LESSON 15.

SCOTTISH POETRY.-"This is poetry written in the English tongue by men living in Scotland. These men, though calling themselves Scotchmen, are of good English blood. But the blood, as I think, was mixed with an infusion of Celtic blood.

Old Northumbria extended from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, leaving, however, on its western border a line of unconquered land which took in Lancashire, Cumberland, and Westmoreland in England, and over the border most of the western country between the Clyde and Solway Firth. This unconquered country was the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde, and it was dwelt in by the Celtic race. The present English part of it was soon conquered, and the Celts were driven out. But in the part to the north of the Solway Firth, the Celts were not driven out. They remained, lived with the Englishmen who were settled over the old Northumbria, intermarried with them, and became under Scot kings one mixed people. Literature in the Lowlands, then, would have Celtic elements in it; literature in England was purely Teutonic. The one sprang from a mixed, the other from an unmixed race. I draw attention to this, because it seems to me to account for certain peculiarities in Scottish poetry which color the whole of it, which rule over it, and are specially Celtic.

CELTIC ELEMENTS OF SCOTTISH POETRY.-The first of these is the love of wild nature for its own sake. There is a passionate, close, and poetical observation and description of natural scenery in Scotland, from the earliest times of its poetry, such as is not seen in English poetry till the time of Wordsworth. The second is the love of color. All early Scottish poetry differs from English in the extraordinary way in which color is insisted on, and at times in the lavish exag

geration of it. The third is the wittier, more rollicking humor in the Scottish poetry, which is distinctly Celtic in contrast with that humor which has its root in sadness, and which belongs to the Teutonic races. Few things are really more different than the humor of Chaucer and the humor of Dunbar, than the humor of Cowper and that of Burns. These are the special Celtic elements in the Lowland poetry.

Its National Elements came into it from the circumstances under which Scotland rose into a separate kingdom. The first of these is the strong, almost fierce, assertion of national life. The English were as national as the Scots, and felt the emotion of patriotism as strongly. But they had no need to assert it; they were not oppressed. But for nearly forty years the Scotch resisted for their very life the efforts of England to conquer them. And the war of freedom left its traces on their poetry from Barbour to Burns and Walter Scott in the almost obtrusive way in which Scotland and Scottish liberty and Scottish heroes are thrust forward in their verse.

Their passionate nationality appears in another form in their descriptive poetry. The natural description of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or even Milton is not distinctively English. But in Scotland it is always the scenery of their own land that the poets describe. Even when they are imitating Chaucer, they do not imitate his conventional landscape. They put in a Scotch landscape, and, in the work of such men as Gawin Douglas, the love of Scotland and the love of nature mingle their influences together to make him sit down, as it were, to paint, with his eye on everything he paints, a series of Scotch landscapes. It is done without any artistic composition; it reads like a catalogue, but it is work which stands quite alone at the time he wrote. There is nothing even resembling it in England for centuries after.

ITS INDIVIDUAL ELEMENT.-There is one more special element in early Scottish poetry which arose, I think, out of its political circumstances. All through the struggle for free

dom, carried on, as it was at first, by small bands under separate leaders till they all came together under a leader like Bruce, a much greater amount of individuality and a greater habit of it were created among the Scotch than among the English. Men fought for their own land, and lived in their own way. Every little border chieftain, almost every border farmer was, or felt himself to be, his own master. The poets would be likely to share in this individual quality, and, in spite of the overpowering influence of Chaucer, to strike out new veins of poetic thought and new methods of poetic expression. And this is what happened. Long before forms of poetry like the short pastoral or the fable had appeared in England, the Scottish poets had started them. They were less docile imitators than the English, but their work in the new forms they started was not so good as the after English work in the same forms.

The first of the Scottish poets, omitting Thomas of Erceldoune, is JOHN BARBOUR, Archdeacon of Aberdeen. His long poem of The Bruce represents the whole of the eager struggle for Scottish freedom against the English which closed at Bannockburn; and the national spirit, which I have mentioned, springs in it, full grown, into life. But it is temperate, it does not pass into the fury against England which is so plain in writers like BLIND HARRY, who, about 1461, composed a long poem in the heroic couplet of Chaucer, on the deeds of William Wallace. Barbour was often in England for the sake of study, and his patriotism, though strong, is tolerant of England. The date of his poem is 1375, 7; it never mentions Chaucer, and Barbour is the only early Scottish poet on whom Chaucer had no influence. In the next poet we find the influence of Chaucer, and it is hereafter continuous till the Elizabethan time.

JAMES THE FIRST of Scotland was prisoner in England for nineteen years, till 1422. There he read Chaucer, and fell in love with Lady Jane Beaufort, niece of Henry the Fourth. The

poem which he wrote, The King's Quhair, the quire, or book, is done in imitation of Chaucer, and in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, which from James's use of it is called Rime Royal. In six cantos, sweeter, tenderer, and purer than any other verse till we come to Spenser, he describes the beginning of his love and its happy end. I must write,' he says, 'so much, because I have come so from Hell to Heaven.' Nor did the flower of his love and hers ever fade. She defended him in the last ghastly scene of murder when his kingly life ended. There is something especially pathetic in the lover of Chaucer, in the first poet of sentiment in Scotland's being slain so cruelly. He was no blind imitator of Chaucer. We are conscious at once of an original element in his work. The natural description is more varied, the color is more vivid, and there is a modern self-reflective quality, a touch of spiritual feeling, which does not belong to Chaucer at all. The poems of The Kirk on the Green and Peebles to the Play have been attributed to him. If they are his, he originated a new vein of poetry, which Burns afterwards carried out-the comic and satirical ballad poem. But they are more likely to be by

James V.

ROBERT HENRYSON, who died before 1508, a school-master in Dunfermline, was also an imitator of Chaucer, and his Testament of Cresseid continues Chaucer's Troilus. But he set on foot two new forms of poetry. He made poems out of the fables. They differ entirely from the short, neat form in which Gay and La Fontaine treated the fable. They are long stories, full of pleasant dialogue, political allusions, and with elaborate morals attached to them. They have a peculiar Scottish tang, and are full of descriptions of Scotch scenery. He also began the short pastoral in his Robin and Makyne. It is a natural, prettily turned dialogue; and a subtile Celtic wit, such as charms us in Duncan Grey, runs through it. The individuality which struck out two original lines of poetic work in these poems appears again in his sketch of the graces