No More Learning

From 1555 to 1559, with the exception of a visit to Scotland
during part of the years 1555 and 1556, Knox made his home in
Geneva, where he acted, for a time, as co-pastor to a congregation
of English exiles, more in harmony with his own opinions than
that of Frankfort. His passionate desire, however, was to preach
his
gospel in England and Scotland, but this desire he saw thwarted
by the two female rulers who now governed these countries. It
was out of the indignation of his baffled hopes, therefore, that,
in 1558, he published his First Blast of the Trumpet against the
Monstruous Regiment of Women, which of all his works had the
widest notoriety in his own day. From the classical writers, the


## p. 145 (#167) ############################################

John Knox.
Pamphlets
145
Roman law, the Bible and the Fathers, he supports the argument
for which he vehemently contends—that 'to promote a Woman to
beare rule, superioritie, dominion, or empire above any Realme,
Nation or Citie is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a
thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance. '
In his main contention, Knox was at one with the most influential
writers of the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin among others, but,
even by divines of his own way of thinking, his pamphlet was
generally regarded as a hasty and ill-considered performance. In
1559, it was answered by John Aylmer, one of the Marian exiles,
subsequently bishop of London, in his Harborowe for Faithfull
and Trewe Subjectes agaynst the late blowne Blaste concerning the
Government of Women, in which the most effective point made is
that, as a limited monarchy, England is specially guarded from
the drawbacks incident to female sovereignty. But the course of
public events proved to be the most stringent commentary on the
contention of the Blast. At the close of the very year of its
publication Mary Tudor died and the protestant Elizabeth suc-
ceeded to the throne of Englandan event which Knox was bound
to recognise as the happiest dispensation for the welfare of his
own cause.
While still in Geneva, Knox produced another work, of less
resounding notoriety than the Blast, but a more solid and careful
performance. This was his Answer to a great Nomber of
blasphemous cavillations written by an Anabaptist and adver-
sarie to God's eternal Predestination. Like all his more important
works, it was prompted by the circumstances of the moment. The
dogma of predestination was the foundation of the theological
system of Calvin, to whom Knox looked as his spiritual father, but
the doctrine had been impugned by many, and notably by Sebastian
Castalio, who had been expelled from Geneva for the general
heterodoxy of his opinions. From the protestants in England,
also, there came a request to their brethren in Geneva that they
would prepare a reply to a book which had recently been written
against the same dogma, and to Knox was assigned the task. The
result was his lengthy treatise on predestination which fills one
volume of the six that comprise his published works. It is
Knox's most elaborate effort in constructive theology, but,
strenuous and dexterous though he is in meeting the arguments
of his adversary, he possessed neither the self-control nor the
systematising genius which made his master, Calvin, the law-
giver of reformed doctrine. It is to Calvin's Institutes of the
2
L. L. III.
CH. VII.
10


## p. 146 (#168) ############################################

146 Reformation and Renascence in Scotland
Christian Religion, and not to Knox's treatise, that the followers
of both must have recourse for the magistral statement of the
constitutive dogma of their theological system.
The triumph of the reforming party in Scotland in 1559 at
length restored Knox to his native country, where his presence
was to be the dominating fact in the political and religious
situation, and where he was to produce the work which is the
great literary monument of the time. As the immediate result of
the victory of protestantism, appeared the First Book of Discipline,
of which Knox was not, indeed, the sole author, but which bears
his imprint on every page, and is the brief summary of his ideals
in religion and education. Here, as directly connected with the
literary history of Scotland, we are only concerned with the scheme
of national instruction which the book sets forth with detailed
precision. In every parish there was to be a school and in
every important town a college, from which the aptest scholars
were to be sent to the three universities-attendance in all three
grades being exacted by state and church. The poverty of the
country and protracted civil commotions prevented the scheme
from being realised; but an ideal had been set forth which never
passed out of sight, and, during successive centuries, the parish
schools of Scotland were the nursing homes of her most vigorous
intellectual life.
Like all his other works, Knox's Historie of the reformatioun
in Scotland was suggested by an immediate occasion and was
written to serve a special purpose. Its express aim was to justify
the proceedings of the protestant leaders who had been the chief
instruments in overthrowing the ancient religion, and it was at
their desire that he undertook the task. His book, therefore, is
essentially that of an apologist and not of a historian; and he
makes no disguise of the fact. That right and justice were all on
one side and that those who opposed the reformation were blinded
either by folly or iniquity, is his unflinching contention from the
first sentence to the last. So transparent is this assumption, how-
ever, that it hardly misleads the reader; and through what he
may consider the perversion of characters and events he cannot
fail to discern their salient and essential traits. Thus, in the most
remarkable parts of Knox's book, his interviews with queen Mary,
the weak points in his own cause and in his own personal character
are as manifest as those of his adversary. The History consists of
five books, the last of which, however, is so inferior in vigour to
the others that its materials must have been put together by


## p. 147 (#169) ############################################

Historie of the reformatioun in Scotland 147
another hand. It is in the first book, which traces the beginning
and progress of the reformation in Scotland, that Knox displays
his most striking gifts as a writer—such passages as those describ-
ing the rout of Solway Moss, the mission and death of George
Wishart and the battle of Pinkie being the nearest anticipation of
Carlyle to be found in English literature. In the second and
third books, we have one of the earliest examples of an appeal to
historical documents as vouchers for the truth of the narrative :
fully three-fourths of these books consisting of papers supplied by
the leaders of the reformation in Scotland and England. But it
is the fourth book that has made the most vivid impression on
the national memory, and may be said to have created the preva-
lent conception of the Scottish reformation. · The theme of this
book is the return of Mary to Scotland, and the compromise that
followed between her and the reforming leaders. Here we have
the reports of the dramatic interviews between Mary and Knox,
and of his fulminations from the pulpit in the church of St Giles,
and here, also, those characterisations of Mary and other leading
personages which are written for all time. What Sainte-Beuve
said of the Memoirs of Saint-Simon may be said with even greater
truth of Knox's History: the periods before and after that which
he describes are dim and obscure by comparison. And it is a
further tribute to the literary interest and importance of the book,
that it is the first original work in prose which Scotland had yet
produced. There had been translations and compilations in prose,
but there had not, as yet, been any work which bore the stamp of
individual genius and which might serve as a model for Knox's
undertaking. In this fact, and in his long residence in England and
association with Englishmen abroad, we have the explanation of
the diction—the anglicised Scots—which was made a reproach to
a
him by his Catholic adversaries.
Knox's History is the chief literary monument of the Scottish
reformation ; but to the same period belong a number of works,
more or less of a historical character, which prove that prose had
now become an accredited vehicle of expression as well as verse.
Next in literary quality to the work of Knox is The Historie and
Cronicles of Scotland by Robert Lindesay of Pitscottie-one
of the few productions of the time which can be read with
interest at the present day. Lindesay was an ardent protestant,
and, in the parts of his History where he deals with the
change of the national religion, he is a thoroughgoing partisan.
With religion, however, he is not primarily concerned, and his aim
1042


## p. 148 (#170) ############################################

148 Reformation and Renascence in Scotland
is not controversial like that of Knox. What mainly interested
him in the past were picturesque episodes illustrating the manners
of the times and the characters of the leading actors; and it is to
him that we owe some of the most lively pictures in the national
history. As his easy credulity as well as the structure of his book
shows, Lindesay had no very severe criterion of historic accuracy.
His account of the reign of James II (1436—60), with which his
History begins, is merely a translation of Hector Boece's Latin
History of Scotland—a work of inventive imagination in which
the wildest fables are recorded as ascertained facts. From 1542
onwards, he drew upon his own observation or on the testimony of
eye-witnesses ; but it is precisely in this portion of his work that
he exhibits in least degree that gift of vivid narrative which made
him the delight of Sir Walter Scott as the nearest approach to a
Scottish Froissart.
Of a different order is the work of Sir James Melville of
Halbill, who, first as page to queen Mary and, afterwards, as
her ambassador, played a subordinate part in the transactions
of his time. His Memoirs, in which he records his own
observations of what he had seen and heard in the course of
his public life, still retain their value as one of the historical
sources for the period. Though a protestant in religion, he
possessed the confidence of Mary; and his sympathies are with
her and not with her rival, Elizabeth. Melville's point of view
is that of the courtier and the diplomatist, and in his decorous
and sober pages there is little indication of the seething
passions of the time. In the Memorials of Transactions in
Scotland (1569–73) of Richard Bannatyne, Knox's secretary,
we have another example of the stimulus given to historical
narrative by the events of the reformation. In the form of
a diary, Bannatyne records the events that he saw passing
before his eyes in those momentous years when the victory of
protestantism was definitely assured by the surrender of Edinburgh
Castle by the last champions of Mary. But the most memorable
passages in the book are those which record the last days of his
master, from whose hand there are some entries written in the
most vigorous style of his History. Another example of the general
interest in contemporary events is the Diary of Mr James Meb-
ville, Minister of Kilrenny in Fife (1566—1601). Of the nature
of an autobiography rather than of a diary, this is one of the most
delightful books of the kind in the language. In the author him-
self, we have the most attractive type of the Presbyterian pastor,


## p. 149 (#171) ############################################

Historians of the Period. Political Ballads 149
and his account of his home life and of his education at school and
university is of high value as a picture of the life of the time. As
a specimen of the Scottish language of the period, and as one
of the best known passages in early Scottish literature, his descrip-
tion of Knox preaching at St Andrews in his last days may hardly
be passed over:
I saw him everie day go hulie and fear (slowly and warily) with a furring
of martricks (martens) about his neck, a staff in the an hand, and guid godly
Richart Ballanden (Bannatyne] his servand, holdin upe the other oxter (arm-
pit) from the Abbaye to the paroche Kirk, and be the said Richart and
another servent lifted upe to the pulpit, whar he behovit to lean at his first
entrie; bot or he haid done with his sermont he was sa active and vigorus,
that he was lyk to ding that pulpit in blads (break the pulpit in pieces) and
Alie out of it.
A few other works, also of the nature of annals, though not
attaining to the dignity of literature, may be noted as illustrating
the interest in history which had been mainly occasioned by the
revolutionary events of the period. The Diurnal of remarkable
Occurents, a work by different hands, notes events from the time
of James V till the year 1575; the period from 1566 to 1596 is
dealt with in The Historie and Life of James the Seat, briefly
continued till 1617; and, further, we have the Memoirs of the
Affairs of Scotland (1577—1603) by David Moysie, and the Diary
of Robert Birrel (1532–1605).
The cultivation of prose was the most important literary result
of the reformation, but it did not check the tendency to versify-
ing which had been assiduously practised throughout the reigns
of the Jameses. In verse, however, there was produced no work
comparable to Knox's History in. prose. However we may explain
the fact, from the reformation dates a period of barrenness in
imaginative literature, similar to that which in England followed
the death of Chaucer, and it lasted to the poetic revival in the
beginning of the eighteenth century. With few exceptions, the
verse written during the reformation struggle was prompted by
the occasion of the hour-its principal themes being the sensational
events on which the destinies of the nation appeared to hang,
Printed in black letter on one side of a leaf of paper, ballads of
this character issued in a constant stream from the press of Robert
Lekprevik, the Edinburgh printer. Almost all of them were
written by supporters of the reformation, and are mainly coarse
and virulent attacks on Mary and such conspicuous persons as
were known to be her friends.
The principal authors to whom the ballads have been ascribed
are Robert Sempill, Sir John Maitland of Thirlstane, the Rev.


## p. 150 (#172) ############################################

150 Reformation and Renascence in Scotland
John Davidson and Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange. Of Sempill,
the most prolific writer of his class, little is known beyond
the fact that he was an ardent supporter of the reformation
and an uncompromising enemy of queen Mary, and that he
lived in the thick of the sensational events of his time. His two
best pieces are the Sege of the Castel of Edinburgh and The
Legend of a Lymaris Lyfe, the coarse vigour of which sufficiently
explains his temporary popularity; but in none of his work does
Sempill rise to the dignity of poetic satire which ensures per-
manent literary interest. Sir John Maitland-better known in
political than in literary history as the framer of the act of 1592
which has been called the Magna Charta of the Church of Scotland
-strikes a higher note than Sempill. In the three poems that
have been attributed to him, Ane Admonition to my Lord
Regentis Grace, Ane Schort Invectyve aganis the Delyverance
of the Erle of Northumberland, and Aganis Sklanderous Tungis,
there is a restraint, a good sense and dignity, which became one
who filled successively the offices of a senator of the College of
Justice, of secretary of state and of lord high chancellor of
Scotland. To Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange only one piece
is assigned-Ane Ballat of the Captane of the Castell—that is,
of Edinburgh, the last stronghold held for queen Mary, of
which Kirkcaldy himself was the captain. Of little poetic
merit, this ballad has at least the distinction of being one of the
few in which loyalty to Mary is expressed with chivalrous and
heartfelt devotion-a devotion which he expiated with his life on
the capture of the castle in 1573. The reformation in Scotland
had no more strenuous adherent than the Rev. John Davidson,
and, as he lived till 1603, his uncompromising opinions brought
him into frequent trouble with James VI in his policy of suppress-
ing presbyterianism and introducing episcopacy. A personal friend
and admiring disciple of Knox, Davidson has extolled his virtues
and, at the same time, sketched the main events of his career in
Ane Brief Commendation of Uprichtness-a valuable document
for Knox's biographers. To the eulogy of Knox is also devoted
a second of the three poems known to be the work of Davidson-
Ane Schort Discurs of the Estaitis quha hes caus to deploir the
Deith of this excellent Servand of God, the closing lines of which
may be quoted as a specimen of the general level of his style:
Lyke as himself is unto gloir,
So sall all ages ay recyte
Johne Knoxis Name with greit decoir.


## p. 151 (#173) ############################################

Roman Catholic Writers. John Major 151
The writers who have been mentioned all belonged to the
reforming party, but, throughout the whole period, the ancient
church had also its representatives in literature, one of whom, at
least, had a European reputation in his own day. This was John
,
Mair or Major, who has been called 'the last of the schoolmen,'
and who is the one eminent thinker whom we can with certainty
say that Scotland gave to scholasticism. Born in Haddington-
shire in 1479, and dying in 1549 or 1550, Major lived to see the
beginnings of the reformation in Scotland, but, though in many
respects a liberal thinker both in religion and politics, he continued
to the end a steady adherent of the communion in which he was
a
reared. After a year's study (1493) at the university of Cambridge,
Major passed to the university of Paris, where, till 1518, with the
exception of a brief visit to Scotland, he was successively student,
regent in arts, and doctor in theology. From 1518 to 1525, he
lectured on logic and theology, first in the university of Glasgow
and afterwards in the university of St Andrews, where he had
George Buchanan as one of his pupils. Between 1525 and 1531,
he was again in Paris, where he was now regarded by all the
learned world as the most distinguished champion of medievalism
in its opposition to the new studies. He had attained this repu-
tation through the long series of his publications, begun in 1503,
of which the most notable was his Commentary on the Four
Books of the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1509). In all these
works, Major is the schoolman pure and simple; the subjects he
treats, his manner of handling them, are those of the medieval
logician when scholasticism had become an exhausted movement.
For the men of the new order, therefore, Major was an obscu-
rantist against whom ridicule was the only appropriate weapon.
Melanchthon selected him as the special object of attack in his
reply to the condemnation of Luther by the Sorbonne. 'I have
seen John Major's Commentaries on Peter Lombard,' he writes;
‘he is now, I am told, the prince of the Paris divines. Good
heavens! What wagon-loads of trifling. . . . If he is a specimen of
the Parisian, no wonder they have so little stomach for Luther. '
A shaft was aimed at Major by a still greater hand; in the
wonderful library of St Victor in Paris, Pantagruel found a book
entitled The Art of Making Puddings by John Major. Despite
the mockery of the humanists, however, there are ideas and
suggestions to be found in his voluminous disquisitions which
prove that he was a shrewd and independent thinker when he
addressed himself to practical questions. No reformer saw more


## p. 152 (#174) ############################################

152 Reformation and Renascence in Scotland
clearly or denounced more stringently the corruptions and abuses
of the church as it existed in Scotland; he held as liberal opinions
as his pupil Buchanan regarding the relations of rulers and
subjects; and a suggestion which he threw out as to the most
effective method of dealing with mendicancy was adopted with
fruitful results in Germany and the Low Countries. But his good
sense and independent judgment are best exemplified in his one
book which is not a scholastic treatise—his Historia Majoris
Britanniae tam Angliae quam Scotiae. The Latin in which the
History is written shows no trace of the influence of the revival
of letters; it is the Latin of the schoolmen, impure, inharmonious
and difficult. On the other hand, Major as a historian stands on
a far higher level than that of the medieval chronicler. His work
bears no evidence of great research, but he carefully selects the
significant facts that were accessible to him, and judges men and
events, if not with philosophic grasp, yet with a genial shrewdness
which gives piquancy to his narrative. In six books he relates the
history of the two countries from the earliest times till the reigns
of Henry VII and James IV. What is noteworthy in his narrative
is his rejection of the legendary origins of Scotland which had
been invented to rebut the English claims of paramountcy, and
which continued to be retailed by Scottish historians into the
eighteenth century. But the most signal illustration of Major's
insight and originality is his attitude regarding the political
relations of the two kingdoms whose histories he relates. Almost
alone among his countrymen, and at a period when the hereditary
animosities of England and Scotland were never more intense, he
counselled political union as the natural consummation of their
respective destinies and in the best interest of both peoples.
One of the most notable specimens of the vernacular prose of
the period is the singular production entitled The Complaynt of
Scotland, the anonymous author of which was an adherent of the
ancient church, and an ardent opponent of the English alliance.
Primarily a political pamphlet, it was prompted by the miseries of
the country that followed the defeat of the Scots at Pinkie by the
duke of Somerset in 1547; and the object of its author is to point
out to his countrymen the various evils to which their misfortunes
were due. Till within recent years, the Complaynt was regarded
as an original work, but it is now known to be, in great part, an
adaptation of Le Quadrilogue Invectif of Alain Chartier (1422).
The object of Chartier's work was to encourage his countrymen
in their effort to expel the English, and, as the same situation now
.


## p. 153 (#175) ############################################

153
The Complaynt of Scotland
existed in Scotland, the author of the Complaynt found material
in Chartier ready to his hand. After an introduction, consisting
of an epistle to queen Mary and an epistle to the reader, the book
opens with a succession of chapters (the first mainly a translation
of Chartier), in which the author discourses on such themes as the
‘mutations of monarches,' the wrath of God against wicked
peoples, and the approaching end of the world-all with more or
less direct bearing on the miseries of Scotland. In chapter VI,
we have what the author calls 'ane monologue recreative,' in
which, with curious irrelevancy, a shepherd is made to expound
the Ptolemaic system. Then follows what is to be considered the
main portion of the book-the vision of Dame Scotia and her
indictment of the iniquities of nobles, clergy and commons, which
have pro ced the existing miseries of their country. Here, again,
the author is indebted to Chartier, from whom he has appropriated
the conception of the vision, besides certain portions of his text.
Such is the general plan of this fantastic production, which may
have been drawn from other sources not yet discovered. Regarded
merely as a specimen of early Scottish prose, however, the book
has an interest of its own. The author himself assures us that he
uses the domestic scottis language'-a statement which he
modifies by the further remark that he found it necessary 'til myxt
oure langage vitht part of termis dreuyn [derived] fra Lateen. '
Another source of interest in the book is the multitude of curious
details regarding the life of the time which are not to be found
elsewhere. Of its author nothing is known, though he has been
variously identified with Sir James Inglis, abbot of Cambuskenneth,
Sir James Inglis, abbot of Culross, Sir David Lyndsay and one of
the three Wedderburns. From the book itself, we gather that he
was a Catholic and an enemy of England; and the recent discovery
that he had read a manuscript of Octavien St Gelais, bishop of
Angoulême, suggests that he may have been in the suite of queen
Mary in France, and strengthens the conjecture that the work was
printed in Paris in 1548 or 1549.
A notable volume was archbishop Hamilton's Catechism
(1552), so called because it was issued by his authority after
receiving the sanction of a provincial council. Written in the
purest Scots of the time, the Catechism presents the fundamental
Catholic doctrines in the simplest and most attractive form,
though in the tumultuous period that followed its publication
it had little influence in turthering the cause of its promoters.
The most eminent defender of the old church was Quintin


## p. 154 (#176) ############################################

154 Reformation and Renascence in Scotland
!
Kennedy, a son of the second earl of Cassillis, who, in 1558,
published The Compendius Tractive, which stated the case
against protestantism with such persuasiveness and ability that,
by the admission of an opponent, it perceptibly affected the
progress of the new opinions. Better known than his Tractive,
however, is the Ressoning between him and Knox: the record of
an oral controversy that took place at May bole in 1562, and lasted
for three days.
A larger amount of work was produced by Ninian Winzet,
another Catholic controversialist, who, in his Certain Tractatis
for Reformatioun of Doctryne and Manneris (1562) frankly
admitted the corruptions of the Catholic church in Scotland,
but contended that they afforded no rational ground for changing
the national religion. It is noteworthy in Winzet and other
Roman Catholic writers of the time that they claimed to be
the upholders of the national tradition not only in religion but in
policy. In the alliance with England, but for whose intervention
the reformation in Scotland would not have been accomplished,
they saw the ruin of their country; and all things English were
the objects of their special detestation. For this reason it was
that they resented the intrusion of English words into the Scottish
vocabulary, and regarded it as a patriotic duty to write in what
they considered the purest Scots. In a well known sentence,
Winzet caustically upbraids Knox (who, in point of fact, wrote for
England as well as for Scotland) for his use of English modes of
expression. 'Gif you,' he writes, “throw curiositie of novations
has forget our auld plane Scottis quhilk your mother lerit you :
in tymes cuming I sall write to you my mynd in Latin ; for I am
not acquynted with your Southeroun. '
The highest place among the Catholic writers of the period un-
doubtedly belongs to John Leslie, bishop of Ross, the friend, adviser
and most distinguished champion of Mary, whom he attended during
her imprisonment in England. Like many others of his Scottish
contemporaries, Leslie chose history as his special province, and,
like all the historians and chroniclers who have already been
mentioned, he chose as his theme the history of his own country.
His first work, written during his residence in England, took up
the national history from the death of James I, where Hector
Boece had stopped, and continued it to the year 1561. This
fragment, composed in the vernacular, was followed up by a more
ambitious performance in Latin (De Origine, Moribus et Rebus
Scotorum), published at Rome in 1578, in which he narrated the


## p. 155 (#177) ############################################

Hector Boece
155
a
national history from its origins. In 1596, this was translated into
Scots by Father James Dalrymple, a Scottish monk at Ratisbon,
but the manuscript was not published till 1888. The first seven
books of Leslie's Latin history are mainly an epitome of Hector
Boece, and he is as credulous as Boece himself regarding freaks of
nature and his country's legends. In the later portions of his
work, however, he writes with seriousness and moderation, and his
narrative of events during the reign of Mary is one of the valuable
sources for the period. Writing as a dignitary of the church, he
has his own point of view; but his natural equability of temper
saved him from the explosions of Knox, while his mediocre gifts
rendered his work commonplace compared with that of his great
rival.
The works that have been enumerated belong, for the most part,
to the main stream of the reformation literature, which may be re-
garded as the distinctive product of the period. Parallel with this
main stream, however, there was another class of writings which,
in greater or less degree, and more or less directly, proceeded from
the secular movement of the renascence. It is a noteworthy fact
in the history of Scotland from the earliest Middle Ages, that,
sooner or later, she came under the influence of every new develop-
ment in western Christendom. Especially since the war of
independence against England, which had thrown her into the
arms of France, her intercourse with the continent had been close
and continuous. From the middle of the fourteenth century, there
had been a constant stream of Scottish students to the university
of Paris and to other universities of France, with the result that
every novelty in the spheres of thought or action speedily found
its way into Scotland. It was to be expected, therefore, that the
revival of learning would not leave Scotsmen untouched, and in
one distinguished Scot its influence is manifest. This was Hector
Boece, a native of Dundee, and subsequently the first principal
of the newly founded university of Aberdeen. Boece was a a
member of the university of Paris during the greater part of
the last two decades of the fifteenth century, and was the esteemed
fellow student and friend of Erasmus-a fact which, in itself, suggests
that Boece's sympathies were with the new ideals of the time. And
the character of his two published works, his Vitae Episcoporum
Murthlucensium et Aberdonensium (1522), and his Historia
Gentis Scotorum (1527), show conclusively that he had studied the
classical writers in the new spirit. While his contemporary, John
Major, who also studied at Paris, wrote his History of Greater


## p. 156 (#178) ############################################

156 Reformation and Renascence in Scotland
Britain in the traditional style of the medieval chroniclers,
Boece deliberately made Livy his model and endeavoured to
reproduce his manner and method. His sole concern, indeed, was
to present his subject in the most attractive form of which it was
capable, and his one aim to prove to the world that Scotland and
her people had a history which surpassed that of every other
country in point of interest and antiquity. His name is now a
byeword for the inventive chronicler; but he was not so regarded
by his contemporaries, and, even so late as the eighteenth century,
his astounding narrative of fabulous kings and natural wonders
was seriously accepted by the majority of his countrymen. Trans-
lated into French by Nicolas d'Arfeville, cosmographer to Henri II,
Boece found wide currency on the continent, and in France, to the
present day, many prevalent impressions of Scotland are traceable
to his lively fancy. In England, Boece had still greater good fortune;
his tale of Macbeth and Duncan, taken from him by Holinshed,
supplied Shakespeare with the plot of his great tragedy, as well
as with those vivid touches of local colour which abound in the
play.
But Boece's History is memorable for another reason besides
its wide currency and its audacious fictions : it gave occasion to
the first book in Scottish prose which has come down to us. At
the instance of James V, who thus followed the example of other
princes of the renascence, it was translated into Scots (1536) by
John Bellenden, archdeacon of Moray, one of the many versifiers
who haunted the court. Bellenden proved an admirable translator
-his flowing and picturesque style doing full justice to his original,
while he added so much in Boece's own manner that he further
adapted it to the tastes of the time. Also by the command of
James-another illustration of the influence of the renascence in
Scotland-Bellenden undertook a Scottish translation of all the
existing books of Livy, though only five were actually com-
pleted. Besides being a translator, Bellenden has claims as a
poet on the strength of the versified prologues to his Livy and
Boece's History and other pieces, and it is specially for his skill
in verse that his contemporary, Sir David Lyndsay, commends
him as
The cunnying clark, quhilk writith craftelie,
The plant of poetis, callit Ballendyne,
Quhose ornat warkis my wit can nocht defyne.
In the works of Boece and Bellenden, the influence of the
revival of learning is distinctly apparent, but it is in George


## p. 157 (#179) ############################################

6
George Buchanan
157
Buchanan that Scotland has its pre-eminent representative of
the movement known as humanism. By his contemporaries,
both in England and on the continent, Buchanan’s mastery of
Latin, equally in prose and verse, was acknowledged with em-
phatic unanimity. Poetarum nostri saeculi facile princep8-80
he was described by Henri Estienne, and the eulogy, approvingly
repeated by Camden, was generally regarded as just by the
scholars of every country. And for fully two centuries after his
death his fame suffered little diminution. In the seventeenth
century, Saumaise speaks of him as the greatest man of his age,'
and Grotius calls him Scotiae illud numen. As a writer of history,
Dryden declared that Buchanan was comparable to any of the
moderns and excelled by few of the ancients. In the eighteenth
century, according to Warton, he was still 'a popular modern
classic,' and Dr Johnson, not a genial critic of Scotsmen in general,
conceded that ‘Buchanan not only had great knowledge of the Latin,
but was a great poetical genius. As pre-eminently, therefore, as
Knox represents the reformation in Scotland, Buchanan represents
the revival of letters.
Born in 1506 or 1507, at Killearn in Stirlingshire, Buchanan
was sent in his fifteenth year to the university of Paris, where,
during two years, he was assiduously trained in the composition of
Latin verse. Returning to Scotland, he attended the lectures of
John Major in the university of St Andrews, whom, in the true
spirit of humanism, he describes as 'teaching the art of sophistry
rather than dialectics. ' A second sojourn in Paris (1525—35? ),
extending to about ten years, decided his future career; thence-
forward, his life was to be that of the typical scholar of the
renascence-a life devoted to the study of the classical writers
and the interpretation of them to his contemporaries as a con-
secrated vocation. It was Buchanan’s lifelong conviction, which
he shared with most scholars of his time, that Latin must eventually
become the literary language of Christendom, and that it would
be disastrous to literature should it prove otherwise. What his
new reading of the Bible was to Knox, pura oratio, the language
of Cicero or of Vergil was to Buchanan.
With few exceptions, the writings of Buchanan were prompted
by some immediate occasion of the moment. As far as we know,
it was during his second residence in Paris that he began to throw
ofi those shorter poems mainly directed against idle and dissolute
monks and priests, or against opponents of the new studies which


## p. 158 (#180) ############################################

158 Reformation and Renascence in Scotland
had resulted from the revival of learning. At this period, the
struggle between the champions of the old and the new studies
was at its height in the schools of Paris, and it was in the teeth of
the most vehement opposition on the part of the university that
Francis I, in 1530, founded the Collège Royal for the study of
Greek, Latin and Hebrew. With all the energy of his ardent
temper, Buchanan threw himself on the side of the reformers.
In caustic epigrams he denounced the obscurantism of those
who opposed the study of the classical writers as these were
now interpreted through the labours, of the Italian humanists.
But bis most effectual contribution to the cause of the new
studies at this time was his translation into Latin of Linacre's
Grammar, published in Paris in 1533, which ran through seven
editions before the close of the century. In the dedication of
the book to his pupil the earl of Cassillis, he takes the opportunity
of stating the reasons for its publication, and his words deserve
to be quoted as illustrating the ideals to which his life was
dedicated and as clearly defining the position of the adversaries
with whom he waged a lifelong battle.
‘But I am perfectly aware,' he says, “that in translating this book many
will think that I have given myself quite unnecessary trouble. We have
already too many of such books, these persons will say, and, moreover, they
add, can anything be said worth the saying which is not to be found in authors
who have long enjoyed the approval of the schools ? As for the novelties
which make a large portion of this book, such as the remarks on the declen-
sions of nouns, of relatives, and certain moods and tenses of verbs, they think
them mere useless trifling. Such criticism can only come of sheer ignorance
or the blindest prejudice, that will listen only to its own suggestions, and
gravely maintains that departure from tradition in such matters is to be
regarded as a proof not so much of foolish self-confidence as of actual impiety.
From these persons, so wise in their own conceit, I appeal to all men of real
learning and sincere love of letters, confident that to all such Linacre will
generally commend himself. '
To the same period of his second residence in Paris belongs a
poem, the first in his Book of Elegies, which calls for special mention
as a valuable historical document of the time. The poem is entitled,
Quam misera sit conditio docentium literas humaniores Lutetiae.
In vivid terms it describes the round of the daily duties of a regent
in a Paris college, the squalid conditions of the class-rooms, the
behaviour of the pupils, the insubordination of the chance comers
(errones, galoches) who are permitted to attend the lessons and
the grumbling of parents that their sons learn nothing and that
fees must still be paid. '


## p. 159 (#181) ############################################

Buchanan's Franciscanus
159
Another migration in Buchanan's wandering career gave rise to
three poems which had a determining influence on the future
course of his life. In 1535, he returned to Scotland with his pupil,
the earl of Cassillis, and, during his residence in the country with
that nobleman, he translated into Latin verse a pasquinade of
Dunbar, How Dumbar wes desyrd to be ane freir, but which
Buchanan entitled simply Somnium. In this poem, a pungent
attack on the Franciscan order, St Francis, its founder, appears in
a dream, and beseeches him to don the habit. The reply of the
poet is that he can be an honester man as he is, though, if
St Francis could promise him a bishopric, he would gladly listen
to his proposals. It was Buchanan's first declaration of war
against the great order--the worst enemies, as he considered
them, of reform in religion and learning. His engagement with
Cassillis having expired, Buchanan was on the point of returning
to France, when an offer came to him from James V to become
tutor to the lord James Stewart, one of James's natural sons, not
to be confounded with another natural son of the same name,
afterwards the regent Moray. Like his immediate predecessors,
James was a patron of poets, and took pleasure in their effusions.
As James's public policy showed, he was a true son of the church,
but he happened to have a personal grudge against the Franciscans,
and he charged Buchanan to sharpen his pen against the order.
Against his own inclination, for, by his previous satire, he had
already provoked that formidable body, he wrote the piece entitled
Palinodia, in which, according to his own account, he sought to
express himself with such ambiguity as at once to satisfy the king
and not to give further offence to the Franciscans. In point of
fact, the satire is a more deadly attack than the Somnium on the
vices and obscurantism of the order. But even this scathing
satire did not satisfy James, and he demanded another 'which
should not only prick the skin, but probe the vitals. The result
was Franciscanus, the longest and most elaborate of all
Buchanan's satires. All the charges that were then generally
brought against that body, their contempt of their own rules, their
rapacity, their frauds on the public—are here set forth with a far
keener purpose to wound than appears in the contemporary satire
of Lyndsay. The poem was not completed at this time, and it was
not till Buchanan's final return to Scotland, in 1560, that he put
the finishing touches to it, and published it with a dedication to
the regent Moray. Though it was not now printed, however,
the Franciscans were aware of its existence, and not even the


## p. 160 (#182) ############################################

160 Reformation and Renascence in Scotland
authority of the king could secure him from their vengeance.
Supported by cardinal Beaton, the most powerful churchman in
the country, they accused him of heretical opinions, and James
was constrained to commit him to prison, from which, however,
by James's own connivance, he escaped across the Border into
England.
Arrived in London, Buchanan, according to his own account,
found Henry VIII ‘burning Protestant and Catholic alike, on the
same day and in the same fire,' though, in a poem addressed to
Henry at this time, he ascribes to him all the virtues of an Alfred
or a St Louis. In another set of verses, accompanied with a
collection of his poems, be sought to commend himself to Henry's
minister, Thomas Cromwell, then all powerful, and gives a pitiful
account of his own fortunes as one
Qui vagus, exul, inops, terra jactatur et unda
Per mala quae fallax omnia mundus habet.
6
As Cromwell made no response to his appeal, and as England was
hardly a safe place for one of his opinions, under the pretence of
proceeding to Germany he took ship for France, but only to find
his arch enemy Beaton in Paris. An invitation to become a
professor in the newly founded Collège de Guyenne at Bordeaux
relieved him from immediate want and danger, and there, for the
next three years, we find him as one of the précepteurs domes-
tiques attached to the college. Expressly founded for instruction
in the new studies, this institution had already gained the repute
of being the best of its kind in France, and among other pupils
attracted to it was Montaigne, who himself tells us that he had
Buchanan ‘ce grand poète escossois' as one of his précepteurs de
chambre.
Now in surroundings that were congenial to him, and in
association with colleagues of tastes kindred to his own, Buchanan
was stimulated to productions on a more ambitious scale than
anything he had hitherto attempted. As his poetic gifts and his
command of Latin were regarded as unrivalled, to him was
entrusted the task of being the spokesman of the college on all
public occasions. When the emperor Charles V passed through
Bordeaux on his memorable visit to Francis I, it was Buchanan
who was commissioned to hail the illustrious guest in a con-
gratulatory ode-a task which he brilliantly accomplished in one
of his Sylvae-Ad Carolum V imperatorem, Burdegalae hospitio
publico susceptum, nomine Scholae Burdegalensis. By a rule


## p. 161 (#183) ############################################

Buchanan's Latin Plays
161
of the college, each professor was expected to compose a Latin
play every year, to be acted by the pupils under his charge,
and, in the performance of this duty, Buchanan produced four
plays during his residence in Bordeaux. Two of these were
translations of the Medea and Alcestis of Euripides, primarily
undertaken, Buchanan himself tells us, to improve his scholarship
in Greek, for in Greek, it is significant, Buchanan was self
taught. The other two plays, Jephthes and Baptistes, are original
compositions, modelled on the classical examples, and expressly
written to enforce that pietas literata which was the ideal of all
the schools that, like the Collège de Guyenne, had recently been
founded in France. In Buchanan's judgment, the former, founded
on the story of Jephthah’s vow, is the better drama, and in none of
his productions has he risen to a higher strain of moral intensity
and elevation of thought and expression. It is in the Baptistes,
however, that we find the fullest and hardiest expression of the
convictions which, frequently at his own peril, he consistently
proclaimed throughout his whole career. The principal character,
John the Baptist, is the fiery apostle of precisely those doctrines
of political and religious liberty which were then perturbing
Christendom, and his death at the hands of Herod is pointed
as the moral of all religious and political tyranny.
Buchanan must have known that it was at his own risk that
he expressed these opinions in such a city as Bordeaux-where
heresy had, indeed, lately appeared, and where, about the date of
the appearance of Baptistes, a heretic had actually been burned.
It was doubtless, therefore, for reasons connected with his personal
safety, that he left Bordeaux in 1542-3, between which date
and 1547 we all but lose sight of him. To this period, how-
ever, belongs a poem which deserves special attention as being
the most minutely personal of his productions and as illustrating
what is notable throughout his life-the affection and regard in
which he was held by the most distinguished scholars of the time.
The poem, entitled Ad Ptolemaeum Luxium Tastaeum et Jacobum
Taevium cum articulari morbo laboravit, was written on his sick
bed, where he had lain for a year between life and death, and its
burden is that his sufferings had been made light by the tender
attention of friends, whose names and special services he enu-
merates in glowing remembrance.
In 1547, Buchanan received an invitation which was to lead to
the most eventful experience in his chequered career and to the
production of the most memorable oi all his works. The invitation
11
E. L. III.
CH. VII.


## p. 162 (#184) ############################################

162 Reformation and Renascence in Scotland
was to join a band of scholars, intended to complete the staff of
teachers in the university of Coimbra in Portugal, which had
been remodelled by king John III. Buchanan accepted the offer,
but, within a year, the Jesuits, then supreme in Portugal, obtained
control over the university, and Buchanan and others were
accused of heresy and conveyed to the Inquisition in Lisbon.
During a year and a half, Buchanan was repeatedly under exami-
nation by the inquisitors, mainly on the charge of eating meat in
Lent and of satirising the Franciscans. Convinced at length that,
though he had been an erring son of the church, he was no
heretic, they allowed him his liberty, but on the condition that he
should spend six months in a neighbouring monastery in some
penitential exercise. The penance which he chose, or which was
imposed upon him, was his Psalmorum Davidis Paraphrasis
Poetica—the work which more than any other has secured to him
his eminent place among modern Latin poets. Buchanan's trans-
lation of the Psalms may fairly be considered one of the repre-
sentative books of the sixteenth century, expressing, as it does, in
consummate form, the conjunction of piety and learning which
was the ideal of the best type of humanist. Versified translations
of the Psalms were the favourite exercise of the scholars of every
country, but, by general consent, Buchanan was acknowledged to
have surpassed all competitors in the felicity of his rendering, and
it was on the title-page of their editions of his translation that
Henri and Robert Estienne assigned him the distinction above
referred to, of being poetarum nostri saeculi facile princeps.
As a manual at once of piety and scholarship, it was received
with universal acclamation. In Buchanan's own lifetime it was
introduced into the schools of Germany and an edition, set to
music, was published in 1595. Till within recent years, it was
read in every school in Scotland where Latin was taught, and
among educated Scotsmen of every shade of opinion it became
their treasured companion, to which they had recourse for religious
edification and solace.
On the expiry of his time of penance in the monastery,
Buchanan was at liberty to leave Portugal, and his first thought
was to seek a home in England, now a protestant country under
the rule of Edward VI. The distracted state of England, however,
as he tells us, offered little prospect of peaceful employment to
scholars, and, once more, he sought a haven in Francebis second
home, as he always considered it. In one of his most beautiful
poems, Adventus in Galliam, he expresses his delight on finding


## p. 163 (#185) ############################################

Buchanan's De Sphaera
163
himself again on its hospitable soil. 'Buchanan,' says de Thou,
'was born by the banks of the Blane in the country of the Lennox,
but he was of us by adoption,' and, in the glowing tributes he pays
in these lines to the French and their country, Buchanan fully
justified the statement. To the same period, also, belong his odes
on the capture of Calais from the English and of Metz from
Germany, in which he speaks with all the fervour and pride of
a Frenchman in his country's triumph. In 1555, Buchanan had
been appointed tutor to Timoleon du Cossé, son of Charles du Cossé,
comte de Brissac, one of the marshals of France, and the con-
nection gave occasion to the most elaborate of all his poems—the
poem entitled De Sphaera. All Buchanan's more serious pro-
ductions are informed by a strenuous didactic purpose, and it was
primarily for the instruction of his pupil that De Sphaera
was undertaken. Its theme is the exposition of the Ptolemaic
cosmogony in opposition to the system which had recently been
promulgated by Copernicus, and which, with few exceptions, had
been rejected by learned and unlearned as impious and irrational.
The poem was intended as its author's greatest stroke for durable
fame, and in its execution he has lavished all his learning and all
the poetic art at his command. As we have it, it consists of five
books, the last two of which are unfinished; and it remains as a
curious memorial of a literary ambition which strangely mistook
the course of the world's thought, equally regarding its theme and
the language in which it is written.
Towards the year 1560, there came a change in Buchanan's
opinions which divides his life in twain. Hitherto, though he had
spoken freely of monks and priests, he had remained a member of
the church of Rome, but, from a special study of the Bible, as he
tells us, he now became convinced that the truth was to be found
in protestant teaching. As Scotland adopted protestantism
as its national religion in 1560, after an exile of more than
twenty years he returned to his native country. Now, as always,
his new associations prompted him to renewed production. During
the first six years after his return to Scotland, it was queen Mary
who was the chief inspirer of his muse. Before he left France,
he had already celebrated her marriage with Francis I in an
Epithalamium containing the famous description of his country-
men beginning
Illa pharetratis est propria gloria Scotis,
which are among the best known lines he has written. To Mary,
11-2


## p. 164 (#186) ############################################

164 Reformation and Renascence in Scotland
also, he now dedicated the second edition of his translation of the
Psalms in the most admired of all his shorter poems, the epigram
beginning
Nympha, Caledoniae quae nunc feliciter orae
Missa per innumeros sceptra tueris avos.
Till 1567, he remained in close connection with the court, reading
the classics with Mary in her leisure hours, composing a masque
on the occasion of her marriage with Darnley, and celebrating the
birth of her son, afterwards James VI, in a Genethliacon in which
he did not conceal his opinions regarding the duties of rulers to
their subjects.
The murder of Darnley, the head, be it noted, of Buchanan's
own clan, converted him into a bitter enemy of Mary, as, like all
protestants, he believed that she was accessory to the crime.
Henceforward, therefore, he identified himself with the political
and religious party which drove her from the throne, and it was in
the interests of that party that his subsequent writings were
mainly produced. In his Detectio, written at the request of the
protestant lords, he has presented their case against Mary with a
vehemence of statement which can only be understood and justified
by comparison with the polemical writings of contemporary
scholars. In the service of the same cause, he produced the only
two pieces which he wrote in vernacular Scots—Chamaeleon,
a satire on Maitland of Lethington, and the Admonition to the
trew Lordis, a warning to the protestant lords themselves regard-
ing their past and future policy. What is noteworthy in these
two pamphlets is that Buchanan shows the same mastery of the
Scottish language as he does of Latin, and their periodic sentences
are an exact reproduction of his Latin models. But Buchanan's
greatest literary achievement of this period was his Rerum
Scoticarum Historia, published in 1582, the year of his death,
in which he related the history of Scotland from its origin till the
death of the regent Lennox in 1571. Dedicated to James VI,
with whose education he had been entrusted, the underlying object
of the book is the inculcation of those principles of political and
religious liberty of which Buchanan had been the consistent
champion throughout his career. By the leading scholars of
Europe it was adjudged to be a work of transcendent merit, and
even in the eighteenth century it was seriously debated whether
Caesar, Livy, or Sallust had been his model. In this History,
which for fully two centuries kept its place as a standard authority,


## p. 165 (#187) ############################################

6
Buchanan's De Jure Regni 165
Buchanan had appealed both to scholars and protestant theo-
logians, and in another work, De Jure Regni apud Scotos (1579),
he made a still wider appeal on questions which were then agitating
every country in Christendom. Written in the form of a dialogue
(between Thomas Maitland and Buchanan) this treatise is, virtually,
an apology for the Scottish reformation, and, as a classic exposition
of protestant political theory, it found wide acceptance both in
Britain and on the continent-Dryden in the following century
even accusing Milton of having embodied it in his Defence of the
People of England.
No man,' says archbishop Spottiswoode, 'did better merit
of his nation for learning, nor thereby did bring it to more glory,'
and this is Buchanan's specific and pre-eminent claim to the
regard of his countrymen. Read as classics by all educated
Scotsmen, his works, prose and verse, perpetuated the study of
Latin, which, to the comparative neglect of Greek, remained a rooted
tradition in the curriculum of a learned education in Scotland.
Scotland, as has already been said, owing to conditions peculiar to
itself, was more powerfully affected by the reformation than by the
renascence, yet, through the work of Buchanan, and of others of
kindred tastes, though less distinguished than himself, one result,
at least, was secured from both movements : religion has ever
been associated with learning in the mind of the Scottish
people


## p. 166 (#188) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
THE NEW ENGLISH POETRY
THE reign of Henry VIII was not, as students of history know,
a period of unbroken internal peace. Nevertheless, when the
wars of the Roses were over and a feeling of security had been
induced by the establishment of a strong dynasty, a social and
intellectual life became possible in England which the troubles
of the reigns of Henry VIII and his two successors were sufficient
to check but not to destroy. More important still, England, having
more or less settled her internal troubles by a judicious application
of the balancing system, became a power to be reckoned with in
European politics. This brought her into touch with the kingdoms
of the continent, and so, for the first time in a more than incidental
way, submitted her intellectual life to the influences of the
renascence. The inspiration of the new poetry, we shall find, was
almost entirely foreign. It was upon French, and, especially, upon
Italian, models that the courtiers of Henry VIII founded the
poems which now began to be written in large numbers. The
extent to which the practice of versifying prevailed cannot now
be gauged; but modern investigation shows it to have been very
wide. To make poems was one of the recognised accomplishments
of the knight as conceived in the last phase of chivalry, the days
with which we are, for the moment, concerned; and it is not,
perhaps, too much to say that every educated man made poems,
which, if approved, were copied out by his friends and circulated in
manuscript, or included in song-books. It was not, however, till
1557 that some few were, for the first time, put into print by
Richard Tottel, in the volume, Songes and Sonettes, written by
the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey,
and other, commonly known as Totteľ8 Miscellany.
This volume tends to prove that the movement had one pioneer
and two leaders. The pioneer was Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was
joined in the leadership by Henry Howard, known as earl of
Surrey. A sketch of their lives, especially of that of the former,


## p. 167 (#189) ############################################

Sir Thomas Wyatt
167
1
may be of interest as helping to show the extent to which England
was brought into touch with European influences.
Thomas Wyatt was born in or about 1503, and was educated
at Cambridge, possibly, also, at Oxford. In 1511, his father was
joint constable with Sir Thomas Boleyn of Norwich Castle, and,
as a boy, he made the acquaintance of a lady-Sir Thomas's
daughter Anne-with whose name report was to link his own very
closely. In 1525, after holding certain offices about the person
of the king, Thomas Wyatt accompanied Sir Thomas Cheney on a
diplomatic mission to France. In 1526–7, he was sent with Sir
John Russell, the English ambassador, to the papal court; and
visited Venice, Ferrara, Bologna and Florence. On his return,
he was captured by the imperial forces under the constable of
Bourbon, but escaped. In 1529–30, he was high marshal at Calais.
In 1537, he went as ambassador to the emperor, and remained
abroad, mainly in Spain, till 1539; in the April of that year he was
recalled, in consequence of the intrigues of his fellow-ambassador,
Bonner. At the end of the same year he was despatched to
Flanders to see the emperor and followed him to Paris, returning
in 1540. On the fall of Cromwell, who had supported Wyatt,
Bonner succeeded in obtaining Wyatt's imprisonment in the
Tower; whence, having either denied the accusation or pleaded
for mercy, he was afterwards released. He retired to his house at
Allington, in Kent, and employed his leisure in writing his satires
and his paraphrase of the penitential psalms. In 1542, we find him
knight of the shire for Kent; and, in the summer of that year,
hastening in ill health on a mission to conduct the imperial
ambassador to London, he caught a fever, and died on the road, at
Sherborne, on 11 October. One other episode of his life remains
to be mentioned. He was commonly regarded as, in youth, the
lover of Anne Boleyn; and it was reported that, when the
king wished to make that lady his wife, Wyatt informed him
of his previous relations with her. Whatever the truth of an
obscure matter, Wyatt was chief ewerer at the coronation of
Henry's second queen in 1533; and, though we find him committed
to the Tower in May 1536, the period of her downfall, it was
probably only as a witness. One of his sonnets, Whoso list to
hunt, has clear reference to Anne Boleyn, ending, as it does, with
the line : 'Noli me tangere ; for Caesar's I am'; for, though it is
imitated from Romanello? or Petrarch (157, Una candida cerva),
it may yet be of personal application. There is also an epigram
According to Nott, p. 571.
1
1


## p. 168 (#190) ############################################

168
The New English Poetry
Of His Love called Anna, and another reference to Anne has
been found by some in the sonnet Though I myself be bridled
of my mind. His confinement in May 1536 was, undoubtedly, one
of the facts in his life which induced him to regard May as his
unlucky month.
It will be seen that Wyatt frequently travelled abroad, and
that he spent a period of some months in Italy. And it was from
Italy that he drew the ideas and the form by means of which
English poetry was rejuvenated. The changes which English versi-
fication passed through in the period between Chaucer and the
Elizabethans are described elsewhere? Neither the principles of
rhythm and accent, it would seem, nor even the grammar of Chaucer
were fully understood by his followers, Lydgate, Occleve and Hawes.
In place of Chaucer's care in arranging the stress and pause of his
line, there is chaotic carelessness; and the diction is redundant,
feeble and awkward. Meanwhile, the articulate final -e, of which
Chaucer made cunning use, had been dropping out of common
speech, and the accent on the final syllable of words derived from
the French, such as favour, virtue, travail, had begun to move
back to the first syllable, with the result of producing still further
prosodical confusion and irregularity. It was the mission of Wyatt
and his junior contemporary, Surrey, to substitute order for con-
fusion, especially by means of the Italian influence which they
brought to bear on English poetry, an influence afterwards united
by Spenser (Gabriel Harvey assisting) with the classical influence.
Wyatt's chief instrument was the sonnet, a form which he was
the first English writer to use. Of all forms, the sonnet is that in
which it is most difficult to be obscure, turgid, or irregular. Its
small size and precise structure force on the writer compression,
point and intensity, for a feeble sonnet proclaims itself feeble at a
glance. No better corrective could have been found for vague
thought, loose expression and irregular metre; and the introduction
of the sonnet stands as the head and front of Wyatt's benefaction
to English poetry. His model-in thought, and, up to a certain
point, in form-was the sonnet of Petrarch, of whom he was a close
student. Wyatt's sonnets number about thirty: ten of them are
translations of Petrarch, and two others show a debt to the same
author. But either he did not apprehend, or he deliberately
decided not to imitate, the strict Petrarchian form; and the
great majority of the English sonneteers before Milton followed
his example. The main difference is this: that, whereas the
1 Cf, the sonnet : Ye that in love finde luck.
* See post, chap. xl.
1
а


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Wyatt's Sonnets
169
a
sextett of the strict Petrarchian sonnet never ends with a
couplet, the sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Elizabethan sonnets :
in general, nearly always do. The effect produced, that of a forcible
ending, is opposed to the strict principles of the sonnet, which
should rise to its fullest height at the conclusion of the octave, to
sink to rest gradually in the sextett. But the final couplet has
been used so freely and to such noble ends by English writers that
objection is out of place. Wyatt was possibly induced to adopt
this form partly by the existence of the favourite Chaucerian
rime royal stanza of seven lines, riming ababbcc.
Of Wyatt's
sonnets, two or three (e. g. Was never file; Some fowles there
be; How oft have I) do actually, by their sense, fall into two
divisions of seven lines; but it is plain that this was not the prin-
ciple on which he constructed his sonnets. For the most part, the
separation of octave and sextett is clearly marked, and the rimes
of the former are arranged in Petrarchian fashion, abbaabba, with
occasional variations, of which abbaacca is a not uncommon form.
The effect of the sonnet-form on Wyatt's thought and diction we
shall examine presently; for the moment, we are concerned with
his metrical reforms. He was a pioneer, and perfection was not to
be expected of him. He has been described as a man stumbling
over obstacles, continually falling but always pressing forward.
Perhaps the best way of illustrating his merits and his short-
comings is to quote one of his sonnets in full; and it will be con-
venient for the purpose to take his version of a sonnet of Petrarch
which was also translated by Surrey, in order to compare later the
advance made by the younger writer.
The longe love, that in my thought I barber,
And in my hart doth kepe his residence,
Into my face preaseth with bold pretence,
And there campeth, displaying his banner.
She that me learns to love, and to suffer,
And willes that my trust, and lustes negligence
Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence,
With his hardinesse takes displeasure.
Wherwith love to the hartes forest he fleeth,
Leavyng his enterprise with paine and crye,
And there him hideth and not appeareth.
What may I do? when my maister feareth,
But in the field with him to live and dye,
For good is the life, endyng faithfully.
The author of this sonnet clearly has much to learn. The
scanning of harber, banner, suffer, campeth, preaseth, forest as
iambics is comprehensible; but, in line 6, we have to choose


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170
The New English Poetry
between a heavy stress on the unimportant word my, or an
articulated final -e in lustes; while, in line 8, we can hardly escape
hardinesse, and must have either takës again, or dis-plè-a-sùre
(a possibility which receives some very doubtful support from
line 8 of the sonnet, Love, Fortune, and my minde, in the almost
certainly corrupt version in the first edition of Totteľs Miscellany).
In lines 11 and 12, we find the curious fact that appeareth is rimed
with feareth, not on the double rime but on the last syllable only;
while the last line throws a heavy emphasis on the. The author, ,
in fact, seems to have mastered the necessity of having ten
syllables in a decasyllabic line, but to be very uncertain still
in questions of accent and rhythm. Some of the lines irresistibly
suggest a man counting the syllables on his fingers, as, indeed,
the reader is often compelled to do on a first acquaintance;
on the other hand, we find a beautiful line like the tenth,
which proves the author, however unskilled as yet, to be a poet.
The use of the caesura is feeble and often pointless, and the total
impression is that of a man struggling with difficulties too great
for him. But it is fair to remember two things: first, that pro-
nunciation was then in a state of flux (in one of his satires we find
Wyatt scanning honour as an iambic and as a trochee in the same
line); secondly, that he made great advance in technique, and
that some of the ruggedness of his work (not including this sonnet),
as it appears in the first edition of Tottels Miscellany, is due to a
faulty text, partly corrected in the second edition. Nott, who
published the original MS in 1816, discovered that Wyatt had
occasionally marked the caesura with his own hand, and sometimes
indicated the mode of disposing of a redundant syllable. There
are sonnets (for instance, Unstable dream) which run perfectly
smoothly—to say no more-showing that mastery came with
practice, and that errors were not due to want of correct aim
and comprehension.
This, then the introduction of the sonnet with its chastening
and strengthening influence on metre and diction-is Wyatt's
great service to English poetry; but his service did not end
there. His close study of Petrarch and other Italian authors
resulted in an innovation quite as important, the introduction
of the personal note. The conventionality of character, sentiment
and machinery inherited from the Roman de la Rose disappeared;
and, in its place, came poetry professedly and intentionally personal,
and, within limits, actually introspective. Following Petrarch,
Wyatt sang, in his love-poetry, almost exclusively of his own


## p. 171 (#193) ############################################

Wyatt's Treatment of Love 171
sufferings at the cruelty, much more rarely of his own joy in the
kindness, of his mistress. To say that many of the sonnets are
translations and, therefore, cannot represent the actual feelings
of the translator, is to question the sincerity of almost every
Elizabethan sonneteer. The pleasures and pains of love are the
same in all ages; it is the convention of expression which
changes. The new convention, of which the existence must
be recognised in Wyatt, is a convention of personal emotion,
in which the poet at least pretends to be singing of his own
heart. And in Wyatt we meet with constant proof that he is
so singing. In imitating Petrarch, he frequently adopted to
the full the Petrarchian scheme for the content of a sonnet-the
selection of an image which is then elaborated with as many
cognate and subsidiary metaphors as may be. Take, for instance,
Wyatt's sonnet My galley charged with forgetfulnesse, which is
copied from Petrarch's Passa la nave mia colma d'obblio. His
heart is a ship, steered cruelly through a winter sea by his foe, who
is his lord; the oars are thoughts; the winds are sighs and fearful-
ness; the rain is tears; the clouds are disdain; the cords are twisted
with error and ignorance; while reason, that should be his consort
(or comfort), is drowned. If there were nothing of superior matter
to this in Wyatt, his achievement would almost be limited to his
metrical reforms; but the genuineness and originality of the poet
are shown in other sonnets in which he either alters his original,
modifying some more than usually strained conceit into something
in better taste, or writes with no original but his own heart. See
lines 5—8 in his sonnet, Yet was I never of your love agreved, in
which he flatly contradicts the sentiment of Petrarch. And, more
than once, he flies in the face of the slavery to the mistress pre-
scribed in the code of chivalric love from which he drew much of
his inspiration; declaring roundly (e. g. in the sonnet, My love to
skorn) that,
As there is a certayn time to rage:
So is there time such madnes to aswage;
and bids his cruel mistress a manly farewell. It is not fanciful,
perhaps, to find such a sentiment characteristically English.
The chivalric ideal, codified in Castiglione's Il Cortegiano, was, 1
as we shall see further in discussing Surrey, of great weight in
this, the last century of chivalry in England; but there is, perhaps,
something in our temperament that forbade its complete accept-
ance in the matter of the servitude of love.


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172
The New English Poetry
The same sentiment appears even more clearly in Wyatt's
lyrics not in sonnet form, and especially in those composed of
short lines. A delightful song in three quatrains of octosyllabic
lines, Madame, withouten many wordes, is as brave and cavalier a
way of demanding a 'yes' or 'no' as Suckling himself could have
uttered ; and What should I say! Since Faith is dead, a little
song of tetrasyllabic lines with a refrain, is a resolute if graceful
farewell. It is in these lighter lyrics that some of Wyatt's finest
work is to be found. Forget not yet the tried intent is known to
all readers of poetry. It is marked, with other poems, by two
things : the use of the refrain and the unmistakable impression it
conveys of having been written to be sung.