acknowledges, in very careful and explicit terms, both at the beginning and end of the insertion. We may give what he says in the latter place, as a short sample of his style :

This part last treated beforn,

Fra Davy the Brus our king wes born,
While his sister son Robert

The Second, our king, than called Stuert,
That nest him reigned successive,

His days had ended of his live,

Wit ye well, wes nought my dite ;3
Thereof I dare me well acquite.
Wha that it dited, nevertheless,
He showed him of mair cunnandness
Than me commendis1 his treatise,
But favour, wha" will it clearly prize.
This part wes written to me send;
And I, that thought for to mak end
Of that purpose I took on hand,
Saw it was well accordand

To my matere; I wes right glad ;
For I was in my travail sad;

I eked it here to this dite,

For to mak me some respite.

This is interesting as making it probable that poetical, or at least metrical, composition in the national dialect was common in Scotland at this early date.

Of all our poets of the early part of the fifteenth century the one of greatest eminence must be considered to be King James 1. of Scotland, even if he be only the author of The King's Quair (that is, the King's quire or book), his claim to which has scarcely been disputed. It is a serious poem, of nearly 1400 lines, arranged in seven-line stanzas; the style in great part allegorical; the subject, the love of the royal poet for the lady Joanna Beaufort, whom he eventually married, and whom he is said to have first beheld walking in the garden below from the window of his prison in the Round Tower of Windsor Castle. The poem was in all probability written during his detention in England, and previous to his marriage, which took place in

1 Till.

2 Next.

3 Writing.

4 He showed himself of more cunning (skill) than I who commend.

5 Without.

6 Whosoever.

7 Added.

February 1424, a few months before his return to his native country. In the concluding stanza James makes grateful mention of his

maisters dear

Gower and Chaucer, that on the steppes sate

Of rhetorick while they were livand here,
Superlative as poets laureate,

Of morality and eloquence ornate;

and he is evidently an imitator of the great father of English poetry. The poem too must be regarded as written in English rather than in Scotch, although the difference between the two dialects, as we have seen, was not so great at this early date as it afterwards became, and although James, who was in his eleventh year when he was carried away to England in 1405 by Henry IV., may not have altogether avoided the peculiarities of his native idiom. The Quair was first published from the only manuscript (one of the Selden Collection in the Bodleian Library), by Mr. W. Tytler at Edinburgh, in 1783; there have been several editions since. The following specimen is transcribed from the text given by Mr. George Chalmers, in his Poetic Remains of some of the Scottish Kings, now first collected, 8vo. Lon. 1824; though without adhering in all cases either to his spelling, his pointing, or his explanations :

Where as in ward full oft I would bewail

My deadly life, full of pain and penance,
Saying right thus, What have I guilt to fail1
My freedom in this world and my pleasance?
Sen2 every wight has thereof suffisance

That I behold, and I a creature
Put from all this, hard is mine aventure.3

The bird, the beast, the fish eke in the sea,
They live in freedom everich in his kind,

And I a man, and lacketh liberty!

What shall I sayn, what reason may I find,

That fortune should do so? Thus in my mind

1 What guilt have I (what have I been guilty of) so that I should want

(be deprived of).

2 Since.

3 Hap, lot, fate.

My folk I would argue; but all for nought;
Was none that might that on my paines wrought.2

Then would I say, Gif God me had devised

3

To live my life in thraldom thus and pine,
What was the cause that he more me comprised 3
Than other folk to live in such ruine?

.4

I suffer alone among the figures nine ;4

Ane woeful wretch, that to no wight may speed,5
And yet of every lives help has need!

The longe days and the nightes eke

I would bewail my fortune in this wise;
For which again' distress comfort to seek
My custom was on mornes for to rise,
Early as day; O happy exercise!
By thee came I to joy out of torment:-
But now to purpose of my first intent.

Bewailing in my chamber thus alone,
Despaired of all joy and remedy,
Fortirits of my thought and woe-begone,
And to the window gan I walk in hy9
To see the world and folk that went forby,10
As, for the time though I of mirthes food
Might have no more, to look it did me good.

Now was there made, fast by the Toures wall,
A garden fair, and in the corners set
Ane herber11 green, with wandes long and small
Railed about; and so with trees set,

Was all the place, and hawthorn hedges knet,12
That life was none walking there forby

That might within scarce any wight espy.

1 According to Chalmers this means, "I would argue with my attendantsthe Earl of Orkney and others of his train." We suspect the word folk to be a mistranscription-perhaps for fate.

2 There was no one that might do what had any effect in relieving my sufferings?—if the line be not corrupt. 3 Doomed, forced (compressed).

4 "Of all the nine numbers mine is the most unlucky."-Chalmers. 5 To no man may do service.

6 Living person.

7 Against.

8 Tired. The termination here is Scotch. The MS. appears to have been written in Scotland. Other printed editions have Fortired. 9 Haste.

10 Past? "Forby" in modern Scotch means besides.

11 Ellis says, "probably an arbour :"-Chalmers, "a garden plot set with plants and flowers-a grove with an arbour railed with trellis-work, and close set about with trees."

12 Knit.

13 Living person.

So thick the bewes1 and the leaves green

Beshaded all the alleys that there were,
And middes2 every herber might be scen
The sharpe, greene, sweete juniper,
Growing so fair with branches here and there,
That, as it seemed to a life without,
The bewes spread the herber all about.

And on the smale greene twistes sate

The little sweete nightingale, and sung
So loud and clear the hymnes consecrate

Of loves use, now soft now loud among,
That all the gardens and the walles rung
Right of their song and on the couple next 3
Of their sweet harmony; and lo the text:-

Worshippe, ye that lovers been, this May,

For of your bliss the kalends are begun,

And sing with us, Away, winter, away!

Come summer, come, the sweet season and sun;

Awake, for shame! that have your heavens won,1

And amorously lift up your heades all;

Hark Love, that list you to his mercy call.

The description of the lady whom he afterwards sees "walking under the Tower," at whose sudden apparition, "anon," he says,

-"astart5

The blood of all my body to my heart"

is exceedingly elaborate, but is too long to be quoted. Ellis has given the greater part of it in his Specimens.* Two other poems of considerable length, in a humorous style, have also been attributed to James I.--Peebles to the Play, and Christ's Kirk on the Green, both in the Scottish dialect; but they are more probably the productions of his equally gifted and equally unfortunate descendant James V. (slain at Flodden in 1513). Chalmers, however, assigns the former to James I. As for the two famous comic ballads of The Gaberlunyie Man, and the Jolly Beggar, which it has been usual among recent writers to speak 2 Amidst.

1 Boughs.

3 Not understood. Tytler thinks" couple" relates to the pairing of the birds; Ellis and Chalmers, that it is a musical term.

4 "Ye that have attained your highest bliss "-Tytler.

5 Started up.

* Vol. i. pp. 305–309.

of as by one or other of these kings, there seems to be no reasonable ground-not even that of tradition of any antiquity-for assigning them to either.

Chaucer, we have seen, appears to have been unknown to his contemporary Barbour; but after the time of James I. the Scottish poetry for more than a century bears evident traces of the imitation of the great English master. It was a consequence of the relative circumstances of the two countries, that, while the literature of Scotland, the poorer and ruder of the two, could exert no influence upon that of England, the literature of England could not fail powerfully to affect and modify that of its more backward neighbour. No English writer would think of studying or imitating Barbour; but every Scottish poet who arose after the fame of Chaucer had passed the border would seek, or, even if he did not seek, would still inevitably catch, some inspiration from that great example. If it could in any circumstances have happened that Chaucer should have remained unknown in Scotland, the singular fortunes of James I. were shaped as if on purpose to transfer the manner and spirit of his poetry into the literature of that country. From that time forward the native voice of the Scottish muse was mixed with this other foreign voice. One of the earliest Scottish poets after James I. is Robert Henryson, or Henderson, the author of the beautiful pastoral of Robin and Makyne, which is popularly known from having been printed by Bishop Percy in his Reliques. He has left us a continuation or supplement to Chaucer's Troilus and Creseide, which is commonly printed along with the works of that poet under the title of The Testament of Fair Creseide. All that is known of the era of Henryson is that he was alive and very old about the close of the fifteenth century. He may therefore probably have been born about the time that James I. returned from England. Henryson is also the author of a translation into English or Scottish verse of Æsop's Fables, of which there is a MS. in the Harleian Collection (No. 3865), and which was printed at Edinburgh in 8vo. in

*Vol. ii. pp. 73-78. It was first printed in Ramsay's Evergeen, 12mo. Edin. 1724. (Or see second edition, Glasgow, 1824.) It is also in Lord Hailes's Ancient Scottish Poems (from the Bannatyne MS.) 8vo. Edin. 1770. And an edition of this Poem, and of the Testament of Crescide, by the late George Chalmers, was printed for the Bannatyne Club, in 4to. at Edinburgh, in 1824.

VOL. I.

2 c