giant, and other monsters. He overcomes all these obstacles and marries the damsel. At last age comes upon him, with Policy and Avarice; then Death with Contrition and Conscience; Remembrance writes his Epitaph, and Fame enrolls him among the great knights. The Pastime of Pleasure is a notable link between the old metrical romances and the old didactic allegories, on the one hand, and The Faerie Queene, on the other.

POPULAR BALLADS

A POPULAR or traditional ballad is a song that tells a story and that has been handed down among the folk for generations. Even when an individual author is presumed to have given the story its first form, his personal characteristics were obliterated in the long process of transmission, during which each singer modified the text at his will, until the product is truly that of the people. A text becomes fixed only when it is caught by print, and the life of the ballad, properly speaking, ends. The oldest so caught is Judas, found in a manuscript of the thirteenth century; and one of the most recent is the Bitter Withy, discovered in 1868. We have a few ballads written down in the fifteenth century; but the bulk of those extant probably date in their present form from the seventeenth century; Bishop Percy's old manuscript, for example, was written about 1650. In spite of the praise of ballads by Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, and Addison, they were neglected by the literary world until well into the eighteenth century. An interest in them was one of the signs of the romantic movement, and the publication of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765, which consists largely of old ballads, marks an epoch in English literature. The enthusiastic collecting period was from about 1750 to 1850, Percy and Sir Walter Scott being the most notable of the collectors.

Ballads are the simplest of poetry, the usual metre being a stanza of four roughly iambic lines, the unrhymed first and third of four beats, the rhyming second and fourth of three beats. It is common to have all four lines with four beats, or to have rhyming couplets; very few ballads have any greater metrical sophistication. The refrain is much employed; so is assonance and imperfect rhyme. There is much repetition of phrase and of situation; many of the epithets are conventional; the favorite numbers, three, seven, and nine are conspicuous; gold and silver and gems abound; supernatural phenomena are unhesitatingly accepted; the fairy world is very near, and beasts are not so different from men. Thus many archaic literary traits are preserved in the ballads, along with the emotions and the culture of a long past age.

The standard collection of English ballads is that by the late F. J. Child in ten parts or five volumes The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Boston, 1882–98. All these ballads (but not all the versions of them) have been reprinted in one convenient volume with the same title by Helen Child Sargent and G. L. Kittredge, Boston, 1904. The text of our selections is that of Child. The best critical account is that of F. B. Gummere, The Popular Ballad, Boston, 1907.

JOHN BARBOUR

FOR the life of John Barbour, the first of the important Scottish poets, we have the same sort of information as about his English contemporary Chaucer. From state papers we glean that he was born at about 1320, and that he died in 1395; that he was archdeacon of Aberdeen; that he frequently had safe-conduct to travel and study in England and France- - as in 1357, for example, when Edward III permits him to conduct three scholars to Oxford; that in 1373 he was clerk of the audit and one of the auditors of the exchequer to Robert II of Scotland; and that he received various pensions and perquisites from his royal master.

As The Bruce was composed within fifty years of its hero's death, it is by no means devoid of historic authenticity, but in form it is a spirited romance, full of medieval and

patriotic exaggeration, abounding in stirring narrative, and in sage reflections. The 13,615 octosyllabic lines are divided into fourteen cantos. The language is practically that of the north of England in the fourteenth century, and it is sometimes called "Early Scots" to distinguish it from the more sophisticated and more difficult "Middle Scots" of the writers after 1450. The best edition is that of W. W. Skeat for the E. E. T. S., 1870-89, and for the Scottish Text Society, 1893-95, from which latter our excerpts are taken.

In addition to The Bruce, Barbour has had attributed to him on insufficient evidence the fragmentary Troy Book in the northern dialect, a northern collection of Legends of the Saints, and, with perhaps better reason, the Buik of Alexander. Still further additions to his canon are proposed by G. Neilson in his John Barbour, London, 1900 (cf. Athenæum, 27 Feb., 1897, and Scottish Antiquary, Jan., 1897). See also J. T. T. Brown, The Wallace and the Bruce Re-studied, Bonn, 1900; and W. A. Craigie, "John Barbour and Blind Harry as Literature,” Scottish Review, XXII, 173.

"BLIND HARRY"

THE authority usually cited for the date and the author of The Wallace is John Major (1470-1550), the Scottish historian, who says that such a work was composed in Major's infancy by a wandering minstrel, Henry, who was blind from his birth. There happen also to be entries of payments to a "Blin Harry" up to 1492 in the accounts of James IV. The poem, however, seems so much like the work of a well-read accomplished person, observant of nature and of affairs, that it is on the whole safer to consider the authorship doubtful. The unique MS., in the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, is anonymous, as are also the early printed editions of 1508, 1570, 1594, 1601, 1611, etc.

The 11,858 lines, in eleven books, are a largely apocryphal biography of the great Scottish hero who figured so prominently in history from 1296 to 1298, and was brutally executed in 1305, but the rest of whose career is almost totally unknown. The work is written in the comparatively new "heroic" couplet introduced by Chaucer, and for the most part in a straightforward, energetic, unvaried style; but not infrequently the author shows that he can use the artificial, "aureate " terms of Middle Scots. The poem has had an immense popularity in Scotland, and in the modern Scots version of William Hamilton (1722) had some influence on Burns.

Our excerpts are from the edition of J. Moir for the Scottish Text Society, 1884-89. For the authorship see J. T. T. Brown's The Wallace and the Bruce Re-studied, Bonn, 1900, and for the best discussion of the legendary and historical constituents of the poem, with their bearing on authorship, the MS. dissertation of F. L. Childs, Studies in The Wallace, in Harvard University Library.

JAMES I OF SCOTS

KING JAMES I OF SCOTLAND, the author of the King's Quair, was captured at sea by the English in 1406- when he was about eleven and kept prisoner until 1424. In that year he married an English lady, Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, was ransomed, and went home to reign. After an energetic rule of thirteen years, during which he sought especially to crush the power of the turbulent nobles, he was savagely murdered at Perth by the outlawed Sir Robert Graham and a band of Highlanders.

The poem is an allegorical account of James's love affair. The metre is the seven-line stanza of Chaucer's Troilus, which, from James's use of it, is often called "rime royal." In form it is a love-vision of the type best known by the Romance of the Rose, and it abounds in reflections of Chaucer's works, though Lydgate's Temple of Glass is the chief source. In fact, it is one of the most characteristic pieces of the Chaucerian school. The language is a somewhat artificial one, partly northern or Scots, and partly that of ChauMidland English. The date is between 1423 and his death in 1437.

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The standard edition is that of W. W. Skeat for the Scottish Text Soc., new ed., 1911, from which our text is taken. The question of the authorship is debated in J. T. T. Brown's The Authorship of the King's Quair, Glasgow, 1896; Jusserand's Jaques 1re d'Ecosse fut-il poète, Paris, 1897; R. S. Rait's The King's Quair and the new Criticism, 1898; A. Lawson's Kinge's Quair and the Quare of Jelusy, Edinburgh, 1910. For sources, see W. A. Neilson's Origins and Sources of the Court of Love, Boston, 1899, pp. 152, 232 ƒ.

ROBERT HENRYSON

ALMOST nothing is known of Henryson, one of the greatest of the Scottish Chaucerians. He lived perhaps from 1425 to 1500. He may be the master Robert Henryson, already "licentiate in arts and bachelor in degrees," incorporated a member of Glasgow University in 1462; and he is called "schoolmaster of Dumfermlin” in the earliest edition of his Fables (1560).

His Testament of Cresseid, written mostly in Chaucer's seven-line stanza, is, although a bit laden with mediæval machinery at the start, one of the most powerful and affecting poems of the century, as his Robyn and Makyn is one of the most graceful and pleasing of pastorals. The thirteen Fables are perhaps an even more significant accomplishment, for to this time-honored theme Henryson has brought so much vivacity and acute, sympathetic observation of men and beasts, that no fables have more flavor than his. Besides these Henryson wrote a dozen or more short poems. His works have been edited by D. Laing, Edinburgh, 1865; and by G. G. Smith for the Scottish Text Soc., 3 vols., Edinburgh, 1906-8. Our selections are from the latter, in the Testament and the fable of The Two Mice following the Charteris text, in The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger that of the Harleian MS.

WILLIAM DUNBAR

DUNBAR lived from about 1460 to 1520. He graduated bachelor of arts at St. Andrews in 1477, and master in 1479. He was probably of noble kin, but relatively humble station; and it is possible that he was for a time a wandering friar, though the biographical details that have been drawn from his poem on "How Dunbar was desyrd to be ane Freir" should be accepted cautiously on account of the obviously farcical nature of the poem. Later he was a priest at court, accompanied certain expeditions on the king's business, and received certain pensions and grants of livery. A poet's position in the beginning of the sixteenth century is still like Chaucer's.

Dunbar's two most important allegorical poems are those given in our text - The Thistle and the Rose, a parliament of beasts and birds in imitation of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, written in honor of the betrothal of James IV of Scotland and Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII of England; and The Golden Targe, wherein the poet represents himself as trying in vain to ward off the arrows of love by the shield of reason. These elegant stanzas are written in the Middle Scots "aureate " style, and in conscious emulation of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, characteristic praise of whom is to be found at the end of The Golden Targe. There is the same polish in several of the occasional pieces here given; but it is in the Seven Deadly Sins, the Dregy, and Kind Kittok that those qualities for which Dunbar is most famous appear. audacious fancy and rollicking humor, an astonishing virtuosity in every metre, and a cataclysmic wealth of strange words.

Dunbar wrote in all about a hundred poems. The most useful editions are those of J. Schipper, Vienna, 1894, and of John Small and others in the Scottish Text Soc., 1884-93. Our texts are from the latter. Schipper has also written a biographical and critical study, William Dunbar, sein Leben und seine Gedichte, Berlin, 1884.

GAVIN DOUGLAS

GAVIN DOUGLAS (c. 1475-1522) was third son of the great Earl of Angus, Archibald Bell-the-Cat. He was educated at St. Andrews, entered the church, and after many vicissitudes - for he was deep in the politics of a most turbulent period became bishop of Dunkeld. All his literary work appears to have been done while he was Dean of St. Giles in Edinburgh, from 1501 to 1513. His Æneid (1513), “the first version of a great poet in any English dialect," is a translation of Virgil's twelve books, and the thirteenth of Mapheus Vegius, in vigorous Middle Scots. Peculiarly interesting are the original prologues to all the books, on the seasons or other subjects not at all connected with the poems. That to the twelfth book is perhaps the most overwhelming example of the "fresch anamalit termes celicall," the "sugurit, 99 66 aureate, ," "mellifluate," coinages of these late Scottish mediævalists, who at the same time begin to show the influence of the Revival of Learning. King Hart is of course the human heart in the castle of the body, surrounded by his servitors, the five senses: it is a fairly well constructed allegory of over 900 lines. The Palace of Honour, Douglas's earliest work (1501), comprises 2166 lines in nine-line stanzas. It is an over-elaborate dream-vision, stuffed with all manner of mediæval motives, where the poet finds Venus and Prince Honour in a mansion somewhat like that in Chaucer's House of Fame.

The only collected edition of Douglas's works is that by John Small, 4 vols., Edinburgh, 1874, from which our text is taken.

SIR DAVID LYNDESAY

SIR DAVID LYNDESAY lived approximately from 1490 to 1555. He may have attended St. Andrews University; thereafter, for most of his life, he was a personal attendant, in various offices, upon James V of Scotland, finally in 1529 attaining knighthood and the office of chief herald, or Lyon King of Arms. He was sent on several missions abroad, sat for a while as member of Parliament, and was a general master of ceremonies at the Scottish court.

In The Dream (1134 lines) Lyndesay is seeking to edify his young prince by an allegorical vision somewhat in Chaucer's style, wherein after a visit to Hell, Purgatory, and the various spheres, his guide, Dame Remembrance, displays to him the native resources of his own Scotland; and when the author asks, “Why, then, is it so poor ?" she replies, "Because of misgovernment"; and anon follows the excerpt given in our text, where John the Common Wealth lays bare in trenchant fashion the evils under which Scotland suffered. The date of composition may be 1528.

The Testament and Complaint of our Sovreign Lord's Papyngo (1190 lines) is one of Lyudesay's most polished satires. The papyngo or parrot is blown from the top of a high tree which she ought never to have climbed, and fatally hurt. She laments her ambition, and sends one warning epistle to the king, aud another to her brethren of the court, which latter ends with the first three stanzas of our extract.

Kitty's Confession is one of Lyndsay's best short satires, — reasonable, pungent, and exposing an obvious specific abuse.

Squire Meldrum (1847 lines) is a little romance, which recalls in a way the old mediæval romances, but which is brought quite up to date- being founded indeed upon contemporary happenings. The Fifeshire hero-squire defeats the English champion in France, wins a sea-fight, also a lovely lady, takes a great castle, is at last dreadfully wounded and left for dead by brutal assailants, but recovers to live to a good old age and make the Testament which is given in our extract.

The chief works of Lyndesay's not represented here are The Dialogue betwixt Experience and a Courtier (6333 lines), called also The Monarchy, an account of certain biblical stories and church doctrines, and A Pleasant Satire of The Three Estates (4652 lines), a