“ Greater in manner than in matter, Montgomerie’s verse owes its charm to finish and grace rather than to vigour and imagination, affording rather a late reflection of the early glories of the century than the glow of a new inspiration; nevertheless it has remained constantly popular, a surprising number of its lines having become household words in the shape of proverbs; it claims the credit, along with Dunbar’s work, of furnishing models both to Allan Ramsay and to Burns; and, beyond all its Scottish contemporaries, it possesses intrinsic qualities which assure it an enduring fame. ”

“ In Montgomerie there appears a curious reflection, though in fainter colours, of the fate and character of Dunbar. Like the great makar of James the Fourth’s time, he was the scion of a noble house. In his verse appear the same eager efforts to secure favour at Court, the same bitterness at disappointment, and the [241] same succeeding rancour against rivals and enemies. Here is the same oppression under insufficient means, and the same eager and thirsty heart continually mocked by “wicked weirds” and “thrauard fates.” ”

“ John Knox had returned to Scotland, the assassins of Beaton had received pardon, and the leaders of the new church which was to rise out of the ashes of the old had assumed the name of “The Congregation.”
Such was the consistent career of the poet who, in the words of Dryden, “lashed vice into reformation” in Scotland. In high position, with everything to lose and nothing to gain by the part he took, he must be adjudged entire disinterestedness in his efforts. ”

“ Nothing, perhaps, shows one side of the character of James—his decision, daring, and resolute energy—better than the transaction of the night in May, 1528, when, slipping the Douglas leash at Falkland, he galloped through the defiles of the Ochils with Jockie Hart, and appeared at once as unquestioned king among his nobles at Stirling. As energetic, however, and almost as dramatic were the young monarch’s measures for restoring order in his disordered realm. ”

“ In face of these adverse influences—the decay of the language, religious disfavour, and the overturn of the ancient social system—a brilliant poetic era was not to be looked for in Scotland in the sixteenth century. The marvel is that so much was produced that had vigour, humour, and tenderness. Justice has hardly yet been done to a period which, opening with the iconoclast thunders of Sir David Lyndsay, included the compositions of the gallant James V., of “the Scottish Anacreon” Alexander Scot, and of the author of “The Cherrie and the Slae.” ”

“ Already in James the Fourth’s time the war-horns of the Reformation sounded on the Continent had made their echoes heard in Scotland; and during the reign of his successor these were taken up and resounded at home with tremendous effect by the iconoclast trio, Lyndsay, Buchanan, and Knox. The new era was to be one of strife and tempest, in which the root of poesy was little likely to bring to perfection its rarest blossoms.
Goethe has said that the Reformation cost Europe three centuries’ growth of civilization. ”

“ Merry Ross, “there is nothing more [27] delightful in picturesque details than the description of the jousts between Meldrum and the English knight Talbart on the plains of Picardy.”
It has been the habit to regard Lyndsay in the character rather of a reformer than of a poet, and it cannot be doubted that his own purpose was to edify rather than to delight. But the merit of a satirist consists, not in his display of the more delicate sort of poetic charm, but in the brilliance and keenness of his satire. No critic can aver that in these qualities Lyndsay was lacking. ”

“ Not yet thirty-one years of age at his death, and notwithstanding the corrupting influences to which in early youth he had been purposely exposed by the Douglases, James had shown himself a noble and active prince. Had he gone with the tide and consented to gratify his courtiers with the plunder of the monasteries, like Henry VIII., his reign might have been less troubled and his memory less maligned by interested historians. He has been chiefly accused of an unrelenting severity towards members of the house of Douglas, and of cruelty in assenting to the death of Lady Glammis. ”

“ But it is too frequently forgotten that the era of Scotland’s highest achievement in arms and in poetry was not the era of Knox and Buchanan, but the era of Bishop Lamberton, Archdeacon Barbour, [1] and the preaching friar Dunbar. Against the unquestionable benefits of the Reformation in Scotland must be set [4] the fact that it not only broke the stem of the existing feudal civilization, but itself, intent only upon things of a future life, and modelled overmuch upon Judaic ideals, gave scant encouragement to the carnal arts of this world. ”

“ As gold, thocht gold of grittar pryss.
But, apart from its poetic fascination, a peculiar interest attaches to the work of the man who struck the first distinctly modern note in Scottish poetry. Breaking away from the conventional forms of the old makars, Alexander Scot wrote in a direct, natural fashion, and but for their rich quaintness of expression and their antique language, many of his pieces might almost be the work of a poet of the nineteenth century. ”

“ It is in his satiric and moral pieces that Maitland appears at his best. These, as in the case of Lyndsay, deal with a wide range of subjects, from the vanities of ladies’ dress to the venality of courtiers and the corruptions of church and state. Much of his satire, it is true, owes it chief interest to connection with events of his own age; but elsewhere he proves himself a not unworthy inheritor of the mantle of the Lyon King, his best pieces containing touches closely applicable to the human nature of all time. ”

“ Had James IV. lived he would doubtless have continued, firm-handed as he was, to hold in check both churchmen and nobles, and the reforms which were in the air might have taken effect like leaven, and not, as they did, like gunpowder. They might have been grafted upon the existing stem, as in England, instead of overturning it. But during the long minority of James V. the abuses of the feudal system, political and ecclesiastical, attained too rank a growth to be pruned by the hand of that king when he came of age, notwithstanding his energy and good intentions. ”

“ SIR RICHARD MAITLAND.
Many of the finest flowers of Scottish poetry previous to the middle of the sixteenth century owe their preservation to the taste and patience of two curiously contrasted collectors. One of the quaintest stories of Scottish literature is that narrating how, during time of pestilence in 1568, George Bannatyne, a young man of twenty-three, occupied the leisure of his enforced retirement with transcribing, page after page, the best works of the national makars. Little further is known of the transcriber except that he became a burgess of some substance in Edinburgh ”

“ In allegoric method and in form of verse it follows the fashion of its day, and it shares that fashion’s faults; but, these drawbacks apart, it is marked by great skill and smoothness of versification, by no small descriptive charm, and by a certain happy vividness of imagery which again and again surprises and delights the reader. One can almost feel the breath of
Notus brim, the wind meridiane,
With wingis donk, and pennis full of rane;
and a seascape rises instantly before the eye at mention of the
Carvell ticht, fast tending throw the se. ”

“ He remained popular for more than two centuries because he sympathised with the sorrows of the people and satirized the abuse of power by the great. In this respect he was not excelled even by his great successor, Robert Burns. For the reader of the present day the interest of Lyndsay, apart from the broad light which he throws upon the life and manners of his time, lies in his shrewd common-sense, his irresistible humour, vivacity, and dramatic power, with the consciousness that behind these [28] burns a soul of absolute honesty. ”

“ This dishonour before his people, followed immediately by the disgraceful rout of a Scottish army at Solway Moss, broke the gallant young monarch’s heart. To add to his sorrows his two infant sons had died within a short time of each other. Upon hearing of the destruction of his troops he shut himself up in the palace of Falkland, where, overwhelmed with grief and despair, he sank under a burning fever. One hope still sustained him: the birth of an heir to the throne was hourly expected. On the 7th of December news arrived that the queen had been safely delivered. ”

“ Full of sage observation and shrewd worldly wisdom, they throw a light, [194] in nearly every line, upon the life and manners of that day. Mourning the rampant oppression and strife of the nobles, and the sorrows and follies of the nation, his verse breathes the inner sadness of Queen Mary’s time. It was his fate to live through the intestine dissensions of three successive minorities, as well as through the great struggle of the Reformation in Scotland, and it is no marvel therefore that he again and again repeats the prayer, “God give the lordis grace till aggrie!” ”

“ Amid the moroseness and ecclesiastic strife which shadowed those closing years while James the Sixth still ruled at Holyrood, this voice still sang sweetly of love and laughter, of dewy nights and the lark’s morning song.
Alexander Montgomerie was a younger son of Montgomerie of Hazelhead, in Ayrshire, a scion of the noble house of Eglinton. The date of his birth remains uncertain; beyond that it was, as he himself says, “on Eister day at morne;” but he is believed to have first seen the light at Hazelhead Castle about 1545. ”

“ His time, besides, fell at a crisis in Scottish history—the meeting of the counter currents of the old order and the new in the Reformation. Whatever the causes, the fact remains that from his birth at Linlithgow on 10th April, 1512, till his death at Falkland on 14th [142] December, 1542, the career of James V. presents a continuous series of personal episodes as dramatic as anything on the historic stage. Dating his reign from the most tragic disaster in Scottish history, he was crowned King of Scotland before he could speak, a month after his father’s death on the battlefield. ”

“ An ingenious argument has been adduced from the use, or rather misuse of archery in “Christis Kirk.” [751] James I., it appears, upon his return from captivity, made a law compelling the constant practice of the bow; and it has been suggested that that king, wishing to fortify the statutes of law by the aid of ridicule, wrote the poem as a satire upon the clumsiness of the Scottish peasantry in the use of the [154] weapon. The same critics aver further that archery had become obsolete in the time of James V., hagbut and arquebus having taken its place. ”

“ Patriotism, the virtue which more than any other has from century to century made the renown [23] of Scotland, must be acknowledged as his chief motive. Of his “Dreme” one writer has said, “We almost doubt if there is to be found anywhere except in the old Hebrew prophets a purer or more earnest breathing of the patriotic spirit.” His attack, it is true, was directed, not against the doctrines, but merely against the abuses of the church, a fact which sufficiently accounts for his freedom from persecution. ”

“ If evidence of power in other fields be demanded, there are, according to the estimate of Professor Nichol, passages in “The Dreme,” “Squyer Meldrum,” and “The Monarche,” “especially in the descriptions of the morning and evening voices of the birds, which, for harmony of versification and grace of imagery, may be safely laid alongside of any corresponding to them in the works of his predecessors.” But it is as a satiric poet that he must chiefly be appraised, and in this character he stands the greatest that Scotland has produced. ”

“ The new makar of 1530, having gained the ear of the court, not only wrote poems which, whether they excelled those of his rivals or not, have at least outlived most of them, but produced works in prose regarding which a critic of the first rank has said, “No better specimen of the middle period (of the Scottish language) in its classical purity exists.” [579]
Some obscurity has been cast upon the life of this scholar and poet by confusing him with an eminent contemporary of the same name, Sir John Bellenden of Auchinoul. ”

“ It is a gratifying sign of the interest still taken in our early poetry that an attempt is made in so praiseworthy a form as this to attract a wider circle of readers to their study.... Everyone who has the best interests of literature at heart will wish them success.—Scotsman.
Everyone must give a hearty welcome to this new venture to bring the best portions of Scottish Poetry within the reach of all. ”