanzas. The presence of these suggests that poets could no longer count on that unjaded appetite in their readers for which the Cursor Mundi was written, but the work is substantially true to that old tradition. Nothing is made of the dialogue form; and if the papacy is treated from the point of view of a Reformer, this does not modify the medieval character of the poem. It is a metrical homily on world history, based largely on Orosius, Josephus, and Diodorus. In poems of this type we do not look for ‘jewels five words long’ nor for any great originality of conception. Their attraction lies in the perennial interest of the matter and in those local variations which it elicits from authors happily ignorant of archaeology and therefore compelled to see the past as if it were part of their own present. They are very seldom dull. From Lyndsay’s I gather much that has made it, for me, worth reading. I learn (in answer to a question often raised) that our first parents loved par amors in Eden, delighting in each utheris bodies soft and quhyte, and no wonder, says the poet, consyderyng thare gret bewte; that in the antediluvian world

The watter was so strang and fyne

Thay wald nocht laubour to mak wyne;

that the Mediterranean and all other inland seas are relics of the flood; and that when the building of the tower of Babel was abandoned the schaddow of that hidduous strenth was already six miles long. It will be seen that Lyndsay usually has his eye on the object. The style of the Monarche does not rise to very great heights except in some of the lyrical interludes; but he must be a dull reader who finds it dull.

Warton—still our most reliable critic on much later medieval poetry—praises some of Lyndsay’s lines as ‘nervous, terse, and polished’ and claims that they need only a modernized spelling to recommend them to the taste of his own age. This affinity between Lyndsay and the eighteenth century is naturally best seen in the ease and mastery of his lighter octosyllabic pieces; but even where his artistic formulas are most widely removed from those of the Augustans, he might be called a medieval Augustan. Decorum, discipline, a perfect understanding of his aim and of the means to that aim—these are his characteristics.

Lyndsay, as I have said, is the last of the major medieval poets in Scotland, but the anthologies display a vigorous undergrowth which is still to be examined. Comic poetry, of the ‘kaleyard’ rather than the ‘eldritch’ kind, is represented by several pieces whose date and authorship are uncertain. The two most famous of these, Christis Kirk on the Green (Bannatyne CLXIV and Maitland Folio XLIII) and Peblis to the Play (Maitland Folio XLIX), have both been attributed to James I. His claim to Christs Kirk rests on the attribution in Bannatyne, but some would there read fift for first and the philologists do not encourage us to date the language of the poem within James I’s lifetime. His claim to Peblis to the Play rests on a passage in Major where he is said to have composed the jucundum cantum ‘At Beltayn’—which certainly is the opening of the extant Peblis to the Play; but then Major spoils everything by adding quem alii . . . mutare studuerunt. The words (‘they busied themselves to change it’) suggest either that the poem was much imitated or that it got abroad in very corrupt texts. The extent Peblis to the Play is certainly earlier than Christis Kirk, in which it is mentioned. Both poems deal with the humours of what we should now call ‘a bank holiday crowd’. The bustle of early morning preparation, the giggling and squealing coyness of the women, the refreshments in packed eating houses, the quarrels and finally the riots in which the extreme pugnacity of both sexes is neutralized by their lack of skill and courage, the tumbles and wrangles and perspiration of a ‘fire-hot day’, are all rendered with great spirit. Christis Kirk is the more violent and, I think, the less amusing of the two. In subject-matter they are not unlike some of the work of Skelton; the difference lies in the art. These are poems about confusion and vulgarity, not confused and vulgar poems. The poet—or poets—have perfect command both of their material and of their stanzas, and let us see pretty clearly that they had poetry of a very different sort at their disposal if they had wished to use it. The lyric quality peeps out in

Bot yallow yallow was hir heid

And sche of luif so sillie,

Thocht all hir kin suld haue bein deid

Sche wald have bot sweit Willie

Allane

At Chrystis Kirk of the grein.

or even in

All the wenchis of the West

War up or the cok crew.

‘The Wife of Auchtermuchty’ (Bannatyne CLXXXIII), attributed, but in a later hand, to ‘Mofat’, is of the same kind and tells the common story of the man and wife who exchanged work for one day with disastrous results. It is more decorous than the German version which Ritson first discovered in the Silva Sermonum of 1568; from which, perhaps, we may infer that the Scotch poet had never heard the German version. ‘The Dumb Wife’ (Maitland Folio XXXV, in an imperfect text) tells amusingly enough how a husband by means of a spell learned from ‘ane greit grim man’ cured his dumb wife and how bitterly he regretted it. Two drinking songs (Bannatyne CLXIX and CLXXIV) are also worth mentioning. The note at the end of the former ‘q(uod) allane matsonis suddartis’ means, I believe, ‘Thus say Allen Ma(l)tson’s subjects’—i.e. the subjects of King Beer. ‘Sym and his Bruder’ (Bannatyne CCXVII) on the comic adventures of two palmers, and Maitland Folio LXXVII on Football, are lively. I am inclined to think that Arbuthnot’s poem in praise of women (Maitland Quarto XXXV) is ironical and therefore intended to be comic. But if so, it has failed, and for a curious reason—it is too musical, too lyrically turned. This was a source of failure which most English poets of the period did not need to guard against.

When we turn to the minor poets whose names and dates happen to be known we soon learn the hopelessness of trying to date the anonymous pieces by internal evidence. This, indeed, is one of the most useful lessons which the anthologies have to teach us. ‘Periods’ are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme. Thus Stewart, who was writing ‘daylie’ when Lyndsay composed the Complaynt of the Papyngo in 1530, will write aureate stanzas (Bannatyne CCXLVII) whose poetics would not surprise us in the age of Henryson. Equally medieval, but far superior, is his song ‘Thir lenterne dayis’ (Bannatyne CCCXXV). But of course he may not be Lyndsay’s Stewart. We are more certain of Bellenden who was a new poet (‘now of lait starte up’) in the Papyngo and whose Proheme to his Chronicle (Bannatyne IV) is pure stanzaic aureate morality in the old style. It must date from 1536. His Benner of Peetie (Bannatyne III) deals with the Four Daughters of God in the same style. Sir Richard Maitland, who lived ninety years (1496–1586) is a more interesting poet. Most of his poems are very like Dunbar and by no means contemptible. Three stand out: ‘Thocht I be auld’ (Maitland Quarto XX) for its cheerful resolution; Bannatyne VI, a lyric narrative of the Fall, for its music; and ‘Quhen I haue done consider’ (Maitland Quarto XXXI), for both; the moral that a merry heart is best leaps cheerily to the tune of

It will not be our sorrow

That will stope Goddis hand

To stryike baith evin and morrow

Bayth on the sie and land.

Alexander Scott (1525?–1584?) is more independent. There is in some of his poems a new music, lighter than Dunbar’s, and often suggestive of Burns. There are also poems (notably Bannatyne CCCXV and CCCXXIV) in short lines and plain language which remind us of Wyatt. But then again there are poems which, so far as their literary quality is concerned, might have been written a hundred years earlier—Remedies of Love like Bannatyne CLXXXV, or aureate stanzas like CLII. It would be delightful if we could arrange his work in chronological order so as to show a picture of the young poet slowly ‘escaping’ from the Middle Ages, but the most medieval of all his pieces—‘Welcum illustrat Ladye and oure Quene’ (Bannatyne CLII)—bears on its face the date 1562. Scott is using a certain style not because he is ‘still’ medieval but because he considers it appropriate to the kind of poem he wants to make. In his best work, and even in his second-best work, melody is his great virtue; that, I suppose, is why Pinkerton called him ‘the Anacreon of old Scottish poetry’. He does not, like Anacreon, excel in gaiety, but rather in pathos:

Scho wait my wo

That is ago

Scho wait my weilfair and remeid;

Scho wait also

I lufe no mo

Bot hir, the well of womanheid.

Scho wait withouttin faill

I am hir luvar laill

Scho hes my hairt alhaill

Till I be deid.

(Bannatyne CCXCII),

or again:

To luve unluvit is ane pane,

For scho that is my soverane

Sum wantoun man so he hes set hir

That I can get no lufe agane,

Bot brekis my hairt and nocht the bettir.

(Ibid. CCCXXXIV.)

Anacreon’s melody is much simply than this; nor could Anacreon conceivably have written such a line as (from the first of these two poems) ‘The quyet secreitis of my harte’. But our opinion of Scott is not raised when we read his work as a whole; music seldom fails him, but he is often empty and in some of his more medieval poems there are very dull conceits.

Even now—such are the riches of Scotch poetry—there remain many anonymous pieces which I cannot bring myself to pass over in silence; the pretty nequitiae of ‘I met my lady weil arrayit’ (Bannatyne CCIX), the ‘jolly woe’ and ‘lusty sorrow’ of ‘Quhen Flora had ourfret the firth’ (CCLI), or the delightful poem on Old Age:

As schadow in the sonnis beme

Or primrois in the winter showr.

So all my dayis is bot ane dreme

And half the sleeping of ane howr . . .

Ane nap is nowrissand eftir none,

Ane fyre is fosterand for my feit,

With dowbill sokkis for my schone

And mittanis for my handis meit.

(Maitland Folio LIX.)

Perhaps best of all is the poem (Maitland Quarto LXXXVIII) entitled—and the title is part of its beauty—‘The Reed in the Loch says’.

But every good order, in poetry as in commonwealths, draws to an end. In Maitland Quarto XXXVIII a vague and confused echo of the Italian canzone can be heard. The confusion of what we call ‘Periods’ is particularly apparent in XL from the same manuscript. It sets off in the style of Pearl:

O blissid bird brichtest of all

O flour of femenein . . . ,

suddenly darts forward into something like the Cavalier lyric:

So Nature has ordanit wyislie

That in all kynde of thing

Perfyite the unperfyite supplie

And to perfectioun bring . . . ,

and then retracts to what, but for the language, we should call pure Elizabethan:

Your goldin hair lyik Phoebus schein

Quhaireuer ye go dois glance.

Here we see different kinds of good poetry contending together. In Maitland Quarto XLVIII (‘Declair ye bankis of Helicon’) the Elizabethan manner is superbly victorious. Elsewhere—in XLVII, LXXVI, LXXVII, LXXVIII, and LXXXVIII—we see the simple conquest of the worse over the better. The very draff and scum of contemporary English poetry, the lumbering Poulter’s Measure creeps in. It is a sign that the Scotch medieval literature is doomed. ‘Newfangleness’ and the power of foreign fashion must have become strong indeed before men nurtured on the great ‘makaris’ could welcome such alien imbecility. We are very near the day when Scotch poets will cease to write in their own rich and perfected tongue and Scotch poetry will become, for centuries, a backwater.

The representative poet of this transitional period is Alexander Montgomerie (1545?–1611?), a friend and probably a distant relative of James VI and I who quotes him for a specimen of versification in his Rewlis and Cautelis (1584). Montgomerie’s implication in a popish plot to establish a Spanish garrison on Ailsa Craig afterwards led to his disgrace and banishment. He had commenced poet before 1568, for he appears in the Bannatyne MS. His most celebrated work, The Cherrie and the Slae, existed in some form before 1597 (the textual problems are rather complicated) and his Flyting against Polwart before 1584. His posthumous reputation in Scotland was very great and twenty-two editions of the Cherrie are recorded before 1792.

The new elements in Montgomerie’s work are very obvious. He is, to begin with, a sonneteer, and as such indebted to Constable and Ronsard. His seventy sonnets are not, perhaps, opened once in a hundred years by those who read for pleasure. Yet they cannot exactly be called bad; they are careful, dignified work from which here and there a good line could be picked out. The miscellaneous poems are on the whole more interesting than the sonnets. In those which are of the new school Montgomerie sometimes has just a hint of that stateliness which comes in when the classic model of the ode begins to mix with the native song in men’s conception of lyric poetry. The Solsequium is perhaps the best, or else the Address to the Sun, beginning:

Quhill as with whyt and nimble hand

My maistres gathring flowrs doth stand.

He would have enjoyed, though he would never have learned to imitate, Ben Jonson’s lyrics. Elsewhere he can be flat enough; he admired Tottel’s poets.

But the old elements are equally important. Side by side with the Solsequium we find ordinary medieval moralizing stanzas, occasional aureation, and poems in the manner of Dunbar. The best poem he ever wrote belongs to no particular age:

Hay! Nou the day dawis,

The jolie cok crawis,

Nou shroudis the shawis

Throu Natur anone.

But here he had an old tune to keep him right. The most medieval of all his works, the Flyting, is arguably (at least in places) his best. The genre is indeed dead; but then so are his sonnets, and the ‘Flyting’ sounds as if it had once been alive. I, at any rate, find the opening irresistible:

Polwart, ye peip like a mouse amongst thrones;

Na cunning ye keip; Polwart, ye peip.

Ye luik like a sheipe and ye had two hornes;

Polwart, ye peip like a mouse amongst thrones.

Surely this is better, unless we are very fond of novelty, than ‘Bright amorous ee where Love in ambush lyis’ and its kind.

In The Cherrie and the Slae Montgomerie pours very old wine into (comparatively) new bottles. The matter of the poem is purely medieval—a May morning, a river, a hesitation whether to pluck the accessible sloe or climb for the more delicious cherry, and a ‘psychomachy’ in the form of an interminable debate between Hope, Courage, Will, Dread, Danger, Skill, Experience, Reason, and Wit. A thirteenth-century poet would have done it in octosyllabic couples, a Tottelian in octosyllabic quatrains. Montgomerie’s very unhappy innovation consists in a more lyrical stanza. It is a very delightful stanza in itself; the same that we find in Sir Richard Maitland’s poem on the Fall, with the ending movement of:

Sum creiping, sum fleiting

Sum fleing in the air,

So heichtly, so lichtly

In moving heir and thair.

(Bannatyne VI.)

But this tumble-home is unendurable in a prolonged narrative, and still more in a prolonged debate. The long-continued popularity of the Cherrie among Montgomerie’s countrymen is something of a puzzle. Perhaps men liked it because it is so quotable—stanza after stanza consists almost entirely of proverbs (or sentences capable of becoming proverbs) which are certainly stitched into the verse with great dexterity. Perhaps, too, a patriotic desire to read Scotch poetry coupled with a decreasing knowledge of Middle Scots may have had something to do with it. But Pinkerton was not deceived; ‘the allegory’, he said, ‘is weak and wire-drawn, and the whole poem beneath contempt. Let it then sleep.’ If for ‘the whole poem’ we read ‘four-fifths of the poem’ this is about right.

The rest of Montgomerie’s certain output is made up of religious poetry; he fails, like his betters, as a translator of psalms. Some poems in the Laing MS. are suspected of being his. One of these, though its ending is ugly enough, begins delightfully:

Glade am I! Glade am I!

My mother is gone to Henislie. . . .

In so far as Montgomerie writes his own mother tongue, you may if you like call him the ‘last of the makaris’. If you prefer, you can call him for his sonnets the precursor of Drummond. But unless you are a student you will not read him in either capacity.

What remains of Scotch poetry in this century may, for our purposes, be briefly gathered up. John Rolland published his Sevin Seages in 1560 and his Court of Venus in 1575. The former is a versification of the prose version printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1515; the latter an erotic allegory strangely encumbered by the author’s legal interests, and almost (but not quite) without merit. Much more important is the collection of Protestant hymns, compiled and largely composed by the Wedderburn brothers, which is known under many names; A Compendious Book of Godly and Spiritual Songs, the Gude and Godlie Ballatis, the Psalms of Dundee, and the Psalms of Wedderburn. There are several editions. Hymnody is an extreme case of literature as an applied art. Its products can be judged only when we have heard them used for their proper purpose. To the literary critic, judging in his library, the Gude and Godlie Ballatis will appear very uneven, ranging from the bathos of

He is the Lord Christ, God and Man;

He will do for you what He can,

to the excellent lyric ‘All my lufe leif me not’. The latter belongs to a large class which are either certainly or probably ‘anti-parodies’ (if I may coin a most necessary word)—the conversion of popular and secular songs to devout purposes; as in:

Hey, now the day dallis,

Now Christ on us callis,

Now welth in our wallis

Apperis anone.

One of the most vigorous pieces is the ‘Flyting’ of the Pope (‘that Pagan full of pride’) with its refrain ‘Hay trix, tryme go trix, under the greenwood tree’, familiar to every reader of The Abbot. In Alexander Hume’s Hymnes or Sacred Songs (published in 1598 but composed, Hume tells us, ‘in my youth’) we reach religious poetry proper as distinct from hymnody; and we also reach the point at which Scotch poetry is ceasing to be very noticeably Scots. Hume’s modest statement that he is making ‘rude Scottish and hask [i.e. harsh] verses’ is significant; it was for his ‘Inglis’ words that Douglas had apologized. There is also a plentiful crop of controversial and satirical ballads, mostly on the Protestant side. The authors are usually anonymous, but the name of Robert Sempill (ob. 1595), famous for his coarseness, survives. And with that we are at an end. We enter upon a period in which historians of Scotch literature can fill their chapters only by dwelling on writers who in happier lands and ages would hardly secure a mention. One sonnet by Boyd (ob. 1601) is remembered. And of course there is always Drummond. But Drummond himself, when all’s said, is a Scotchman only ‘out of school’.

It is impossible not to wonder at this sudden extinction of a poetical literature which, for its technical brilliance, its vigour and variety, its equal mastery over homely fact and high imagination, seemed ‘so fair, so fresshe, so liklie to endure’. Historians whose sympathies are Roman attribute the catastrophe to the Reformation. But if the cause lies in that quarter at all it must be sought in some peculiarity of the Scotch Reformation; for in England the old religion had no such poetical glories to show and the new had many. Perhaps the Scotch poetry was essentially court poetry and could not live without a court. But however we explain the phenomenon, it forces on our minds a truth which the incurably evolutionary or developmental character of modern thought is always urging us to forget. What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive. Higher organisms are often conquered by lower ones. Arts as well as men are subject to accident and violent death. The philosophy of history outlined by Keats’s Oceanus is not true. We ask too often why cultures perish and too seldom why they survive; as though their conservation were the normal and obvious fact and their death the abnormality for which special causes must be found. It is not so. An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men’s fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery. If we are alive when such a thing is happening we shall hardly notice it until too late; and it is most unlikely that we shall know its causes.

II

Prose is a plant not easily brought to perfection north of the Tweed; even when, in a later age, it became plentiful and vigorous, it seldom flowered, so that to the present day it is difficult to point to any Scotch authors except Hume and Stevenson whose fame depends much on their style. In the two great glories of medieval prose—the Romance and the devotional treatise—Scotland seems to have had no share. No Scotch Malory or Berners, no Scotch Hilton or Lady Julian, has come down to us.

In the sixteenth century the crop is more plentiful and some of it can be classified as medieval. The controversial literature arising out of the Reformation will be treated in a later chapter, except for one work which is at once so early and so unimportant that we may as well dispose of it here. This is The Richt Vay to the Kingdome of Hevine (1533) by John Gau (or Gaw, or Gall). The author spent much of his life at Malmö in Sweden, where he married. His book is a translation of Christiern Pedersen’s Den Rette Vey till Hiemmerigis Rige (1531) which is itself mainly a translation from the German of Urbanus Rhegius. Gau was a Protestant and his book is a modest little commentary on the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer. The style is lucid and no other merit was attempted. The Richt Vay has the distinction of being the first specimen of Protestant theology in Scots; otherwise it counts for little in the history of thought and for less in the history of literature.

One of the most remarkable works of the century is the Complaynt of Scotlande, composed, as the author tells us (cap. v), in 1549. The compiler of the Harleian Catalogue may have had evidence which has since been lost when he attributed it to ‘Vedderburn’; but it is certainly not by any Wedderburne who had a hand in the Gude and Godlie Ballatis, and must here be treated as an anonymous work. It is based chiefly on Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue Invectif (1422)—an appeal to the defeated and dissentient ‘estates’ of France made in the terrible years after Agincourt, and taking the form of an allegorical dream in which France personified addresses her children (peasant, knight, and churchman), and they try unsuccessfully to throw the blame on one another. The Scotch author, writing in the years that followed Pinkie, finds it easy to substitute Scotia for France and bring the work up to date. To that extent his book may be called medieval. But the moment we start reading it we find that Chartier has been metamorphosed. Between the prologue and the vision proper there comes in (page after page of it) a ‘Monologue Recreative’ in which, after some dazzling landscape, we are introduced to a number of wholly idealized shepherds, one of whom lectures on cosmography till silenced by his wife. Tales, songs, and dances succeed; and the list of their names will always give the Complaynt a place in the memory of antiquarians. The names of the tales are especially alluring and everyone would wish to know more about that ‘Volfe’ (some would read ‘Velle’) ‘of the varldis ende’ which struck so fortunately on the ears of William Morris. Before this, in the dedicatory epistle to the queen, and in varying degrees throughout the book, we are deluged with ink horn terms; ‘magnanime avancing’, ‘prochane enemies’, and ‘sempiternall Olymp’. In aureate verse Scotchmen had done this sort of thing before; the inundation of prose was a novelty. Everywhere, too, the author lets loose on us a flood of anecdote and authority, unknown to Chartier, from Sallust, Seneca, Livy, Plutarch, Aristotle, Thucydides, and who not? The flavour is unmistakable. Here, unforetold, unsucceeded, unexplained, tricked out in all its heterogeneous ornaments as in jewels ‘that were the spoils of provinces’, what we call the ‘Renaissance’ has come dancing, shouting, posturing, nay as it were sweating, into Scots prose. It comes, for a moment. This author looks as if he were to be the first of many such; but no more came. There was to be no Scotch Lyly, no Scotch Arcadia, no Scotch Rabelais or Nashe. The author himself hoped that it would be merely his first book and looked forward to his ‘next verkis’. It would be idle to deny this ‘Renaissance’ quality on the ground that the Complaynt is deeply medieval, its form a dream allegory, its landscape painting indebted almost certainly to Dunbar and probably to Alanus about Insulis. The Courtyer, the Faerie Queene, the Furioso, and Petrarch’s Rime all have such medieval roots. What baffles the modern reader is the union of a wholly serious purpose in this book with great extravagance of manner. The author is in tragic earnest about the miseries of Scotland, the fatal tendency of its nobles to disunion, treachery, and neutrality in the face of their ‘ald enemies’ the English. He is also in earnest about the corruptions of the Church in which he finds the true cause of ‘Heresy’ (he is a papist), and which, while they remain, make persecution useless. He can express in words that still move us the ‘curses not loud but deep’ of the hopeless peasants. It stretches our modern sensibilities to reconcile this with his jackdaw-like collections of classical tags, the glittering artificiality of his style, and his own hearty enjoyment of that artificiality. Yet when we have got into the mood we can even now see that there is a certain crazy beauty about the thing; and mere copiousness was regarded as a merit by our ancestors, if not by us.

The historians are more to our taste. They are also interesting because in them we see the art of history itself at the moment of an important transition. Behind the vernacular historians lie the Latin historians, Hector Boethius (or Boece; 1465?–1536) and Johannes Major (1479–1550), who represent the humanistic and the medieval conceptions of historical writing respectively. Major is not, indeed, nearly good enough to be taken as the type of the older school and we shall have a much better example in a moment; but all that there is of him is medieval through and through. His Historia Majoris Britanniae tam Angliae quam Scotiae is dry and annalistic in narrative, and when he discusses a problem (read what he says of Merlin’s birth in II. iv) he sets it out like a disputation in the schools. Boece, on the other hand, writes classical Latin, keeps his eye on Livy, and is never so happy as when he can set his characters making speeches. The gain, if there be a gain, is not one in historical accuracy. Much of his Historia Scotorum (1527) is as fabulous as Geoffrey of Monmouth, but not, I think, so interesting, though we must thank him for supplying to Shakespeare (through Holinshed) the story of Macbeth.

Vernacular history begins by translation, and proceeds by continuation, of Boece. In 1536 John Bellenden, whom we have met before as a very minor poet and who had already in 1533 translated part of Livy, published his version of the Historia Scotorum. He is not one of the great translators and does not quite succeed in getting rid of the idiom of the original. Tell-tale absolute constructions, historic presents, and excessive linking of sentences abound.

John Lesley (1526–96), Bishop of Ross, is a sounder historian than Boece and a better writer then Bellenden. His unpublished History of Scotland from 1437 to 1561 was dedicated to Queen Mary in 1570. It was written during his residence in England and arose from his reading of Polydore Virgil, Bede, Froissart, Fabian, Stow, and others in whom he found ‘sundry thingis sett furth of the daedis and proceedingis betwix Scotland and England far contrair to our annals, registeris, and trew proceedingis’. Where Lesley is on his mettle, as in his dedicatory epistle, he shows himself to be a writer of the new school, and in that kind very good. His builded periods are those of a judicious classicist. This manner is, however, hardly maintained after he gets to business; his narrative is free from rhetoric and not very typical either of the medieval or the humanist kind of history. The truth is that he writes primarily as a man of affairs; he has read too many state papers and sat on too many committees to be either affected or racy. If the word had not been spoiled by ironical usage, ‘respectable’ would be the right adjective for his style. His history in Scots was first printed for the Bannatyne Club in 1830. But in 1579, while in exile at Rome, he had turned it into Latin under the title De Origine, Moribus et Rebus Scotorum, and this Latin text was retranslated into Scots in 1596 by a certain Father Dalrymple, apparently an exile for his religion at Ratisbon. Father Dalrymple’s work is not of much literary importance. He was not very good at Latin, yet his Scots is too Latin by half.

Lesley’s great opposite on the Protestant side, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie (1532–92), had a somewhat similar fate, in so far as his Historie and Cronkiles of Scotland was never printed till the eighteenth century. It was, however, certainly intended for publication. In his dedicatory verses (he was a poor poet) he expresses a wish that its ‘fame’ should not be ‘sprong as yit’ and gives the reason. The book ‘mells’ with present authority and could not be safely published while Morton—or any Douglas for that matter—was in power. From internal evidence it is clear that at least a large part of it was composed before 1577 and that none of it can be later than 1579. It is in Pitscottie that we find a worthier specimen than Major of that old school of chronicling which the rhetorical histories of the humanists displaced; the kind of history which is still saga, full of the sharp sayings and tragic deaths of great men, and which can boast Herodotus, Snorri, the Gesta Francorum, and Froissart among its glories. Pitscottie himself is quite unaware of the difference. He feels himself to be merely continuing Boece and his First Book is a translation of Boece’s Eighteenth—that Eighteenth which did not appear in the 1527 text of the Historia but which Ferrerius published in 1574. This arrangement, however, serves to bring out all the more clearly the classicism of Boece and the medievalism of Pitscottie. I do not mean that we notice an abrupt change as we pass from Pitscottie the translator to Pitscottie the original writer. But we gradually become aware, as his story takes hold of him, that we have entered a different world. The point can be illustrated by quotation. Here is a speech from Book I:

Gif transgressiounis of the lawis and statutes of the realm hopit for nane other thing of Kingis’ and Princes’ handis haveand the rule and governament of otheris, bot that quhilk the lawis decernis (Maist mightie Prince) I see na place left to me this day for remissioun of my cryme; yeit notwithstanding, Reason itself persuades me, &c.,

Here is a speech from the real Pitscottie:

God forbid that the Queen’s artaillyie be left in danger or yeit brekin for fear of Inglischemen. I had liever fight to deid in keeping of the Queen’s artaillyie nor flie with shame and leave it behind me. I vow to God and by St. Bryde I sall put it free in the Castell of Dunbar or ellis die for it . . .

Or again,

I vow to God they sall not take seisin of my lands bot I sall bear thame witness gif I may and help to make thair instrumentis with langer pens and redder ink nor thay bring with thame.

Some will prefer the one manner, some the other; but the examples will at any rate make plain in what sense I classify Pitscottie as a medieval, not a Renaissance, historian. In the class to which he belongs he is not one of the finest—not to be compared with Snorri or Froissart. But in great scenes he can be great. The murder of Cochran, the escape of Albany, the heroic humours of Lord David Lindsay of the Byres, Bishop Forman’s faux pas at the papal banquet, the death-bed of James V, and the whole battle of Ancrum, are admirable in their varied merits of vividness, dry fun, or pathos. He writes frankly on the Protestant side but he was not, as things went in that fierce age, an embittered partisan and can praise merit in a Popish Churchman when he sees it; but he hates a persecutor, and a Douglas. His Scots is pure and racy (so pure, indeed, that de la Bastie becomes, delightfully, ‘Tillabatie’) and though his prose is not very artful it answers all the demands he makes upon it. In his history, for the first and last time, Scots prose of medieval character achieves permanent value.

A consideration of the Complaynt, of Lesley, and Pitscottie might serve as a warning against any simple and overschematic picture of the sixteenth century. The Papist bishop, when he chooses, writes classically. The most purely medieval of the three is a Protestant continuing the work of a humanist. And the most floridly Renaissance book has the deepest roots in the literature of the Middle Ages.

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