spellings as eyen, wood for mad, make for mate, souke for suck, &c.

Thomas the Rhymer, a famous but somewhat elusive personage, used to rank as the foremost name in early Scottish literature, in virtue of the authorship of Tristrem. But, as we have seen, there is no sufficient ground for holding that this poem was written north of the Border (page 44). The romance about his own adventures at the Elf-Queen's court was written long after his time, probably in England; and the prophecies for which he was famous can nore of them be definitely traced to the thirteenth-century seer, or be quoted as rhymes dating from his age at all. The best-known Scottish authors of this early period are Barbour, a patriot whose fervour sometimes lifts his rugged lines to the level of poetry, and Wyntoun, who seldom rises above the doggerel of the rhyming chronicler. But along with and even above these should be ranked Huchown (see page 171), who is only now coming to his rights as a true and accomplished poet.

In date the author of the Kingis Quair no doubt falls within Dr Murray's first period, but in most essentials belongs to the second great group of Scottish authors; whereas Blind Harry, though his work was most probably written after 1475, has affinity rather with the earlier company. For Chaucer fixes an epoch in Scottish not less markedly than in English literature, though his influence, marked in England in his own lifetime, was most conspicuous in Scotland well on in the next century; the first really artistic Scottish poets were disciples of Chaucer, and as poets outshone their English contemporaries. From Chaucer to the advent of Wyatt and Surrey and the greater Elizabethans-when Scottish poesy 'tholed eclipse' -the northerners had the best of it; they are much less monotonous and tedious than Gower, Lydgate, or Hoccleve; more attractive and less uncouth than Skelton. Lowell, their most grudging critic, admits that they have more meat' and substance in them than the southerners. The author of the Kingis Quair, and, two generations later, Henryson, Douglas, and Dunbar, studied Chaucer diligently, were influenced by him, made him to some extent their model. In so far they were Chaucerians; but they were Chaucerians with a difference. Neither the Kingis Quair, nor Henryson, nor Douglas approaches Chaucer in breadth of vision or catholicity of temper; Dunbar, satirical, vehement, caustic, is in temperament the least like Chaucer, and in his own way goes beyond him. With all of them it is easier to see the contrasts than the similarities to the master they reverenced. Dunbar more than Henryson or Douglas partakes of the new spirit of the fifteenth century; Douglas is not fairly to be called a representative of the Renaissance; Dunbar least of all of them finds his natural expression in allegory. The alliterative verse of Scotland, though some of it is later in date,

belongs to the older world. Blind Harry is partly a reversion to the pre-Chaucerian type, although, as has been pointed out by Professor Skeat, he also shows frequently, both in rhymes and phrases, the inevitable influence of the masterpoet of the preceding century. Lyndsay, whose rude but effective satires were enormously popular in Scotland, was rather a facetious 'Piers Plowman' than a Chaucerian, but borrowed phrases and ideas like the rest; both he and Montgomerie belong to the second or middle period. Scottish sixteenth-century prose writers were a large and various company; here we need name as representatives of the prose of the second or middle period only two men of the foremost rank-Knox, the first really powerful writer of contemporary history in the English tongue; and Buchanan, who wrote very little in the Scottish vernacular, but as humanist and Latin poet took amongst the learned of Europe a place that had as yet been conceded to no writer of British birth.

During the second period of Scots writing. the language had undergone a double series of changes. On the one hand it had altered from its old self and become less like Middle English in several ways. The Scots vernacular always remained more Anglo-Saxon and less NormanFrench than southern English-contrary to what is often said or assumed. But the spelling was modified in various ways, and the professional authors had adopted large numbers of words direct from French and Latin-an 'aureate' style

which never formed part of the vernacular speech, and were soon dropped even by writers. Just so French sixteenth-century writers manufactured masses of words from Latin and Greek that never belonged to the spoken language, but remained factitious. Yet 'Ciceronianism' had one good result in Scotland as in France: it helped to produce a rhythmical sonorous prose, in dignified and well-built periods. Now, as in the earlier period, the practice of translation from the French powerfully influenced literary style. On the other hand Scottish authors were being more and more directly influenced by southern literary English. The result became very conspicuous after the Reformation: Knox was taunted by his Catholic opponents with an unpatriotic tendency to Anglicise in his literary style as well as in his doctrine. The Catholic writers, including the compiler of the Complaynt of Scotlande, strove to write what they thought their national tongue without English admixture, with a leaning to a French vocabu lary. But the Anglicising process had begun and become ineradicable long before. The Scottish Chaucerians, from the earliest of them onwards. show very marked traces of their master's influence on their style as well as on their thought. One of the points that makes for James I.'s authorship of the Kingis Quair is that it is not written in Scots, but in such a mixed dialect as might have become natural to a Scotsman long resident

in England-not true Northumbrian,' Professor Skeat says, 'but a singular and quite artificial language not ill adapted for literary purposes, with southern forms and even Kentish rhymes.' Chaucer's and other English influences are patent in Henryson. Gavin Douglas expressly admits that he cannot get on without southern words, and he uses many quite needless southern forms. Alexander Barclay (see page 116), educated and settled in England, became an English author. Dunbar, who in his youth had tramped and begged in England, wrote at least one of his poems in almost perfectly pure southern English, and in his Scots ones constantly uses southern as well as northern forms-go as well as ga, two as well as twa and tway, alone and alane, stone and stane, goist and gaist, and with old, told, gold, and behold rhyming as in English. It must not be assumed, however, that an old Scots writer is Anglicising when he uses forms the modern Scotsman treats as southern. Thus Dunbar regularly has eris for men's ears, and lug only once and then derisively. Ear was originally common to north and south, though modern Scotch has dropped it for lug. It is significant that Allan Ramsay felt bound in a single one of Dunbar's poems printed by him, The Devil's Inquest, to alter the word devill into de il no less than fourteen times, evir to e'ir, and nevir to ne'ir, besides making here as elsewhere other changes in spelling and wording (ge, fro, roe, &c., regularly to gae, frae, rae, &c.), in order to make Dunbar more 'Scotch,' apparently; or to bring him into accordance with the -decayed and vulgarised-Edinburgh Scotch of 1724.

Nothing is more instructive for the history of the national tongue after the middle of the sixteenth century than the contrast already noted between the writings of the Roman Catholics of Scotland and their Protestant opponents. Dr T. Graves Law puts the case thus in the following paragraph :

'The writings of the Roman Catholics of Scotland during the later half of the sixteenth century deserve some notice; for, while Catholics came less directly under the influence of English literature, if only out of opposition to their adversaries, they clung the more tenaciously to the native idiom. The contrast between the language of Ninian Winyet (see below at page 230) and that of John Knox is most marked. Winyet even affected not to understand the Reformer, and wrote to him in 1573: "Gif you throw curiositie of novations hes foryet our auld plane Scottis quhilk your mother lerit you; in tymes cuming I sall wryte to you my mynd in Latin; for I am not acquynted with your Southeroun" (Buke of Four Scoir Questions). The policy was suicidal, for the number of Latin works of controversy published by Scottish exiles on the Continent can have had little or no influence on their countrymen at home. During the ascendency of the Catholic

Duke of Lennox, however, in 1579-1582, when there seemed hope of converting the young king, a more serious attempt was made to appeal to the people in their own language. Mary Stuart had begged for Scottish missionaries on the ground that English priests were not sufficiently understood. John Hay, a Jesuit expelled from Scotland in 1579, wrote urgently to his General of the need of books "written in the Scottish language," and early in the following year he printed at Paris his Certaine Demandes. Father Parsons, who had just successfully introduced his secret printing-press into England, also wrote to the General (September 1581), “Scotland is to be won, if at all, within the next two years;" and he announced the preparations he was making for sending into the north Catholic books in the vernacular "such as have hitherto been never or rarely seen in Scotland." Nicol Burne had published his Disputation concerning the Controversit Headdis of Religion in 1580; and John Hamilton, another secular priest, followed early in the next year with Ane Catholike and Facile Traictise. A Scottish Catholic Catechism (Barberini MSS., Rome; transcript in Signet Library, Edinburgh) which was prepared in answer to Craig's Short Summe (1581), though left unprinted, is another indication of the controversial efforts of the time. Meanwhile, with the view of counteracting the new movement, John Craig had drawn up the famous King's Confession or Negative Confession, the first of the National Covenants signed by the king and his household, January 28, 1581. Its apparent Anglicising tendency provoked the taunts of Hamilton: "Giff King James the fyft," he wrote, "var alyve, quha, hering ane of his subjectis knap suddrone, declarit him ane traiteur, quidder vald he declare you triple traitoris, quha not onlie knappis suddrone in your negative confession, but also hes causit it to be imprentit at London in contempt of our native language." Although at a later date a few other Catholic books appeared in the vernacular, they were far less distinctively Scottish. The crisis of 1579-82 may be said to form a landmark in the history of the national literature; and it may be taken as significant also of the now still closer approximation of north and south on the side of the Protestants, that a catechetical treatise of John Craig on the "Lord's Supper," printed by Henry Charteris in Edinburgh in 1581, was issued simultaneously, with comparatively slight alterations, by Thomas Marsh in London, for the English Puritans.'

Just about this date occurs such a marked decline in Scottish productivity as to form wellnigh a break in the literary history of the nation. The theological and political struggles and distractions consequent on the Reformation seemed so to have absorbed the energies of the nation that literature almost vanishes from view. About 1580, also, Professor Masson, looking at the question

from another point of view, fixes the en great literary period and the beginning for mate, ful change. Even in religion or theology S produced little of note; and erelong it borr what its Puritan theology largely from England, whejost it had taken its Bible, its Confession of Faith, its Catechism, and its Psalm-book. On the

whole it is more remarkable that in the early sixteenth century Scotland had poets more than equal to England's best than that in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth the little land should prove singularly barren, just when the glory of English letters was at its brightest. Therefore to this point we bring down this first great series of Scottish writers and their works.

The romantic ballads, a bright jewel in Scotland's literary crown, may some of them have taken shape as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth century. But though refrains, phrases, perhaps the substance of verses, may have come down from that remote time and still survive in the ballads we know, still it is safe to say that the ballads as we know them can none of them be proved older than the sixteenth century. Many are demonstrably of the seventeenth, some even of the eighteenth. Hence it will be convenient to treat them all, together with the English ballads, in the next main division of this work.

When we comment on Scotland's small production in verse and prose at this time, it should be remembered that the country was not merely pitifully distracted, but was incredibly poor, and was less populous than England in a degree not sufficiently remembered. To England's 5,000,000 at the end of the sixteenth century, Scotland had probably 500,000 inhabitants in all; and for perhaps nearly half of that number Lowland Scotch and English were alike foreign languages, Gaelic being still their mother-tongue.

Whatever of Celtic legends or poems was extant-such as those contained in 'the Dean of Lismore's Book' (1512-30)—was no part of the national literature of Scotland; till the end of this period the Highlanders, though nominally part of the nation, were almost wholly outside the current of the national life. The Highland devotion to the royal line of Scotland rose to fervour only after the Lowlands had abjured their allegiance. The average Scot knows about as much Gaelic as he does Finnish, and hears for the first time the names of the Gaelic poets Rob Donn and Duncan ban MacIntyre when, as a tourist in the Highlands, he stumbles on the monuments erected to their memory. Till the time of Ossian Macpherson no nameworthy influence of Gaelic work is traceable on Scottish literature. Nor, considering the claims made for the Celt, have men of Celtic lineage taken any conspicuous share in the literature of the predominant part of the kingdom. The Scottish writers were Lowlanders, and their work is on the whole very Teutonic and quite un-Celtic in

belongs to the older world.

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of ethereal fantasy and unear brightest and best is lumen si too, of the driest; its philosophy i sceptical, rather than a thing o vision; its theology didactic a averse to mysticism; its romanc the tenderness of it disguised unc its very melancholy convinced ar of the vague, haunting Celtic ki reflected, deep and true, are the Scot,' of human nature, of Lowla) Celtic or half-Celtic nature. Celt has no monopoly of the e tions, of hope and tenderness, by no race has the tragedy of or the comedy of life and loy Borderer of Anglian stock, o ed North, who in the nineteenth even by Ward of be his Lowland countrymen the tury writers entry revealed in m Latin and mance and porty of Highland character and Hi poken languafland history, For the Scottish language, see Dr ceronianism'1 of the Southern Counties of Scotland! Dictionary and Wright's Dialect Dicti superseding Jamieson's Scottish Dictinorous prose, g 87); besides works on the several aut Now, as in th old literature, see David Irving, Lives lation from the

1804) and History of Scotish Poetr

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Dalzell, Scotish Poems of the Sixtely style. On t J. M. Ross, Scottish History and L being more at Car (1884); Hugh Walker, Three Cent "thern literary (from Lyndsay to Scott, 1893); T., nacular Literature (1898); G. Gr Conspicuous Herso, Sust Period in 'Periods of European Lite taunted by his of Gaelic influence in Barbour's Bra "iotic tendency

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Tyr ye Odin,' which Dr Tyr hæb us, ze Tyr ze Odin oth Tyr and Odin'), would veritable litany to the ancient land before Anglian war-gods pale god of the Christians.' ent Anglian document extant in ea is the inscription in runes on Alexander Sartiny pe ross in Dumfriesshire, now again, settled in England tessitudes, preserved within the church. Dunbar, when his on it also sculptures, described in Segged in England mert Latin sentences. The runic inscrippremiady on the narrow sides of the shaft, long and is Serpretation, and were in 1823 strangely as well as arthen inreted, on the hypothesis that the runes as wel as bad bandinavian. Not till after Kemble had and deciphered them as runes of the Anglo574, and type in 1840 was it found, definitely and stay, that the poem in Northumbrian, part of they contained, existed also in a West Saxon the men in the Vercelli Book (see above, pages 15, Dar is indeed one of the Cadmonian poems. lay means, to whom we are indebted for a complete

ng and a full monograph on the subject der thought the cross with its inscriptions dated

.D. 680; Sweet and Bugge held it to be not Saipan 750; others have argued that the runic

tion cannot be earlier than 800, and others that it may perhaps be as late as 950. But ng all these conflicting hypotheses, there is no be that the famous inscription is part of a poem Northumbrian on the rood of Christ, correng to that in the Vercelli Book. The first bre, as transcribed by Stephens :

first contribution to our common literature by the Anglian inhabitants of what we call id may be earlier and much more notethan is commonly recognised. Falling just the seventh century, it comes not from the s, not from Lothian, where the Northumcolonists first made themselves at home, om comparatively remote North Ayrshire. tory of Dryhthelm as recorded by Bede is stance a very early type of those Visions Igment of Purgatory, Hell, and Heavenhad such a fascination for the medieval it anticipates the voyage of the Irish St an in the eleventh century to the mysterious ar from human ken,' and the descent of the * knight Owen into Patrick's Purgatory in the h century. Dante's Divina Commedia is the nation of such visions of the invisible, and

169

Paradise Lost has not a little in common with them. Bede tells us he had the story of Dryhthelm from Dryhthelm's most intimate confidant, then still living; and Bede's graphic Latin, professedly an abridged version of Dryhthelm's own account of the matter, no doubt gives us truly what the Cunningham laird declared he saw in the other world, in phrases that are a direct echo of his Own across the intervening twelve centuries. Skene thinks the incuneningum of the MSS. is (through misreading the MS. t for c) really for Tyningham in East Lothian. But even if it be impossible to say certainly where Dryhthelm's home was, his story reflects the views on the future life cherished by the northern Northumbrians a century after Christianity had first been preached in the north. And though the original Northumbrian words are lost to us, the narrative shows too vividly what people in the Scottish Lowlands were at that time thinking and talking about to be passed over in a work like the present.

The twelfth chapter of the fifth book of Bede's History is wholly devoted to the story of a mortal 'who rose from the dead, and related many things which he had seen, some terrible and others delightful.' Dryhthelm, Drycthelm, or Drithelm— such was his very Anglian name-was head of a household in that district of the Northumbrians which is called In-cuneningum,' and led a Christian life, as did all his house. He sickened, and byand-by he died at evening; but in the morning early, he suddenly came to life again and sat up, upon which all those that sat about the body weeping fled away in great terror; and only his wife, who loved him best, remained with him, though in great consternation and trembling.' He comforted her, assuring her he was really alive, but warned her he must leave her and enter upon the monastic life. He now divided his property into three parts (one for his wife, one for his children, and one for the poor), repaired to the monastery of (Old) Melrose, received the tonsure, and lived in great austerity and universal admiration till his second and final death. When in winter he stood up to the neck in the Tweed, with bits of ice floating against him, and his fellows wondered how he could endure such a sore ordeal, he only said, 'I have seen greater cold-as well he might !

He was not wont to relate to everybody what befell him in that dread night of 696 or thereby, but told it frankly to such as were likely to profit by the narration, and most precisely and frequently to his friend and fellow-monk, Hæmgils, from whom Bede had it; also to the pious and learned King Aldfrith of Northumbria, who, when he happened to be in those parts, very often went to see him.' This was Dryhthelm's story:

'He that led me,' said he, 'had a shining countenance and a bright garment, and we went on silently, as I thought, towards the north-east. Walking onwards, we came to a valley of great breadth and depth, and of

infinite length; on the left it seemed full of scorching flames; the other side was no less intolerable by reason of thrashing hail and icy snow flying and drifting all about. Both places were full of men's souls, which seemed by turns to be tossed from side to side as by a violent storm; for when the wretched creatures could no longer endure the fierceness of the awful heat, they leaped into the midst of the cutting cold; and there too finding no rest, they leapt back again to be burnt in the midst of the unquenchable flames. And as an innumerable multitude of misshapen spirits were being tormented by these cruel shiftings to and fro, without, so far as I could see, any moment of relief, I began to think that this perhaps might be hell, of whose intolerable torments I had often heard tell. My guide, who went before me, answered my thought by saying, “Believe not so, for this is not the hell you think."

'When by degrees he had conducted me, much terrified with that appalling sight, to the further end, of a sudden I saw the place begin to grow dusk and to be wholly filled with darkness. When we came into it, the darkness by degrees grew so thick that I could see nothing besides it and the figure and garment of him that led me.

As we went on through the shades of night, of a sudden there appeared before us frequent globes of fierce flames, rising as it were out of a great pit, and falling back again into the same. When I had been brought thither, my leader suddenly vanished, and left me alone in the midst of darkness and this horrible vision, whilst ceaselessly those same globes of fire were now shot up, and now fell back into the bottom of the abyss; and I observed that the tops of all the flames were full of human souls, which, like sparks flying up with smoke, were sometimes hurled aloft, and again, when the fuming of the fire ceased, dropped back into the depth below. Moreover, an insufferable stench boiled up along with the fumes, and filled all those dark places. Having stood there a long time in sore dread, not knowing what to do, which way to turn, or what end I might expect, of a sudden I heard behind me the noise of a most prodigious and doleful lamentation, and at the same time a loud laughing, as of a rude rabble insulting captured enemies. When that noise, growing plainer, came up to me, I observed a crowd of evil spirits dragging the lamenting and wailing souls of five human beings into the midst of the darkness, whilst they themselves laughed and rejoiced; amongst which five, as I could discern, there was one shaven like a clerk, one a layman, and one a woman. The evil spirits that dragged them went down into the midst of that burning pit; and so it happened that, as they went down deeper, I could no longer clearly distinguish between the weeping of the men and the laughing of the devils, but still had a confused sound in my ears. Meantime some of the dark spirits ascended from that flaming abyss, and running forward, beset me on all sides, and put me in an agony with their glaring eyes and the stinking fire which issued from their mouths and nostrils; and threatened to lay hold on me with the burning tongs they held in their hands; yet they durst not touch me, though they terrified me. Being thus on all sides enclosed with enemies and blinding darkness, when I looked about on every side to see if any help might arrive to deliver me, there appeared behind me, on the way I had come, as it were the brightness of a star shining amidst the darkness; which increased by degrees,

and came swiftly towards me: and when it drew near, all those evil spirits that tried to drag me away with their tongs scattered and fled.

But he whose approach had put them to flight was the same who before had led me; who, turning towards the path on the right, began to lead me, as it were, towards the south-east, and having soon taken me ou: of the darkness, brought me into an atmosphere of clear light. While he thus led me in open day, I saw a vast wall before us, whose length both ways and height seemed altogether boundless. I began to wonder why we should go up to the wall, seeing no door, nor window, nor stair in it. But when we came to the wall, we were forthwith, I know not how, on the top of it; and within it was a vast and delightful meadow, so full of fragrant flowers that the odour of its extraordinary sweetness immediately dispelled all the stink of the dark furnace, which had beset me. So great a light filled all this place that it seemed to exceed the brightness of the day, or the sun in its meridian height. In this meadow were innumerable groups of men clothed in white, and many companies seated together rejoicing. As he led me through the midst of those happy inhabitants, I began to think that this might, perhaps, be the kingdom of heaven, of which I had so often heard in sermons. He answered my thought, saying "This is not the kingdom of heaven, as you imagine."

'When in our progress we had passed those mansions of blessed spirits, I discovered before us a much more beautiful light, and therein also heard the sweetest voices of persons singing, and so wonderful a fragrance issued from the place, that the odour of the other, which I had before thought most delicious, now seemed to me quite ordinary; even as also that extraordinary brilliancy of the flowery meadow, compared with this, seemed mean and poor. When I began to hope we should enter that delightful place, my guide on a sudden stood still; and then turning round, led me back by the way by which we had come.'

The mysterious guide-prominent in so many of these Visions, and essential for pointing the moral -finding on their return, as might be expected, that his companion had but a very confused apprehension of the mysteries he had seen, seized the opportunity of expounding their significance; holding out to his auditor a hope of ultimate and permanent admission to the glorious company of the blest. When he had said this to me I much abhorred returning to my body, being delighted with the sweetness and beauty of the place I beheld, and with the company of those I saw in it. Yet I durst not ask my guide any questions; but on a sudden, I knew not how, I found myself alive among men.' And so the vision ended.

In this and others of these stories, as Dean Plumptre says, the reader can detect parallelisms sufficient to make certain the assumption that Dante must have been acquainted with some of them and influenced by them. Dryhthelm's story was so much appreciated in the Middle Ages that one often finds MSS. in which it is given wholly apart from the history in which it is embedded. And for our purpose it is worth detaching this one chapter from the great wealth of Northumbrian lore and litera