If

may the mair vivelie represent that persoun whais pairt ye paint out." He next urges the use, as far as possible, of alliteration, especially “in Tumbling verse for flyting," and touches on three special ornaments, namely, comparisons, epithets, and proverbs. He warns his reader against treating his themes in a hackneyed manner (see supra, p. 81, n.) and enjoins variety. you must say something about the sunrise, "tak heid, that what name ye giue to the Sunne, the Mone, or uther starris, the ane tyme, gif ye happin to wryte thairof another tyme, to change thair names." If you call the sun Titan at one time, call him Phœbus or Apollo the next. Invention should be cultivated, and it is best for a poet not to compose of “ sene subjects," nor to translate. Also, he should "be war of wryting any thing of materis of commoun weill, or uther sic graue sene subjectis, because nocht onely ye essay nocht your awin Inventioun, as I spak before, but lykewayis they are too graue materis for a poet to mell in." Here, we may conjecture, is the voice of the youthful king himself, and not merely his preceptor's. The Treatise, which is really "schort," as it professes to be, closes with a chapter, which we could have wished longer, on different kinds of verse, with illustrations from the Scots poets. To say that the piece as a whole has much substantive value would be to say too much. It is necessarily immature, for the author was at most seventeen when he wrote it. But it presents some points of interest; it doubtless gives expression to many of the ideas of criticism current at the time; and it is not destitute of insight or acuteness. When Queen Elizabeth enquired of Sir James Melville whether her cousin Queen Mary played well on the lute and virginals, that diplomatic courtier replied that she played "reasonably for a Queen." We may apply the saying to Queen Mary's son in respect of his literary criticism, wherein he owes a good deal to Gascoigne.

Nothing, indeed, that James wrote is wholly without merit of some sort. But his remaining works need not detain us

long. His dialogue on Dæmonologie (1597) shows him in full agreement with the sternest sort of Presbyterian divines, who were zealous in obtempering the Mosaic prohibition against suffering a witch to live. But in the Basilikon Doron (1599) we see his not unnatural dislike to Presbytery in full vigour, though he was unable to give effect to it in practice until after his accession to the throne of England. From that date, whatever he wrote (and he had a strong taste for theological and political controversy) was written in English, not in Scots, and therefore, though the celebrated Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604) must be mentioned, no extract is presented from what is a highly entertaining, and by no means illcomposed pamphlet.1 With the close of the sixteenth century it may be said that the use of the distinctively Scots tongue for the ordinary purposes of literary prose practically ceased. This result, as we have shown, was largely brought about by the facts that the reforming party in Scotland had been closely associated with the reforming party in England, and that the service books and the versions of the Scriptures which circulated in Scotland were from an English pen. Such an event as the union of the Crowns was well fitted to put the finishing stroke to a process which had been in operation for half a century, nor was there anything in the history of the seventeenth century that tended to promote the rehabilitation of the national dialect. The object of the Royalist party in England was to establish Episcopacy in Scotland, the object of the Covenanters in Scotland was to force Presbyterianism upon England. Everything thus made for the use of a common and identical literary medium of expression. If any one was burning to give utterance to some private revelation of religious or political truth, he no

1 A counter counterblast was published ten years later (Edin., 1614), by William Barclay, M.D. (b. 1570, d. ?), entitled Nepenthes or The Vertues of Tabacco. It is worth looking at for those to whom the Miscellany of the Spalding Club, 1841 (vol. i. p. 257) is available.

longer wrote (unless by way of jest, or as a tour de force) in Scots, but in the best English he could muster. It is true that it was not until after the Union of the Parliaments that a conscious and concerted effort was made to purge Scottish prose from every trace of the vernacular idiom. But its presence in written speech, though unmistakable, and at times obtrusive, had for long before been accidental and precarious, rather than natural and inevitable; and we have now reached a point at which we are justified in saying of true Scots prose, in the dying words of David Beaton, "Fy! fy! All is gone."

THE preceding chapter has proved to us that the members of the Reforming party were, upon the whole, rather more disposed than their adversaries during the earlier years of the Reformation to appeal through the medium of the press to the general public of Scotland. If this be true of set treatises on theological or historical topics-of what we may call "full-dress" polemics-it is even more true of the ephemeral forms of literature which poured from the printing offices during the latter half of the sixteenth century. In the course of that period, as Mr. Cranstoun tells us, I I "the country was literally deluged with ballads containing rough-and-ready pictures of passing events; circumstantial details of deeds of darkness; satirical effusions directed against those who, from their position or abilities, took a prominent part in affairs secular or sacred; and in some cases ebullitions of spite and rancour and personal abuse." A few of such broadsides have by good fortune been preserved, and of these few only a very small proportion are not on the Reformers' side.

I

2

Introduction to Satirical Poems, ut infra, p. ix.

They are all collected in Cranstoun's Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, S. T. S., 2 vols., 1891-93. For what is known of Robert Lekpreuik, who printed most of them, and a great deal else of Reformation literature, see Dickson and Edmond's Annals of Scottish Printing, Cambridge, 1890.

The collection, as a whole, displays a fair command or the arts of rhyme and metre, and there is no want of variety in the styles essayed by the several authors. An elaborate piece of alliterative rhyme, entitled Aganis Sklanderous Tungis, is from the pen of the second son of Sir Richard Maitland, of Lethington, and shall be quoted from hereafter (infra, p. 206). Sir William Kirkaldy, of Grange, who had been one of Beaton's murderers, and who was hanged in 1573 for having espoused the cause of Mary, contributes Ane ballat of the Captane of the Castell in the elaborate measure of The Cherry and the Slae (infra, p. 216), to cope with which his powers were barely adequate. Nicol Burne, or some other champion of the unreformed Church, makes a spirited attack in the Lewd Ballet (aptly enough named) on the morals of the Protestant clergy. One or two cases, like that of Paul Methven, once a baker in Dundee, and afterwards a preacher until his deposition, gave him a handle of which he made vigorous use. In long fourteens he charges the Reformed ministers with immorality even more glaring and unabashed than that of their predecessors in office :

"The subject now commandis the Prince and Knox is grown a King: Quhat he willis obeyd is, that maid the Bishop hing”

and so on. His numbers are fluent and tripping enough, but the rest of his pasquinade must remain unquoted here.

The most powerful among the versifiers whose scanty remains have thus been gathered together is unquestionably Robert Sempill (1530-95), of whom little that is certain is known save that he was not Robert, the fourth Lord of that name. He is extraordinarily coarse, violent, and brutal; no touch of humanity or good humour relieves his habitual squalor; and yet there is a rude and persistent vigour in his work which raises it above the level of the average ballad

In addition to Mr. Cranstoun's anthology, see The Sempill Ballates, ed. Stevenson, Edin., 1872.