GUDE-COUNSALL. Luke what St. Paul writes unto Timothie,- I never red that, therefore reid it yoursell. A pardoner, with relics to sell, is also a figure of some prominence in the Satire of the Three Estaitis. He comes on the stage complaining that the sale of his goods is much interfered with by the circulation of the English New Testament; but proceeds to solicit purchases for some sufficiently remarkable wares : Heir is ane cord, baith gret and lang, Quha ever he be heiris this bell clink, Giff me ane ducat for till drink, He sall never gang to hell, Without he be of Beliall borne : Maisters, trow ye that this be scorne? Cum win this pardoun, cum. In spite of all obsoleteness of language and subject, the true spirit of comedy makes its presence felt here. Sir David Lindsay is a rude Scottish Aristophanes; but the genius for dramatic creation which budded in him never came to flower in the cold air of Northern Protestantism. Scotland has never had a dramatic literature, for we suppose nobody now believes in the frigid and unnatural trash of Home's Douglas. This is partly due to the fanaticism of the country; and partly to its poverty; but another element must be taken into account in these matters, -the almost constant want of literary attainments and literary sympathy among the modern Scottish clergy. Much as literature did for the Reformation in Scotland as elsewhere, the clergy have done astonishingly little to repay the debt. Yet among Scotch men of letters the memory of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount holds its own: Still is thy name in high account, The reforming war was also carried on in Scotland by satirical ballads. We should much like to quote one which the curious reader will find in Dr. Irving's excellent History of Scottish Poetry, and of which the refrain or "ower-word" is : Hay trix, trim goe trix under the greene-wode tree. But this ballad is too long,—and we may add that it is also too broad, for quotation here, even supposing that such ballads came, as they do not, within our present plan. That their sting and danger, as well as that of other satire, was felt by the orthodox, is proved by an order of the provincial council convoked by Archbishop Hamilton in 1549. The council directed every ordinary to make strict inquiry within his diocese, "whether any person had in his possession certain books of rhymes of vulgar songs, containing scandalous reflections on the clergy, together with other heretical matter;" and to read or keep them was an offence to be punished by Act of Parliament. But it was now too late to effect the object for which such Acts were passed; and twenty years afterwards, the Archbishop was hanged on a gibbet and embalmed in an epigram. The only Scot of that age entitled to figure in our list by the side of Lindsay was one who first made the literary genius of his country known to Europe, and who in modern times has been persistently and inexcusably neglected, so much so, that he lies, without even a tombstone to mark the spot, in the churchyard of the Greyfriars in Edinburgh. George Buchanan-poetarum sui seculi facile princeps, as a long list of scholars recognized him to be, from Scaliger to Ruddiman-was younger than Lindsay, but had reached his thirtieth year before the death of Erasmus. His youth in St. Andrews and in Paris was a period of hard study and hard struggling with poverty, after which he became tutor to a natural son of James V.-about 1534. Already-he was now twenty-eight-he had written a poem against the Franciscans; and a few years afterwards, James, having formed an ill opinion of their sincerity towards him in the matter of a certain rumoured conspiracy, requested Buchanan to compose a satire against the order. Buchanan knew his men, and hesitating between offending either them or the king, produced a brief and ambiguous composition. James was not satisfied with this, and demanded something sharp and pointed-acre et aculeatum. The result was the Franciscanus, one of the most vigorous Latin satires of the century. Soon after, Buchanan learned that his life was sought by Cardinal Beatoun, who had offered the king money for it. He was sentenced to exile and imprisoned, but escaped while his jailers were asleep, and got away to England and the Continent. This was in 1539. He remained abroad more than twenty years, leading a life of much variety. Suspicion of heresy drove him from Paris; the plague drove him from Bordeaux. He went away to Lisbon to teach the classics; but there, too, the fatal odour of heterodoxy clung to him. He was imprisoned in a monastery, where he spent his time on his immortal Latin version of the Psalms. Quitting the Tagus in a vessel that had put in there on her way to England from Crete, he landed in London, which he left for his favourite Paris. He was now for the next five years tutor to a son of Marshal Brissac, with whom he resided a good deal in Italy. He returned to Scotland about the time that Queen Mary did, in 1560; joined the party of the Regent Murray; was tutor to young James VI., and held other important appointments; and died in Edinburgh in 1582, in his seventy-seventh year. The most valuable books of Buchanan are his version of the Psalms, and his Rerum Scoticarum Historia; but his satires are very excellent, and must have helped to bring the men of the ancient system into a wholesome and desirable contempt. The Franciscanus holds the first place amongst them. It is a Juvenalian satire in sonorous hexameters of great swing and flow; for Buchanan was almost equally at home in every form of Latin composition, from the sweet ripple of elegiacs to the stormy roll of indignant heroics. He places himself in the position of one who is dissuading a friend from entering the Franciscans, and proceeds to lay bare their character and habits. They are recruited, he says, from those who have no means at home; or who have angry stepmothers, and severe fathers and masters; or who are lazy, and cold to all the attractions of the muses. The order to such is a harbour of refuge and of ignoble ease. Some look after the door, and some after the kitchen. One digs in the garden ; another is employed to trick widows. The duller sort are sent to dupe the rural vulgar; to give apples to the boys, and amulets to the girls, whose heads they fill with the most superstitious fancies. The dullest blockhead assumes the appearance of wisdom when he has become one of these friars, and learns to humbug the world; and in his old age may proceed to teach the art to young beginners. He will teach him how to make a judicious use of confession, and to plunder well those whose secret thoughts. and deeds have become his property; how to lure innocent virgins into sin; and how, if any one resolutely declines communication with the sect, to earwig his servants, and try to get up accusations against him,especially if his life should prove irreproachable, the accusation of heresy. A great deal more advice of the kind is given, and a story told of an adventure which had evidently befallen Buchanan himself on the Garonne. One of the brothers was travelling in company with a woman who fell into labour in the vessel; and he abandoned her to her fate, running away amidst the confusion caused by the event at the landing-place. Buchanan tells the story in the person of an old Franciscan; and, with admirable irony, makes him conclude by saying:-"Young and strong as I then was, I could hardly silence the murmurs of the people, often though I execrated the deed, and swore that the offender was some Lutheran lying hidden under the name of our holy sect!" We do not find in the satirical portions of Buchanan's writings the Erasmian vein of Sir David Lindsay, or the rollicking humour of Rabelais, nor even the intermediate kind of pleasantry, smacking of both, of the Epistola Obscurorum Virorum. His fun is grim; and his abuse hearty. He is of the Juvenalian and Swiftian school of satire; a good hard proud Scots gentleman, whose keen feeling for classical beauty has given him. elegance but not gentleness. There was nothing of what is now called "gushing" about George, any more than about those similar types of Scot, Smollett and Lockhart. He had much love for his own friends; much humour and feeling at bottom; but very little compassion for fools, rascals, or personal enemies. Many of his epigrams are bitter enough; and we shall transcribe a couple of them from a recent translation : ON THE MONKS OF ST. ANTONY. When living, thou, St. Antony, As swine-herd kept thy swine; The monks as stupid are as they, So much agrees 'tween herd and herd, If but thy monks, St. Antony, Had acorns for their food! ON PONTIFF PIUS. Heaven he had sold for money; earth he left in death as well; Buchanan the latest, is also the last of the satirists on whom we have undertaken to offer some criticisms in this paper. It has been seen that the Low Countries, Germany, France, and Scotland, each produced within the compass of about a century satirists whose names have become classical, and whose powers were exerted in the same direction. The exact value of their services to the cause of divine truth and human enlightenment cannot be estimated; but it was undoubtedly great. The friends of the cause valued them; its foes feared them. They were nearly all persecuted; they were all, without exception, we think, libelled. Two of them were, in ignorance however, grossly misrepresented by succeeding generations of their own friends and countrymen. Francis Rabelais was made the traditional hero of a score of foolish anecdotes, apocryphal, obscene, and profane. George Buchanan became, in the eyes of the Scottish peasantry, the king's fool of a past age; and chap-books, filled with the dirtiest stories about him, circulated by thousands among the cottages of his native land. The last historical fact is only amusing. But there were other conditions common to these men of great importance, which may be well commended to the attention of those who are inclined to underrate satirists generally, and to that of the ordinary comic writers of our own time. These satirists of the Reformation were all scholars and thinkers to a man not wits only, still less buffoons, but invariably among the bestread men, and the most vigorous manly intellects of their generation. Erasmus towered over the whole century; and by universal admission, Buchanan did more skilfully than any writer what every writer of the period was trying to do; while Hutten was recognized along the whole length of the Rhine as one of the most accomplished men in Germany; and Rabelais ranked from the first among the most learned men in France. What is equally worthy of notice, no solid charge has ever been proved against the characters of any of the satirists of the Reformation. Hutten was probably not the soberest man in Europe, but he was generous, and faithful, and brave, and true. Erasmus was loved by the best men then living; and Rabelais and Lindsay trusted by the chief personages of their respective kingdoms. As for the silly lies which were once disseminated against Buchanan by such writers as Father Garasse, they are no longer repeated even by Popish malignity. The lies and the liars have passed into a common obscurity. The study of such writers would seem, we may say in conclusion, to have a practical value, as well as a merely antiquarian interest. The last man who did any political work of European importance by the use of satire-Béranger-felt strongly on this subject. He had been often urged to come forward for the Academy, but always persistently declined; and he gave a remarkable explanation of his reasons for this decision. The chanson, he said, may be again needed as a political instrument; and I could not, as a chansonnier, set an example which might lead to its being prostituted by ambitious men to the service of power. The sentiment is noble; and it is instructive. Satire may again be necessary in politics and other fields; and if the reaction against modern knowledge and thought, which seems to be gaining ground in some quarters, should become really formidable to intellectual freedom, we may some of us be none the less useful for having studied the satirical masters of the great sixteenth century. |