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which elapsed between the consecration of the "Poets" Corner” in Westminster Abbey, by the dust of England's elder poet, and the birth of the EARL OF SURREY, who takes foremost place in point of time in the revival of the sixteenth century.

JOHN BARBOUR, Archdeadon of Aberdeen, has been already referred to as one of the older rhyming historians. His writings, however, lay claim to a higher rank, and possess such vigour and sweetness as give him a just claim to rank among the true poets of Britain. His great work, “The Bruce,” demands our attention equally by its poetic merits and its value as authentic history. It was executed at the request of David II., the son of the hero of Bannockburn; and, though not without some of the license of story common to nearly all old historians and metrical chroniclers, it is a relic of our early national literature of peculiar value.

JAMES I. of Scotland, the royal poet, takes a higher rank, and stands in no need of the adventitious circumstances attending kingly dignity, to confer an interest or value on his writings. His life was a romance such as fiction has rarely surpassed. Taken captive by English cruisers in time of peace, and against all law of nations, he was ungenerously detained a captive in England, from his eleventh to his thirtieth year. Henry IV., however, while holding him in durance, treated him otherwise becoming his rank; and, during his long enforced abode at Windsor Castle, he attained to all the accomplishments of a knight, and acquired the learning of a scholar and a profound statesman. While in England, he formed an attachment to the Lady Jane Beaufort, daughter of the Duke of Somerset, who became his queen, and enjoys enduring fame in the allusions to her which occupy so

prominent a place in his great poem. The "King's Quhair,” or King's Book, as it is called, is a poem of great vigour and beauty, which justly commands the admiration of all who delight in the study of such choice relics of our elder literature. It has, indeed, been ranked as equal in merit to some of the finest works of Chaucer, whom the royal poet couples with Gower, in his concluding stanzas, as "his masters dear." Unhappily the poet-king was in advance of his age and country. His zealous schemes for reform were resented by the barbarous Scottish nobility, whose manners and mode of thought his education at the more refined court of England had ill prepared him to conciliate. He fell a victim, in 1437, to a conspiracy of his rebel nobles, who forced their way into the monastery of the Blackfriars at Perth, where he then resided, and put him to death with the blows of their daggers. Two other poems, "Christ's Kirk on the Green," and "Peblis to the Play," both humorous descriptions of rustic manners, have been ascribed to James I., but are, perhaps, more correctly assigned to his royal descendant, James V., who also ranks among the Scottish poets.

But the greatest of all the elder poets of Scotland is DUNBAR, the favourite of James IV., and of his queen. He is a writer of great beauty and variety, and excels equally in the treatment of comic and serious subjects. While he abounds in the richest imagery, and exhibits great ingenuity in the construction of the allegories invariably adopted by the elder poets, they are kept in subordination to more practical sources of interest; and none of our elder poets are more susceptible of ready appreciation and enjoyment by the ordinary reader. He was educated at the University of St. Andrews, and

entered the order of Franciscans. His life, however, was chiefly spent at court, and he was employed by James IV. on several important foreign missions. He was one of those who went to London to receive the Princess Margaret, Henry VII.'s eldest daughter, and the affianced bride of the Scottish king, whose marriage with the English princess is the subject of his beautiful poem, "The Thrissle and the Rose." Some of Dunbar's comic pieces are characterized by the same grossness as is found in all the metrical tales of the elder poets, and is no doubt ascribable, in part, to the manners of the times. This, however, is atoned for by the grave beauty and fine moral tone of the productions of his later years. He has been pronounced by Ellis "the greatest poet that Scotland has produced," and in this bold sentiment some of the ablest critics of the present day have concurred.

Among other distinguished Scottish poets who maintained the dignity of minstrelsy during the long interval between Chaucer and Spenser, is-GAWIN DOUGLAS, Bishop of Dunkeld, a contemporary of Dunbar. He translated Virgil's Eneid into Scottish heroic verse, accompanying each book by a prologue, frequently characterized by great vigour and beauty. His original poems are, “King Heart," and "The Palace of Honour." Both abound with much fine fancy, but they are cumbered by the classical phraseology and allusions common to the period; and the elaborate obscurity of the allegory renders them tedious, as a whole, to modern readers.

Attached to the court of James IV., though, as a poet belonging to that of his successor, was SIR DAVID LINDSAY, a poet inferior, in some respects, to those already named, but one specially deserving of note from the great influence his writings exercised on his age and country.

His poems abound in the boldest satire. Both the political and ecclesiastical evils of his times are handled in the freest spirit of a reformer, and with a graphic humour and keenness of sarcasm, combined with the shrewdest sagacity, which were well calculated to win the affections of the common people. With all his boldness, however, he did not lose the favour of the court; though his writings have been justly regarded as contributing no less than the preaching of John Knox to bring about the Scottish Reformation. His "Satire on the Three Estates," in addition to its vigorous, though somewhat coarse humour, and the pungency of its sarcastic exposures, is specially interesting as the earliest example of a play adapting the principle of the older religious mysteries to the form of the modern drama. As with the older writings of Boccacio, Chaucer, and Dunbar, the clergy enjoyed the humour and graphic depictions of Lindsay, without perceiving the graver lessons they were teaching to the people; and hence, while they were committing Lollards and Wickliffites to the flames, these more popular teachers tore the mask from them, and exposed the vice and knavery of the corrupt church in all its nakedness.

BLIND HARRY, the author of the "Wallace," HENRYSOUN, KENNEDY, and others of the Scottish poets of this age, have each left works not unworthy of the Scottish Augustan age.

The English poets of the same period are-JOHN LYDGATE, a Benedictine monk, nearly contemporary with Chaucer, a voluminous poet, whose diffuse writings have not been reprinted since the fifteenth century; BRADSHAW, a later imitator of Lydgate; SKELTON, a vigorous, but now nearly forgotten, satirist of the reign of Henry VIII.; BARCLAY, and HAWES. But their names are only

worthy of mention as evidence of the poetical barrenness of the period which immediately succeeded the age rendered so illustrious by the writings of Chaucer.

The extracts introduced in the following pages from the elder poets are brief, as their obsolete words and orthography frequently render them unintelligible to the young reader. These are slightly modernised in the examples given here, but any attempt to carry this process far would sacrifice the true vigour and force of the poems.

From such old poems we may frequently recover obsolete modes of pronunciation; and this is specially observable in the sounding of the final e, which appears to have been done at pleasure, as in the analagous practice of modern poets with words ending in ed-such as loved, spared. In both cases the reader must be guided by the ear; and the same rule applies to letters now silent or altogether omitted, but which frequently require to be expressed in poems of the 16th and 17th centuries, to render the measure complete; as in Chaucer's "Good Parson," where such words as Christ-és, word-és, must be read as two syllables. An attention to this simple rule will greatly aid the reader who is desirous of mastering the beauties of the Early British Poets.

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