pictorial relief, they are the nearest approach to renascence habit in the whole work and in all Douglas's writings. A tour de force in the popular alliterative stanza, not without suspicion of burlesque intention, is offered as the appropriate preface to the eighth book! Sum latit lattoun, but lay, lepis in laud lyte;

Sum penis furth a pan boddum to prent fals plakkis;
Sum goukis quhill the glas pyg grow full of gold zit,
Throw cury of the quentassens, thocht clay mugis crakis;
Sum warnour for this warldis wrak wendis by his wyt;
Sum trachour crynis the cunze, and kepis corn stakis;
Sum prig penny, sum pyk thank wyth privy promyt;
Sum garris wyth a ged staf to jag throw blak jakkis.
Quhat fynzeit fayr, quhat flattry, and quhat fals talis!
Quhat misery is now in land!
How mony crakyt cunnand!
For nowthir aiths, nor band,
Nor selis avalis1.

This audacious break in the web of the Aeneid may have served some purpose of rest or refreshment, such as was given by the incongruous farce within the tedious moralities of the age; but it is not the devising of a humanist. The dialogue between the translator and Mapheus Vegius, in the thirteenth prologue, follows the medieval fashion, which was familiar before Henryson conversed with Aesop about his Fables. The first, or general, prologue is the most important, and is frequently referred to for evidence of Douglas's new outlook. The opening homage to Vergil is instructive.

Laude, honor, prasingis, thankis infynite

To the, and thi dulce ornate fresch endite,
Mast reuerend Virgill, of Latyne poetis prince,
Gemme of ingine and fluide of eloquence,

Thow peirles perle, patroun of poetrie,

Rois, register, palme, laurer, and glory,

Chosin cherbukle, cheif flour and cedir tree,

Lanterne, leidsterne, mirrour, and A per se,

Master of masteris, sweit sours and springand well.

It is not difficult to underline the epithets which have done good service in the Chaucerian ritual. Indeed, were Indeed, were we to read 'Chaucer' for 'Virgill' and 'English' for 'Latyne' in the third line, we should have a straightforward 'Chaucerian' passage, true in word and sentiment. But Chaucer is really not far away. Douglas names him ere long, and loads him with the old honours, though he places him second to Vergil. The reason for this is

1 Glossarial notes to this passage would be too numerous and too speculative for this place. Those who are familiar with this genre know that strict verbal interpretation is hardly possible, and that any serious attempt towards it may disclose little but a pedantic misunderstanding of the poet's intention.

interesting. Chaucer, in telling the story of Dido in The Legend of Good Women, had said,

I coud folwe, word for word, Virgyle,

But it wolde lasten al to long a whyle.

This, Douglas politely disputes, especially as Chaucer had said, rather 'boldly,' that he followed Vergil in stating that 'Eneas to Dido was forsworne.' Douglas is careful to disprove this, because it distorts Vergil's purpose to teach all kind of virtue by the consistent goodness of his hero, and to point out (as Henryson seems to have thought in his Cresseid) that Chaucer 'was ever, God wait, wemenis frend.' We are a long way from Vergil here; as we are when the poet complains that Caxton's translation does not do justice to what is hidden 'under the cluddes of dirk poetry.' Douglas makes a more plausible claim to be a modern in a further objection that Caxton's translation (taken from a French version) is bad, that it is out in its words and its geography, and marred by omissions; in quoting Horace on the true method of rendering, a foreign author; and in urging the advantages to vernacular style from the reading of the Latin poet. Yet, after all, his aim was to make Vergil's book a literary bible, as Boccaccio's and Chaucer's were. He desires to be thanked by schoolmasters and by 'onletterit' folk, to whom he has given a new lesson1; he joins St Gregory's opinion with Horace's; he sees a Christian purpose in his work, and he prays for guidance to Mary and her Son, 'that heavenlie Orpheus.' His Vergil is, for the most part, the Vergil of the dark ages, part prophet, part wizard, master of 'illusionis by devillich werkis and coniurationis.' These, he confesses, are now more rare for 'the faith is now mair ferme'; but the circumstances should have been allowed for by the dullard Caxton. When he returns in the prologue to the sixth book to chide those who consider that book but full of 'gaistis and elriche fantaseis' and 'browneis and bogillis,' he says of Vergil—

As tuiching hym, writis Ascencius:

Feill of his wordis bene lyk the appostillis sawis;

He is ane hie theolog sentencius,

And maist profound philosophour he hym schawis.
Thocht sum his writis frawart our faith part drawis,

Na wondir; he was na cristin man, per de;

He was a gentile, and leifit on payane lawis,
And it he puttis ane God, Fadir maist hie.

So it would appear, only too clearly, from these interesting

1 Directioun and Exclamatioun.

prologues, that Douglas's literary attitude was not modern, and that he is not even so much a Janus-poet as his position and opportunities would warrant. When we separate him from his literary neighbours, it must be as a dilettante.

Probably, the main interest of the translation, and of most of Douglas's work, is philological. No Scot has built up such a diction, drawn from all sources, full of forgotten tags of alliterative romance, Chaucerian English, dialectal borrowings from Scandinavian, French, Latin. No one is harder to interpret. Literary merit is not wanting; yet, in those passages, and especially in his Aeneid, which strike the reader most, by the vigorous, often onomatopoeic force of the vocabulary, the pleasure is not what he who knows his Vergil expects, and must demand. The excellence of such a description as that of Acheron

With holl bisme1, and hiduus swelth wnrude,
Drumlie of mud, and scaldand as it wer wod3,
Poplands and bullerand✦ furth on athir hand
Onto Cochitus all his slik5 and sand,

is not the excellence of the original. We are sometimes reminded of Stanyhurst's later effort, in which, however much we may admire the verbal briskness in the marshalling of his thunder and storm passages, we feel that all 'wanteth the trew decorum' of Vergilian sentiment. The archaic artifices, the metrical looseness and the pedestrian tread, where Vergil is alert, destroy the illusion. Still, if we may not give Douglas more than his due, we must not give him less. His Aeneid is a remarkable effort, and is gratefully remembered as the first translation of a great classical poet into English, northern or southern.

Douglas's work, considered as a whole, expresses, in the amplest way, the content of the later allegorical literature. He has lost the secret of the older devices, and does not understand the new which were about to usurp their place. He has not the artistic sense of Henryson, or the resource of Dunbar. His pictorial quality, on which so much stress has been laid by some who would have him to be a modern, is not the pagan delight, nor is its use as an interpretation of his mood after the fashion of the renascence. Some passages which have been cited to prove the contrary are but copies from Henryson and earlier work. In him, as in Hawes (to quote a favourite metaphor of both) 'the bell is rung to evensong.' If Lyndsay and others in the next period still show Chaucerian influence, with them it is a reminiscence, amid the turmoil of the new day.

86

1 abysm. 2 mad, wild. 'bubbling.' roaring, 'boiling.' slime, wet mud.

The minor contemporaries of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas add nothing to our sketch of Middle Scots poetry. What information we have of these forgotten writers is derived from Dunbar's Lament for the Makaris, Douglas's Palice of Honour and Lyndsay's Testament of the Papyngo. Historians have probably exaggerated the extent and importance of this subordinate literature1. It is true we know little of the authors or of their works, but what we do know shows that to speak of 'nests of singing birds,' or to treat Dunbar as a kind of Shakespearean eminence overtopping a great range of song, is amiable hyperbole. What is extant of this 'Chaucerian' material lies in the lower levels of Lydgate's and Occleve's work. The subjects are of the familiar fifteenth century types, and, when not concerned with the rougher popular matter, repeat the old plaints on the ways of courts and women and on the vanity of life. Walter Kennedy, Dunbar's rival in The Flyting, and the most eminent of these minors, has left five poems, The Passioun of Christ, Ane Ballat in praise of Our Lady, Pious Counsale, The Prais of Aige and Ane agit Manis invective against Mouth-thankless. His reputation must rest on the Flyting rather than on the other pieces, which are conventional and dull; and there only because of the antiquarian interest of his 'billingsgate' and his Celtic sympathies. With Kennedy may be named Quintyne Schaw, who wrote an Advyce to a Courtier.

In a general retrospect of this Chaucerian school it is not difficult to note that the discipleship, though sincere, was by no means blind. If the Scottish poets imitated well, and often caught the sentiment with remarkable felicity, it was because they were not painful devotees. In what they did they showed an appreciation beyond the faculty of Chaucer's southern admirers; and, though the artistic sense implied in this appreciation was dulled by the century's craving for a 'moral' to every fancy, their individuality saved them from the fate which befel their neighbours. Good as the Testament of Cresseid is, its chief interest to the historical student is that it was written, that Henryson dared to find a sequel to the master's well-rounded story. Douglas's protest in the general prologue to his Aeneid, though it fail to prove to us that Vergil was much more to him than Chaucer was, shows an audacity which only an intelligent intimacy with the English poet could allow. The vitality of such appreciation, far from undoing the Chaucerian tradition, gave it a fresh lease of life before it yielded, inevitably, to the newer fashion.

1 For the non-Chaucerian elements see next chapter.

* See Chapter IV.

CHAPTER XI

THE MIDDLE SCOTS ANTHOLOGIES: ANONYMOUS VERSE AND EARLY PROSE

STRONG as was the Chaucerian influence on the Scottish poets during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it by no means suppressed or transformed what may be called the native habit of Scottish verse. That influence came, as has been shown, from the courtly side; it was a fashion first set by the author of The Kingis Quair-in its treatment of the language and in its literary mannerisms, a deliberate co-operation with the general European effort to dignify the vernaculars. It did much, but it came late; and, being perhaps too artificial, it yielded, in due course, to another southern influence, more powerful and permanent. Were the Chaucerian makars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their successors in the seventeenth century to be taken as the sole representatives of northern literature, it would be hard to account for the remarkable outburst of national verse amid the conventionalities of the eighteenth. Chaucer and the Elizabethans do not explain Ramsay' and Fergusson and Burns: and these writers are not a sudden dialectal sport in the literary development. It is the object of this chapter to show that the native sentiment which has its fullest expression in these 'modern' poets was always active, and that the evidence of its existence and of its methods is clear, even during that period when the higher literary genius of the country was most strongly affected by foreign models. The vitality of this popular habit has been shown in the most courtly and 'aureate' verse of the so-called 'golden age.' Even in those passages in which the poets may be suspected of burlesquing this habit-whether by direct satire or in half-conscious repetition of Chaucer's dislike of 'rum ram ruf'-the acknowledgment is significant. The thesis of this chapter is, therefore, to supplement what has been said parenthetically of this non-Chaucerian 'matter.' It deals with those pieces which lie outside the work of the

1 See Chapter iv, p. 95, note.