"For now is exilde all ald noble corage, Lautee, lufe, and liberalitee: Now is stabilitee fundyn in na stage, Nor degest counsele wyth sad maturitee, Prudence, and policy, ar banyst our al brinkis. That want of wyse men makis fulis sitt on bynkis. O, whare is the balance of justice and equitee? Noucht reulit be reson, mair than ox or asse and so forth, and so forth. Is not the substance, though not the form, familiar to us in countless jeremiads of our own generation? The most marked deviation from the path of more or less serious moralising is the poem entitled Sum Practysis of Medecyne, written in an elaborate stanza, with a free use of alliteration, in which Henryson for once gives the rein to that rollicking and boisterous humour of which most of the poets his compatriots have had a share. A flash of the same spirit appears in Kynaston's story of his last illness and death, discreetly referred to by his namesake, Mr. Henderson. Of narrative poetry in the Chaucerian manner Henryson has left us two specimens, the Orpheus and Eurydice (633 lines), and the Testament of Cresseid (616 lines), the latter of which is an avowed continuation of Chaucer's Troilus and Cresseid. They are both in The King's Quair metre (rhyme royal), and, if comparisons must be made, the Testament appears to deserve the preference over the Orpheus. It deals with the horrible fate of Cressida after her desertion by Diomede, smitten by the sentence of the gods with leprosy and doomed to "go begging fra hous to hous, With cop and clapper lyke an lazarous.” There are many striking passages in the poem which demonThe Want of Wyse Men. strate Henryson's versatility: such as the picture of an "interior" on a bitter winter's night, when the author describes how he and "tuik ane drink his spreitis to comfort," "armit him weill fra the cauld thairout," before taking up and reading glorious Chaucer's "quair" of "fair Cresseid and lustie Troylus"; or the account of the descent of the seven planets from their spheres, to pass judgment upon Cresseid, each being differentiated from the other by minute traits of appearance, more characteristic, perhaps, of men than of gods. Here is a vignette of Saturn :— "His face frosnit, his lyre was lyke the leid, His teith chatterit, and cheverit with the chin, I The culminating point in the poem comes with the visit of Troilus to the lepers, when he thinks that he has seen Cresseid's face before, yet fails to recognise her, although he signals her out among the other lepers by an unusually generous alms. But the episode is too long for extraction here, and the reader must be content with two stanzas from the complaint of Cresseid (in aab aab bab) when sentence of leprosy has been passed upon her :— "Quhair is thy chalmer wantounlie besene, With burely bed, and bankouris browderit bene, Spycis and wyne to thy collatioun, The cowpis all of gold and silver schene, The Testament of Cresseid, 11. 155-16. The sweit meitis servit in plaittis clene, With saipheron sals of ane gude sessoun : Quhair is thy garding with thir greissis gay, And see the royal rinks in thair array, In garmentis gay, garnischit on everie grane." Noteworthy as the Orpheus and the Cresseid undoubtedly are-significant as we must hold them to be of the degree of technical accomplishment attained by the Scottish poetsHenryson's most successful and characteristic work is to be sought in his version of The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian, one of the happiest performances in its kind which the English language has to show, and distinguished by a humanity and a tolerance which our national poetry, in so far as it bears to be a "criticism of life," has sometimes lacked. The plot of the Taill of the Uplandis Mous and the Burges Mous, for example, is familiar to every one, but the inimitable happiness of its adaptation to Scottish life and manners, and the dexterous mingling of the animal and the human element, give it an irresistible claim upon our attention. The mouse from the burrows town sets out for the country to pay a visit to her sister : "The hartlie joy, Lord God! gif ye had sene Was kithit quhen that thir twa sisteris met; The upland mouse entertains her sister with peas and nuts, but the latter tells her outright "My gude Friday is better nor your Pace" [Easter]; and invites her to come back to the burrows town. There they dine sumptuously "into ane spence with vittell greit plentie"; "Baith cheis and butter upone thair skelfis hie And flesche and fische aneuch, baith fresche and salt, our The banquet is rudely interrupted by the entrance first of the spenser [butler], and next of Gilbert, or Gib-Hunter, jolie cat," from whose clutches the country mouse escapes only by creeping between a board and the wall. Like a wise mouse, she goes home without delay. The poet informs us that he can nocht tell how efterwart scho fure." adds "Bot I hard say, scho passit to hir den "Bot," he Als warme als woll, suppose it wes nocht greit, Full benely stuffit, baith but and ben, Of beinis and ruttis, peis, ry, and quheit; Bot to hir sisteris feist na mair scho yeid." Scarcely inferior to this excellent fable are the Wolf and the Lamb, Schir Chantecleir and the Foxe, and The Tod's Confession to Freir Wolf, a little masterpiece of trenchant, but not badtempered, satire. The fox is bidden by his confessor, by way of penance, to "forbeir flesche hyne till Pasche." He immediately proceeds to the sea-side with the virtuous intention of catching fish. At the sight of the water, however, he exclaims "Better that I had bidden at hame But presently he espies a herd of goats, from among which he steals "ane lytell kid." "Syne ouer the heuch unto the see he hyis, And tuke the kid rycht be the hornis twane, He dowkit him, and till him can he sayne, 'Ga down, Schir Kid, cum up, Schir Salmond agane, But, indeed, all the Fables are good, and stamp Henryson as a master of fluent and easy versification, a man of insight into character, and the possessor of the same wide and generous outlook upon men and life which are not the least among the many memorable excellences of his model, Chaucer. A very different stamp of poet was Harry the Minstrel, commonly known as "Blind Harry," who is believed to have died in 1492, or thereabouts, and whose Wallace1 (circ. 1460) was, in one form or another, for long a prime favourite of the Scottish peasantry. It was, indeed, the Wallace that "poured" into the veins of Burns "a Scottish prejudice, which," the poet predicted, "will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest," which unfortunately did not prevent his writing what he conceived to be literary English prose, and which certainly helped to produce such peculiar results as Scots Wha Ha'e. Harry was indeed far from being an illiterate man. He had his pro indiviso share in the common stock of the Middle Ages; and the culture of the better sort of itinerant minstrel was probably not unlike that of the journalist of our own day, whose functions the minstrel, or "jongleur," to a certain extent anticipated in the society of a more primitive age. But there is certainly no trace in Harry of the intellectual qualities or attainments which distinguished men like Barbour in a previous generation, and men like 1 Ed. Jamieson, Edin., 1820; ed. Moir, S. T. S., Edin., 1884-89. |