A livelier interest belongs to two Metrical works in the living tongue, both of which belong to that age.

The later of these in date was the "Original Cronykil" of b. ab. 1850. Andrew Wyntoun, prior of Saint Serf's in Lochleven, d. aft. 1420. which is a history, in nine books, partly of Scotland, partly of the world at large. Far from being without worth as a record of facts, it is totally destitute of poetical merit.

Not so is it with a work which immediately preceded it, b. ab. 1316. "The Bruce" of John Barbour, archdeacon of Aberd. 1896. deen, a narrative poem, containing more than thirteen thousand rhymed octosyllabic lines. It relates the adventures of the heroic King Robert, with a spirit and clearness in narrative, a dramatic vigour in the depicting of character, and an occasional breadth of reflective sentiment, which entitle this, our oldest genuine monument of the Teutonic language of Scotland, to be ranked as being really an excellent poem. If we were to compare it with the contemporary poetry of England, its place would be very high, Chaucer being set aside as unapproachable. Barbour must be pronounced much superior to Gower, and still more so to the anonymous writers of the very best of the metriçal romances.

With the romances, indeed, not with the metrical chronicles, the Bruce should perhaps be classed, in respect of the freedom with which it interweaves invented details into its web of historical facts. Yet the romantic license is used with much discretion. The outline of the events is faithful to the truth: the hero, though he is certainly a knight-errant rather than a leader of hosts, does not often exert the fabulous prowess which he displays on one occasion, when, single-handed, he defends a pass against three hundred wild men of Galloway; and the only introduction of supernatural agency is in the account of the siege of Berwick, where the poet briefly describes, as a miracle, the impunity with which the women and children carried up arrows and stones to the Scottish defenders of the ramparts. Indeed the work is wonderfully little tinged with those superstitions, which we have seen emerging so often in the poetry of the middle ages. The poet does, it is true, attribute the king's early calamities, not to his slaughter of Comyn, but to his having committed sacrilege by slaying his enemy at the altar; but his hints as to the popular sciences of astrology and necromancy indicate, at once, a characteristic cautiousness which might perhaps be regarded as national, and an enlightenment of opinion for which we should hardly have looked. The prevalent calmness of tone and sobriety of judgment give, by contrast, additional force to the animated

passages describing warfare and peril. Several of these are both boldly conceived, and executed with very great spirit. Such are the desperate combat in which Bruce lost the brooch of Lorn; and the adventure in which he baffles the blood-hound of the men of the isles, with the attempted assassination which is its sequel. Nor is the fierce love of warfare unrelieved by gentler touches, which occur both in the portraiture of characters, in the events chosen for record, and in the sentiments expressed by the poet. Sir Walter Scott, whose "Lord of the Isles" owes much to "The Bruce," and might profitably be compared with it, has not forgotten one of the finest of those passages; in which we are told how the king, pursued by a superior force, ordered his band to turn and face the enemy, rather than abandon to them a poor woman who had been seized with illness. There are likewise not a few pleasing fragments of landscape-painting: and one of these is made unusually picturesque by having, as its main feature, the mysterious signal-fires that were seen blazing on the Scottish shore, and tempted Bruce to a dangerous landing.

In respect of language we do not, in Wyntoun and Barbour, reach the point of a distinct separation between England and Scotland. If unessential peculiarities of spelling are disregarded, Barbour's work may be said to be composed in Northern English. Its style differs chiefly from that of Chaucer and his contemporaries, in being much more purely Saxon than theirs; the writer showing, indeed, no symptoms of that familiarity with French poetry, which caused so extensive an importation of foreign words into the literary diction of the south. It is not, however, to be forgotten, that the archdeacon seems to have had English inclinations: he travelled to Oxford for study after he had become a beneficed priest.

8. In passing to the fifteenth century, we do not discover any traces of a dialect distinctively Scottish in the earliest poem it presents. It is the King's Quair, (or Book,) in which the accomplished King James the First celebrated the lady whom he married. But the royal poet was educated in England, and probably wrote there; and his pleasing poem exhibits, in its allegories and personifications, and in its whole cast of thought, the influence exerted by his study of those English writers of the preceding age, whom he himself respectfully acknowledges as his

masters.

The development of the language of Scotland into a distin dialect, must, even then, have fairly begun. It went on rapid. afterwards; and it was attended by a great partiality to Chaucer and his contemporaries and followers, with a fondness still greater for their French models. In no long time there arose als

taste for Latin reading, which influenced the style of poetry yet more strongly.

None of the foreign influences is to be traced, (unless it may be in the use of Chaucer's heroic stanza,) in the "Wallace" of Henry the Minstrel, oftener called Blind Harry. This old poem was once much more popular in Scotland than the Bruce, and it was likely to be so, on account of the more picturesque character of its incidents, its strain of passionate fervour, and the wildness of fancy which inspires some of its parts. It is altogether, notwithstanding its formidable bulk, a work whose origin might naturally be attributed to the class of men to which its author is said to have belonged; the same class who, then and afterwards, were enriching the northern language of the island with our aneient ballads.

Towards the close of the century, and in the beginning of the next, Scottish poetry, now couched in a dialect decidedly peculiar, was cultivated by men of higher genius than any that had yet appeared in Great Britain since the dawn of civilization, the father of our poetical literature being alone excepted. One of

d. ab. 1500.

them was Robert Henryson, supposed to have been a monk or schoolmaster in Dunfermline. His most elaborate work was his "Testament of Faire Creseide," a continuation, excellently versified and finely poetical, of a piece of Chaucer's. This Scottish poem indeed is so exceedingly beautiful in many of its parts, so poetical in fancy, so rich in allegory, and often so touching in sentiment, that one cannot help regretting deeply the poet's unfortunate choice of a theme. Probably its unpleasant character is the reason why the work is so little known, even by those who are familiar with our early literature. At all events, Henryson is oftenest named for his beautiful pastoral of "Robin and Makyne," one of the gems of Percy's "Reliques."

More vigorous both in thought and fancy, though inferior in b. ab. 1474. skill of expression, was Gawain or Gavin Douglas, d. 1522. bishop of Dunkeld, famous alike as an active politician, a man of learning, and a poet. His "King Hart," and "Palace of Honour," are complex allegories, of the kind with which we have become acquainted through other specimens. His Translation of the Æneid, into heroic verse, is a very animated poem, not more unfaithful to the original than it might have been expected to be; and it is embellished with original prologues, of which some are energetically descriptive, and others actively critical. This was, it should be remembered, the earliest attempt made, in any part of our island, to render classical poetry into the living language of the country.

b. ab. 1465.

d. ab. 1520.

9. William Dunbar, a native of Lothian, was the best British poet of his age, and almost a great one. He appears to have been educated for the church, and to have spent some of his early years as a begging friar. Afterwards he became a dependant on the court of the dissolute prince who perished at Flodden. His poems exhibit a versatility of talent which has rarely been paralleled, and moral inconsistency which it is humiliating to contemplate. In his comic and familiar pieces there prevails such a grossness, both of language and sentiment, as destroys the effect of their remarkable force of humour: nor is ribaldry altogether wanting in those serious compositions, which are so admirable for their originality and affluence of imagination. Allegory is Dunbar's favourite field. It is the groundwork of his "Golden Terge," in which the target is Reason, a protection against the assaults of Love; and his "Thistle and Rose" commemorates, in a similar way, the king's marriage with an English princess. "The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins" is wonderfully striking, both for the boldness of the leading conception, and for the significant picturesqueness of several of the personifications. Unfortunately it would be almost impossible to describe, decorously, either the design of this remarkable poem, the imaginative originality which colours the serious passages, or the audacious flight of humorous malice with which, in the close, the Saxon vents the scorn he felt for his Celtic countrymen.

"In the poetry of Dunbar, we recognise the emanations of a mind adequate to splendid and varied exertion; a mind equally capable of soaring into the higher regions of fiction, and of descending into the humble walk of the familiar and ludicrous. He was endowed with a vigorous and well-regulated imagination; and to it was superadded that conformation of the intellectual faculties which constitutes the quality of good sense. In his allegorical poems we discover originality and even sublimity of invention; while those of a satirical kind present us with striking images of real life and manners. As a descriptive poet, he has received superlative praise. In the mechanism of poetry he evinces a wonderful degree of skill. He has employed a great variety of metres; and his versification, when opposed to that of his most eminent contemporaries, will appear highly ornamented and poetical."*

While Scotland, notwithstanding the troubles which marked almost uninterruptedly the reigns of the Jameses, was thus re

*Irving: Lives of the Scottish Poets.

deeming the poetical character of the fifteenth century from the discredit thrown on it by the feebleness of the art in England, her living tongue was, until very near the end of this period, used in versified compositions only. Scottish prose does not appear, in any literary shape, till the first decade of the sixteenth century and its earliest specimens were nothing more than translations.

Nor did Scottish learning take, in that age, more than its very first steps. The necessity of a systematic cultivation of philosophy and classical literature had, indeed, begun to be acknowledged. The university of St. Andrews was founded in the year 1411, and that of Glasgow in 1450. But hardly any immediate effect was produced except this; that the style of most of the poets, especially Douglas, was deformed by a fondness for words formed from the Latin, which were introduced in as great numbers as French terms had been by Chaucer and his followers.

The art of printing was not practised in Scotland till the very close of our period, when it was introduced in Edinburgh. The oldest of the extant books, which is a miscellaneous volume, chiefly filled with ballads and metrical romances, bears the date of 1508.

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