'•WW*!-'' ^'\ •. ^ ^Zi ic'i,^- J . f j^T J ei m M ^ r QforttcU HnicerHitg SIthtatg Jltlfata, Ntm ^artt BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDdWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 Cornell University Library PA 6928.W34 Douglas's Aeneid. 3 1924 026 495 261 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://archive.org/details/cu31924026495261 DOUGLAS'S ^NEID CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Sonbfln: FETTER LANE, E.G. 4 C. F. CLAY, Manager ittto 2mk : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS ^smlnis, (SfUatia aitb iSaixta : MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. •Eotonto : J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd. Inkso : MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA DOUGLAS'S ^NEID LAUGHLAN MACLEAN WATT M.A., B.D., F.R.S.E., F.S.A.S0OT. AUTHOR OF "SCOTTISH LIFE AND POETRY" ETC, ETC. CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1920 If I do borrow anything . . . you shall still find me to acknowledge it, and to thank not him only that hath digged out 'treasure for me, but that hath lighted me a candle to the place. John Donne : The Progress of the Soul, Introductory Epistle. 1601. PREFACE This is an attempt to elucidate Gawain Douglas's work, and to place it in its proper setting, as a Kterary document, in the hope that, until something better is achieved, this may fill a blank in Scottish Literature. My ezciise is that it has not before been done. For reasons which I show in Chapter IV, I have taken the version of the Cambridge Manuscript, presented for practical purposes in the Bannatyne Club edition, as being the most authentic. This explains the differences, of spelling and some- times of phrase in the quotations, from Small's text in his well- known edition. Small does not observe the pecuharities of the Elphynstoun Manuscript, which he professed to follow, especially in the remarkable terminations of Books V, VI, and VII, while he also interpolated certain verses, which are not in his exemplar, but taken from the Black Letter edition of 1553. I therefore make my references by the number of the Book of the Mneid, the chapter of Douglas's version, and the Une of that chapter, e.g. II, 3, ^5. This seems the best way to facihtate reference to the three great manuscripts of the poem, which would not have been the case had I referred to the volume of Small, with the page, and Une of the page. At the same time, for the convenience of the reader, who has Small's edition at hand, I have given, where necessary, a reference also to his text. I have to thank the Marquess of Bath, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Arthur Hirtzel, and Professor Clark of Oxford, for courtesies and opportimities of information ; the Rev. W. L. Sime, of Smailholm, for help in reading proofs ; and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, for their kindness. L. M'L. W. 1 Novembtr 1919 MANUSCRIPTS REFERRED TO: 1. Caubbidob (not later than 1522). 2. EuHYNSTOUN (circa 1525). 3. RuTHVBN (circa 1535). 4. Lambeth, dated February 1545 (1546). 5. Bath, dated 1547. EDITIONS REFERRED TO: 1. " Black Lbttbb," 1553. 2. Rttddiman's, 1710. 3. BaNNATYNB CLtTB'S, 1830. 4. Small's, 1874. Vide Cbapthb IV. CONTENTS PAQB Preface . . ix OHAP. I. The Man and his Fame 1 II. The Man and his Work 25 III. The Translation : Its Method and Result . 69 IV. Manuscripts and Readings ..... 124 V. Language and Influences ..... 149 Appendix A 179 „ B 227 „ C 237 Index . . . 247 DOUGLAS'S ^NEID THE MAN AND HIS FAME His misfortunes It is not necessary here to go into details of the life of Gawain Douglas. The piteousness of his story arises from the fact that he was drawn into the fatal vortex of ambition and faction which followed upon Flodden, with the consequent unsettlement of afEairs in Scotland. The widowed queen's infatuation, which first tempted and then compelled the poet's nephew, the Earl of Angus, to marry her, lay at the root of Douglas's disaster. The opportunity of preferment drew him into the political and ecclesiastical arena, and his record became stained with place-seeking. In this, it may be, he was no worse than his neighbours, but it is not pleasant to read the poet's letter to Adam " Wyllyamson," from Perth, of date 21st January 1515, in regard to the bishopric of Dunkeld, — " Forzet not to solyst and to convoy weyll my promotion . . . for I haf gevyn the money quhar ze bad me." He was advanced to the see by Pope Leo X, " referente reverendissimo Cardinale de Medicis," the queen supporting his claims with her brother King Henry VIII. And on 29th June 1515, he paid at Eome by hands of his proctor 450 gold florins. It must be admitted also, that he was not untouched by actual disloyalty to his country. His correspondence — ^in which he pleads that the English king should enter Scotland — ^and his method of pulUng the wires at Eome through Wolsey's influence, laid him painfully open to more than suspicion, and exposed him to imprisonment and finally to exile. The duplicity of the queen, and the de- sertion by Angus of his own cause, were the final instruments of the shipwreck of the poet's hopes, into which, only for a little, 2 The Man and his Fame entered tlie soft light of a tender friendship in London with the Scholar Polydore Vergil, ere the darkness sank above the banished man, dying of the plague, far from home. His own letter to Wolsey^ gives a touching gUmpse of his condition. He says, " I am and haif bene so dolorus and full of vehement ennoye that I dar nocht auentor cum in your presence . . . haif compacience of me, desolatt and wofull wycht." And he anticipates " penuritie and distress." It was the last he wrote, and one seems to hear, in this, the pang of a proud heart breaking. His dust sleeps in the Church of the Savoy ; and Scotland should not forget the resting-place of the great poet who was the first to write her name large upon the vestibule of the new age of hght and learning. His circumstances Though, unfortunately, we know little of his early days, when poesy was the intimate companion of his soul, before ambition drew him into strife and sorrow, everybody is aware that he was, by circumstance of birth and education, of the most prominent note. He was not only a member of the leading noble family of the Scottish realm, son of Archibald " BeU the Cat," but he was also uncle of the nobleman who had become the husband of the widow of Eling James the Fourth. And he was also a bishop who just missed being the primate of Scotland. A busy man, plunged in the rolling welter of his unsettled times, he drifted into overmastering sorrows and disappointments when he left the quiet shades of poesy to mix in the bitter ambitions of his peers, and to die, in 1522, as his tombstone in the Hospital Church of the Savoy puts it — " patria sua exul." The poet is often forgotten and hidden behind the bishop, crowded and crushed out of sight by the multitudinous business involved in the himt for preferment and the flotsam of political scramble. And those who might have fully recorded contem- porary opinion regarding his poetic work, passed it for the most part over, as though in it he had not made an abiding 1 State Papers, Scotland, MSS., voL i No. 85. The Man and his Fame 3 mark more deeply lasting than any he was destined to make in the memory of the Church by his episcopate, except for the quarrels stirred by his quest for place and profit, in the crowd which, unfortimately, were seeking for the same things at the same time as himself. Henry YIII The letter of Henry VIII to Pope Leo X, of 28th January 1514,* written to further Douglas's claims in regard to the primacy of Scotland, summed up his pubhc character when it spoke of him as possessing " prseclaram non generis solum sed etiam animi nobilitatem," and " eminentem videlicet doctrinam, prudentise, modestiae, atque egregise probitati conjunctam : et quantopere sit communis boni studiosus," though we must remember that it is the language of a testimonial which is here used. Douglas's own letters to Wolsey and Adam WiUiamson are, of course, the letters of a keen candidate for a very desirable post, and few men can stand the white Ught of criticism under such circumstances. He doubtless maimed and stained his hands, when, instead of plucking at the chords of Apollo, he pulled the unclean wires of ecclesiastical and political influence. A very sane modern historian is thus impelled to characterize Douglas as a " man reputable as a poet, but disreputable as a politician." ^ George Buchanan But it is fine to read the simmiary of George Buchanan's' residuary impression, when, writing of the poet's decease in London, he said : " Peste corruptus obiit, magno suae virtutis apud bonos desiderio rehcto. Prseter enim nataJium splendorem et corporis dignitatem erant in eo multse, ut illis temporibus literse, summa temperantia et singularis animi moderatio, atque in rebus turbulentis inter adversas factiones perpetua fides et auctoritas." * There spoke the humanist, who, though a patriot, saw beyond the limit of provincial prejudice and the detriment of personal spite. He was himself to taste the 1 Monumenta Britannioa ex autographis Romanorum Fontifioum DeprompttL, voL xxxvii., Brit. Mus. » MaoEwan : History of the Church in ScoUand, vol. i 403. » 1506-1582. • Berum acoHcarum Historia, lib. xiT. c. 13, a. s. 1582. 4 The Man and his Fame bitterness of all these, and to be able to describe his own case also, as " exul, vagus et inops." Douglas's personal friends knew of his scholarship ; but, in their view, that and his place as a Churchman were the greatest things about him, to judge at least from what they say. Ahhot Myln Alexander Myln,^ Abbot of Cambuskenneth, and afterwards first President of the Court of Session, seemed to think as much of Douglas's position as a bishop, and his rank as a son of the Earl of Angus, as of anything besides. True, in the dedication of his Lives of the Bishops of Dunkeld,^ Myln included the Reverend Father in Christ, the Lord Gawain, " divinas et humanas liter as docto." But, in the biography, the main things that make him still remembered as a " prseclarus homo " are practically overlooked. John Ma/jor John Major,* the learned Doctor of the Sorbonne, who, during his regency of Glasgow University and professorship of theology there, had' John Knox — ^and afterwards at St Andrews, Patrick Hamilton, Alexander Alesius, and George Buchanan — ^under his direction, dedicated to Douglas and Cockburn the Fourth Book of his commentaries on the Sententice of Peter Lombard.* And yet he does not speak of Douglas's eminence as a poet, though he knew him so intimately. Perhaps that aspect of the ecclesiastic did not appeal to the scholastic mind of Major. And, perhaps, to one who, of course, lectured in Latin, and saw to it that within the University walls the students spoke together in that language, the rendering of its greatest poetry into the vulgar tongue may have seemed worthiest of silence. He dedicated the First Book of the Sententice ^ to George Hepburn, Abbot of Arbroath ; and following upon the epistle dedicatory is a pseudo dialogue " inter duos famatos viros, magistrum Gauuinum douglaiseum virum non minus eruditum quam nobilem, ecclesise beati Egidii edinburgensis prefectum, et 1 1474 ?-1549. « Vide Edition Bannatyne Club, pp. 72-5 3 c. 1470-1550. 4 Paris, 1519, "impressore lodooo Badio." ' Paris, 1510, " impressum ... per Henricum Stephanum. The Man and his Fame 5 magistrum Davidem crenstonem in sacra theosophia baccha- lariiuu formatum optime meritum." In tMs dialogue Major makes Douglas appear as being an opponent of the scholastic mode of thought, objecting to the darkening of knowledge by the multiplicity of positions and subtleties, and also as quoting ^neas Sylvius, who had been so venturesome as to declare that time would wither the works of Aristotle. Douglas is also made to say that it was absurd to ascribe to Aristotle an authority equivalent to that of the Doctors of the Church ; and he is represented as admonishing Major to return to Scotland and scatter among the souls of the faithful, by the exercise of preaching, the best seeds of evangehcal truth. This reflects the fact that there must have been some good-humoured ex- pression of differences between Douglas and Major, the latter of whom was well-known as a reactionary, despite his learning - — evidently a laudator temporis acti, and a staunch upholder of the old paths,^ while Douglas is thought by his friend to be a somewhat dangerously advanced modernist. It is Douglas the Churchman whom Major admires. He either ignores the poet, or considers his poetic work not quite worthy of the notice of a grave scholastic mind. Polydore Vergil A third contemporary, of considerable note, and a friend of Douglas's closing days, was Polydore Vergil,^ the Italian whom Bome had sent to England to collect " Peter's Pence " ; and who, after holding several ecclesiastical positions, was naturalized in 1510, becoming later on a prebendary of St Paul's. He says in his AngliccB Historiw ' — ^and in this he is the only person except Douglas himself whose hand draws the curtain, giving us a glimpse of Douglas in his exile from his native land — " Nuper enim Gauinus Dunglas Duncheldensis episcopus, homo scotus, virque summa nobiUtate et uirtute, nescio ob quam causam in Angliam profectus ubi audiuit dedisse me iampridem ad historiam scribendam, nos conuenit : amicitiam fecimus : . . . verum non licuit diu uti, frui amico, qui eo ipso anno, * Considered by Rabelais (bk. ii. o. 7) worthy of laughter ; in List of Library of St Victory as having written de modo faciendi puMinoa ! ' 1470-1655. * Lib. iii. pp. 60-1. 1534, Basel 6 The Man and his Fame qui fuit salutis htunanse MDXXI Londini pestilentia absumptus est." Douglas died between 10th September 1522, the date of his will, and the 19th of the same month, when probate of his will was taken. The Black Booh of Taymouih is therefore wrong in giving the date as 9th September. He had been declared rebel by Albany on 12th December 1521, and his denunciation as a traitor was confirmed under the Great Seal of Scotland on 21st February 1522.^ It was as the scholarly Scot, " vir sane honestus," under the shadow of some mystery, eager to provide him with proofs of the antiquity of the story of his fatherland for insertion in the Itahan's history, in answer to what he con- sidered to be the heresies of Major, who had denied the fabled legends of the northern people, that Polydore knew him, and not as the poet. These three — ^two of them, without question, familiar with the man of whom they wrote — do not seem to have recognized the full intent of that which was to link him on to the interest of later ages. The fact, that to Douglas were attributed " comosdise aliquot," ^ albeit they were " sacrse," may have helped the reticence of grave ecclesiastics, as, from their point of view, being somewhat of a lapse from dignity. Spottiswoode Bishop Spottiswoode,^ however, though a Churchman, specially notes Douglas's poetic work with approval, while, at the same time, speaking highly also of the man. He says of him — " A man learned, wise, and given to all vertue and good- nesse : some monuments of his engenie he left in Scottish meeter, which are greatly esteemed, especially his translation of Virgil his books of ^Eneids." * As the number of poetic writers increased in Scotland, it became the habit for each of them to record the names of his predecessors and contemporaries in catalogic eulogy. Dunbar gives his well-known list. And The Complaynt of Scotlande enumerates its guess-provoking poems by name. 1 Stillingfleet erroneously dates his death 1520. Antiquities of the British Churches, p. Iv. Vide Art. Calendar, Encye. Brit. » Cf. Dempster : Hist. Ecdes. Oentis Scot., p. 382. » 1565-1639. * History, Church of Scotland, ii. p. 61. 1655. The Man and his Fame 7 Lyndsay David Lyndsay, in his Testament of the Pa/pyngo,^ has the acumen to observe that Douglas's really greater work was his rendering of the Latin Poet, the riving asunder of the close-set thorn-hedge of Scottish phrase, that it might permit entry of the full flower of the Boman golden age into Scottish fields. He says: Allace ! for one quhilk lampe tves of this land Of Eloquence the flowand balmy strajid, And in our Inglis rethorick the rose, As of rubeis the oharbuncle bene chose ! And as Phebus dois Cynthia precell, So Gawane Douglas Byschope of Dunkell Had quhen he wes in to this land on lyve Abufe vulgare Poeitis prerogative Both in pratiok and speculatioun. I saye no more, gude Bedaris may descryve His worthy worUs, in nowmer mo than fyve ; And speoiallye the trew Translatioun Of Virgill, quhilk bene consolatioun, To cunning men, to know his gret ingyne AIs Weill in natural science as devyne. Charteris Douglas is also especially considered as the poet, in the Ad- hortation of all Estaitis to the reiding of thir present warkis, by Charteris, in his edition of Lyndsay,^ wherein he declares that Douglas in ornate metir surmount did euerilk man. Yet Lyndsay is set in a place of honour before him, of course for his matter and his religio-political purport. Molland John Holland * of Dalkeith, in his stodgy allegory, The Court of Ventis* while acknowledging the difficulty, even then, of Douglas's work, refers to Douglas as ane honest oratour, Profound Poet and perfite Philosophour, Into his dayis above all buir the bell. > 1530. Prologue, L 22. • 1568. Stanza 3. » ft. 1560. * Bk. iii. L 113. 8 The Man and his Fame Barnabie Googe Of knowledge of Douglas's Virgil in England we find evidence in the Eglogs Epyta/phes and Sonettes of Barnabie Googe,^ where, in an Epytaphe of Maister Thomas Phayre the Virgilian translator, he writes : The Noble H. Hawarde once, That raught etemall lame. With mighty Style did bring a pece Of VirgUis worke in frame. And Grimaold gave the lyke attempt. And Douglas wan the Ball, Whose famous wyt in Scottysh ryme Had made an ende of all. Thomas Speght and Thomas Thorp It is interesting to find Speght in his second edition of Chaucer,^ speaking of " the excellent and learned Scottish poet Gawyne Douglass, Bishop of Dunkeld," and drawing attention to Douglas's reference to Chaucer, in the Preface to the trans- lation of the Mneid. Yet, with regard to knowledge of Douglas across the Border, the fact that, in the Cornv-cojna, Pasquils Nightcap or Antidot for the Headache,^ printed for the famous Thomas Thorp, there is a reference to Lyndsay's Testamera of the Papyngo, need not be pressed. The poet is writing praises of the cuckoo. He has evidently taken note of poetic ornithological references, but he has not necessarily read Lyndsay's poem, and so need not be taken as a corroborative witness to Douglas's fame mentioned therein. Question of the Books Among the notices of the sixteenth century imexpected glimpses are caught of what must either have been slips of memory or ignorance of facts. Confusion appears even regarding such a simple matter as the number of Books stated to have been translated by Douglas, as thor^h the writers either did not know, or forgot about the Book of Mapheus Vegius included in the work. > London, 1563. Cf. Phaer. » 1602. » London, 1612. Attributed to William L. Edited by Grosart, 1877. The Man and his Fame 9 Rinaston For example, Sir Francis Kinaston, in a note about Henryson,'^ speaks of Douglas as " one of the most famous of the Scottish poets," and as author of the " learned and excellent translation of Virgil's jEneids, who was Bishop of Dunkeld, and made excellent prefaces to every one of the twelve books." The looseness of statement in the rest of the paragraph shews that lie had no real idea of the chronology of the poets whom he mentions ; and the fact that he refers only to " the twelve books " shews that this may be taken as the note, currente cala/mo, of a man who knew about literary names and works, but had not, by personal corroboration or first-hand enquiry, made direct acquaintance with the contents of that to which he re- ferred, and did not remember the thirteenth book of Mapheus. It was just what any well-educated person was bound to know in regard to Virgil himself. Black Letter Title It is somewhat strange also to see on the title-page of the first printed edition ^ quite as curious a statement of what it purports to be. There we read : The Xin Bukes of Eneados of the Famose Poete Virgill Translated out of Latyne verses into Scottish Metir bi the Reuerend Father in God, Mayster <3awin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkel, and unkil to the Erie of Angus, Every Buke having hys perticular Prologe. This looks as though it were the product of a hand other than the author's. It was, indeed, probably by the printer himself, William Copland, who seems to have been chief editor of the work, and who may have simply counted the number of books without thinking how many were contained in the Mneid, and not remembering at all, when he wrote, about Mapheus Vegius's supplement. The text is often inaccurate, and differs very frequently from all the manuscripts.^ In this respect it is interesting to find also what the body of recorders, the catalogue compilers, apart from the actual » Written about 1640. Printed by F. Waldron, 1796. Kinaston MS. BodL MS. Add. 0. 287. » Black Letter. 1553, London. = Vide p. 140. 10 The Man and his Fame historians and critical writers, have to say regarding Douglas when they mention him ; and it is amazing how they seem to have " followed the lead," Uke sheep, jumping at the same errors. Bah Foremost in importance amongst these stands John Bale.* He had been compelled, as a consequence of his conversion to extreme Protestantism, to live for seven years an exile in Germany, till on the accession of Edward VI he returned and was made Bishop of Ossory, though on Edward's death he had again to flee, coming home again, however, in EHzabeth's reign. He was a voluminous writer, being author of as many as twenty- two religious dramas, of which only five have survived. His influence, as a source, was long and wide. He shews however, in reaUty, as he himself acknowledges, no direct knowledge of Douglas otherwise than what he could pluck from the page of other writers.^ Nevertheless, in Ms Index he records the ntimber of books of the translation accurately as thirteen, though without mentioning the name of Mapheus. Later he alters this to twelve,^ probably recalling how many Virgil himself had written, though again without touching on Mapheus's share. He was aware of his limitations in regard to Scottish poetry, as he was not a Scotsman : and, as himself shews, his handicap was heavy. He says : " Paucos quidem esse scriptores a me citatoa fateor . . . non quod non fuerint plures, sed quod mihi extero homini non perinde sint noti. Nee enim unquam in Scotia fui, nee eorum uidi bibliothecas ; sed ab extemis accepi quicquid hie adductum est." In his Swmmariwm, he similarly mentions Douglas's name and office as Bishop of Dunkeld and his " Com- mentariolum de rebus Scoticis Li. I." with the date and cause of his death. In his later work Douglas's Palice of Honour^ and the Mneid are noted, with acknowledgments to Nicholas. Brigham. He explicitly mentions Polydore Vergil as his authority on Douglas. 1 1495-1563. * Epistola Dedicaloria to Alesius and Knox : Catalogue dealing with Scots writers. ' Scriptorum Illuatrium, Posterior Pars, 1559. The Man and his Fame 11 Holinshed Holinshed ^ mentions Douglas's translation of Virgil's JEneid " lib. 12 " — ^without reference to the supplementary thirteenth. When speaking of him as " a cunning Clerk and a very good Poet " he records the " rare wit and learning," with his nobility of birth, his episcopate, his strife, his flight, and death. There is, of course, no trace of actual knowledge of the work itself, but simply of the fact of Douglas having achieved it. Gilbert Gray Gilbert Gray, Principal of Marischal College,'' Aberdeen, followed Bale's reference. He says : " Anno proximo, scilicet 1521, Fatis concessit vir multigense Eruditionis ac magnum EcclesisB Lumen Oahinus Douglas, Episcopus Dunkeldensis, relicto post se uberi Ingenii f oetu scilicet . . . et venusto Carmine Patrio Sermone fideliter redditis Duadecim Libris i^neid6n Virgilii." He evidently wrote from memory, in general terms, as the custom was, and not from immediate knowledge, omitting reference to the supplement, but knowing of course the number of books in Virgil's original. It is very remarkable that, being an Aberdonian, he omits mention of Barbour in his oration. Leslie Leslie,' Bishop of Ross, wrote regarding Douglas : " Hie Vir, si se his tumultibus non immiscuisset, dignus profecto- fuisset, propter ingenii acumen acerrimimi ac memoria con- secraretur nostram linguam multis eruditionis suse monumentis illustrauit ; in quibus illud fuerat ingenii sui signum longe prsBclarissimum, quod Virgilii ^Eneidos nostro idiomate donauit, ea dexteritate, vt singuhs latinis versibus singuU scotici re- spondeant." Here, in a matter which he ought to have known, Leslie slips — a matter which, indeed, if he had really read the work he could scarcely have forgotten. He either knew his Douglas but did not know Virgil, or knew his Virgil — ^which is > Hittory of ScoUand, p. 307. * Oratio de JUvsiribus ScoUce Scriptoribtu, 1611. See Nioolson'a Scottish Hislorieal Library, p. 70, ed. 1776. Also Mackenzie's Lives and Characters of the Scottish Nation, vol i. p. xxx, 1708. > De Rebu4 Oestis Scotorum, lib. ix. p. 390. 1678. 12 The Man and his Fame much more likely to be certain — ^and followed the conventional idea about Douglas's work, namely, that the translation was a line for hne rendering, though Douglas especially disclaimed that idea in his Introductions and Epilogues. Leslie knows scarcely a hmit to his praise : "in Virgiho vertendo versuum suauitatem, sententiarum pondera, verborum significationes, ac singulorum pene apicum vim, nostra lingua plene enu- cleateque ; expresserit." Demfster Thomas Dempster,^ repeats the old convention as to the conspicuous mark of Douglas's translation, an instance of the perpetuation of errors, copied and handed on as a common heritage by successive compilers — " VirgiUi Opera Scotids Rythmis translata . . . mira ingenii felicitate, ut uersibus versus responderent, quod haud scio an exemplum habeat in antiquitate." Dempster was prone to writing without ex- actness or even without truth, and his Histmia is rich in mistakes. He had a remarkable career, seeming to pick and choose pro- fessorial chairs, from Paris to Pisa, till he died at Bologna as Professor of Humanities in 1625 ; and he rivalled Sir Thomas Urquhart in the exaggerations and forgeries which he per- petrated in order to magnify, in his case, not his own position, but the hterary glories of his native land. He apparently invented authors who never wrote, and books that never were written, so far at any rate as human knowledge goes. He quotes the authority of Polydore Vergil, Leslie, and George Buchanan, mistaking a reference of the latter as applying to Douglas, when it really apphes to Gavin Dunbar. David Buchanan David Buchanan,^ is an untrustworthy person, following all the errors of his predecessors, and adding nothing to the sum of knowledge regarding Douglas. He makes " Robert " Langland the author of Visio Petri Aratoris, and speaks of him as a Scotsman educated in Aberdeen, which is, perhaps, his ' Hiatoria Ecelesiastica Gentis Seotorum, 1627, p. 221. " 1590-1652. De Scriptoribus Scotis, ed. 1837, pp. 92-3. The Man and his Fame 13 greatest originality ; and he repeats the myth of verbal literal- ness which had become a kind of formula when mentioning Douglas. Hume of GodsGroft Hume of Godscroft ^ knew both Leslie and Buchanan pro- bably better than he knew Douglas, for he paraphrases both of them. He says : " His chiefest work is the translation of Virgil yet extant in verse, in which he ties himself so strictly as is possible, and yet it is so well expressed that whosoever shall assay to do the like will find it a hard piece of work to go through with. In his prologues before every Book, where he hath his liberties, he showeth a naturall and ample vein of poesie, so pure, pleasant, and judicious, that I believe there is none that hath written before or since but cometh short of him. And in my opinion there is not such a piece to be found as is his Pro- logue to the 8 Book, beginning (of Dreams and DriveUings, etc.) at least in our language." It is remarkable that he singles out, for special note, not one of those Prologues where Nature frowns or smiles in beautifully free painting, as though a man had sat down at his window to write them, or in the meadows face to face with her ; but the Prologue to the Eighth Book, which is of the most antique mould and deUberately archaic form. Calderwood and Anderson David Calderwood ^ quotes Douglas's translation with ap- proval, even though it had been done by a Bishop, and asserts him to have been " a good Poet in the Scots meeter." And his contemporary, Patrick Anderson,* went the full length which a man can go, and a little further than many would venture, when he says that Douglas was " the best poet in our vulgar tongue that ever was bom in our nation, of any before him." Both of these must have been interested in somewhat similar degree in the Bishop, for each of them had sufEered exile and persecution, and had known the himger for native land and the voice of home. • c. 1560-1630. History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus, ed. 1644. ' History, Kirk of Scotland, 1575-1650. » 1575-1623, nephew of Bishop Leslie. 14 The Man and his Fame In the seventeenth century Douglas was spoken of, borrowed from, and read by, an audience " fit though few." If Charteris had spoken of his style, it was his matter that now was his appeal to his readers. Drummond Thus, Drummond of Hawthomden,^ when Charles the First came to Edinburgh in 1633, set up in the midst of the street " a mountaine dressed for Parnassus," where Apollo and the Muses appeared, and ancient Worthies of Scotland noted for learning were represented : such as " Sedullius, Joannes Duns, Bishop Elphinstoun of Aberdeen, Hector Boes, Joannes Major, Bishop Gawen Douglasse, Sir David Lyndsay, Gleorgius Buchananus." The motto over them was " Fama super asthera noti." This shews where Drummond considered Douglas's place to be ; and he was there as a poet, above everything. To him, elsewhere ^ Douglas was " a man noble, vaUent, and learned, and an excellent Poet as his works yet extant testifie." Here it is, of course, plain that he is regarding him mainly from a personal point of view. He takes his poetic quaUty for granted, but he looks at the man first. In fact, the majority of later writers, as opposed to the earUer ones, refer to the poet rather than to the ecclesiastical poUtician, and probably to the poet who looked out with tender gaze on the landscape and the customs of his native land, and who died in exile ; which is almost the sum of modem knowledge regarding him. L'isle The seventeenth century saw a suddenly revived impulse towards the historic study of Anglo-Saxon ; and WilHam L'isle * whose interest was in the main along the line of Church History, pubhshed in 1623 a Treatise on ^Ifric's New Testament work. He teUs how he wished to unearth what treasures lay hid in Old Bnghsh ; and, in consequence of the dearth of grammars and dictionaries, he had approached the study through " Dutch, 1 1585-1649. Entertainment of the High and Mighty Monarch, etc. ^ History of the Five Jameses. 1655. ' 1579-1637. Title of second edition: Divers Ancient Monuments in the Saxon Tongue, 1638. The Man and his Fame 15 both high and low " ; and then he had read whatever he could find in Old English, of poetry and prose. " But the Saxon (as a bird flying in the aire farther and farther seems lesse and lesse) the older it was, became harder to bee understood. . . . At length I lighted on Virgil, Scottished by the Reverand Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld ... the best translation of that Poet that ever I read : and though I found that dialect more hard than any of the former (as nearer the Saxon, because farther from the Norman), yet with help of the Latine I made shift to understand it, and read the book more than once from the beginning to the end. Wherby I must confesse I got more knowledge that I sought than by any of the other. For, as at the Saxon invasion, many of the Britons, so, at the Norman, many of the Saxons fled into Scotland, preserving in that Realme imconquered, as the hne Royall, so also the language, better than the Inhabitants here, under conqueror's law and custom, were able." ^ A kindred purpose induced Franciscus Junius * to use Douglas's work in his study of Chaucer. " To the end of illustrating and so illuminating difficult and misimderstood passages, in Chaucer," he says, in a letter to Dugdale, February 1667-8 — " I hold the Bishop of Dunkeld his Virgihan trans- lation to be very much conducing . . . there is very good use to be made of him." ' Junius left some marginal notes on a printed copy of the ^neid in the Bodleian Library, and a manuscript, in the same place. Index Alphabdicus verborum obsoletorum quce occurrunt in versione Virgilii Mneadum per Gawenum Douglas cum relatione ad Paginas.* Ruddiman did not attach value to these. In this connection there may be mentioned an anonymous one leaf manuscript in the British Museimi, bound along with Spelman's Glossarium a/rchaiologicvmi (1644) entitled " A glossary to Gawin Douglas the famous Scottish poet, who wrote about the year 1490." 1 To the Reader, sec. 9. ' 1589-1677. Brother-in-law of Vossius. » Letter to Dugdale, Feb. 3, 1667-8. * Nicolson's Scottish Historical Library, 1776, p. 28. 16 The Man and his Fame Gibson In 1691, when Edmund Gibson,^ afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, published his famous edition of the Polemo Middinia and Christ's Kirk on the Green, he did so as an exercise and aid towards Anglo-Saxon study. He treated Douglas as a classic, in a manner that conferred for the first time such a distinction upon a Scottish poet. He used these poems very largely as an excuse for hanging upon them his studies and illustrations from Gothic, Cimbrian, Icelandic, and Old English. Hickes Dr George Hickes, in his monumental Thesaurus of scholarly research along this line,^ is emphatic when with pregnant brevity he says, of Douglas's work, " in versione Mneidos nunquam satis laudand§,." Nicolson Nicolson,' Bishop of Carlisle, in his gatherings * for his Historia Literaria Gentis Scotorum of 1702, refers to the Mnend as supporting the qualifications of Douglas to be the author of De B£ms Scoticis — ^a remarkable plea. He tells how he turned the Mneid in eighteen months' time " into most elegant Scotch verse, thereby wonderfully improving the language of his coimtry and age. One that was a good judge of the work assures us that it is done in such a masculine strain of true poetry that it may justly vie with the original ; every Une whereof is singly rendered and every word most appositely and fully." * . . . Here he is quoting Bishop Leshe, and repeating the familiar error. Sir Robert Sibbald Sir Robert Sibbald* acknowledges that he was waiting for the pubUcation of Nicolson's work before he completed his own account of the sixteenth century, in which he acknowledges his 1 1669-1748. " Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesauri Grammatico-Oritioi et Archseo- logici Pars Prima : seu Institutiones GrammatioBB Anglo-SaxonicEe & Mobbo- Gothiose. . . . Oxon. 1703, p. 128. ' 1655-1727. « Scot. Hist. Library, ed. 1776, p. 28. ' MS. Historia Literaria Oentis Scotorum. Advoc. Lib., Edinburgh. The Man and his Fame 17 indebtedness to Dempster, and to David Buchanan, whose style of Latin he calls " excellent." Unfortunately he leaned on an uncertain authority. In a letter to Wodrow he refers to an " Account of the writers of Divinity . . . done in our language for me by the Reverend Mr Lawrence Charteris to the year 1700." This may be included in a publication by James Maidment, published in 1833, from a Manuscript in Wodrow's writing, wherein is, among others, a brief notice of Douglas. George Mackenzie Doctor George Mackenzie,^ lifted wherever he saw fair spoil, and iacluded in his work a notice of Douglas, which owes an unacknowledged debt to Bishop Sage.^ Eighteenth-Century Nationalism In the eighteenth century Douglas was still one of the Scottish classics, and was read by such select souls as were sufficiently interested in things and men of the past ages, to take such trouble. Devotion to the Scots dialect had been a mark of patriotism at the time of the Reformation, as a protest against the " knap- ping of Southron," then in fashion, curiously enough, under Knox's influence, as we learn from a scornful reference by Ninian Winzet. In fact, the influence of the Reformation was really Anglic, copies of the Bible coming in from England, until the printing of the Bassandyne Edition in 1576-9, and even it is practically the Genevan scripture. In this connection John Hamilton, author of Ane Catholik and Facile Traictise (1581), had declared that it was actual treason even to print Scottish books in London, " in contempt of our native language." This became again prominent as a symbol of the same thing, after the Union of 1707 ; and with the Jacobite element of the nation was frequently, in fact, a political pose. By a curious irony, Douglas, who had fallen on the mortal edge of his desire for the Enghsh alliance, was actually looked ^ Lives and Characters of the most Eminent Writers of the Scots Nation, vol. ii., 1711, pp. 295-308. ^ Vide p. 19 infra. 18 The Man and his Fame upon at this time as a true representative of the Scottish spirit, by those who either forgot the story of the cause of his life's disaster, or conveniently closed an eye to its record. It was to the Jacobite section of the nation that the revival of dialect poetry and the interest in the older Scottish poets were due, and principally to Allan Ramsay, Hamilton of Gilbertfield, and Thomas Ruddiman. It is of no importance, except to show the spirit of the period, that, in the " Easy Club " in Edinburgh, the members called themselves by the names of old Scottish poets, Ramsay's title being " Gawain Douglas." Ramsay, in 1716, printed Christ^s Kirk on the Green, with a quotation from Gawain Douglas, in Greek characters,^ at the head of it ! The mistakes in printing this were regularly repeated in subsequent editions. Ruddiman Thomas Ruddiman's edition of Douglas's Mneid, in 1710, belonged also to this movement. It was the first since the Edition of 1553, on which it was based. Ruddiman, unfor- tunately, did not see the Ruthven Manuscript,^ the only one he knew, until forty-five pages of his folio had been printed, having only then learned that any manuscripts of the poem existed. He claimed the liberty of choosing between the printed version and the manuscript, with the residt that, not- withstanding the assertion in the title page that " innumerable and gross errors of the former edition have been corrected " by comparison with the Latin original and the Ruthven Manu- script, and " narrowly observing " the language of Douglas and his contemporaries, and that defects were supplied " from an excellent manuscript," he himself fell into many inaccuracies and made some readings of his own without authority. He corrected, as far as the metre allowed, the classical names which Douglas had frequently transformed. Robert Freebaim, the bookseller, t>ok the full merit for the edition, and thanked for ^ "KovcnSep lt vapikt piS atprfTjp $av 6715. OftX 07 ec ^\lvk £r\t iroerpL yor rev is r. AciryXas, The quotation ia fiom ProL L 107. » Vide p. 138 infra. The Man and his Fame 19 their help, Bishop Nicolson, Sir Kobert Sibbald, Dr Drummond, and Urry of Christ Church, Oxford. He also mentioned his indebtedness to Thomas Ruddiman, who really was the man that had supervised the whole work. Ruddiman kept a note, which is preserved, of his charge for correcting the book, writing the glossary, etc., which amoimted to forty-eight pounds Scots, or £8, 6s. 8d., a somewhat strange fee for the amount of know- ledge and special attainments which he had placed at the pubUsher's disposal. Well might the publisher recommend him to the notice of " the patrons of virtue and letters " as meriting " all respect and encouragement," a somewhat cheap way of passing on to others some of the burden of his own obhgations. Small ^ states that Urry had in some measure collated the Bath Manuscript for this edition. It is to be taken as following the printed version of 1553, in the main. Ruddiman added General Rules for understanding the Language of Bishop Douglas's translation of Virgil's Mneids. He also appended a Glossary, which is of note, as it was the foundation of Dr Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary of 1808.^ For this vocabulary he employed the aid of Hickes's Linguarum Veterum Septen- trionalium Thesaurus ; Ray's Collection of Local English Words ; Menage's Dictionaire Etymologique de la Langue Francoise ; Junius's Glossarium Gothicwm ; Vossius's de Vitiis Sermonis ; Du Fresne and Spelman's Glossarium Gothicum ; and " above all " Skinner's Etymohgicon Linguw Anglicance, on the whole a formidable body of learning and research. The Biography of the poet in this edition is by Bishop Sage, though printed anon3n3QOUsly. Sage's hfe is in regard to Douglas an Apologia pro vita, declaring him to have been " a wise Statesman, a faithful Counsellor, an excellent Patriot, a constant Friend, the Honour of his Country, the ornament of his Church, a Judge and Master of Polite Learning, and may be justly reckoned the best of Bishops and leamedest Man of his Age," a crescendo of praise difficult indeed to eclipse. It was based on all that was worthy before its time, except Bale's Catalogue of 1559 ; but 1 Edition 1874. ^ The copy of Ruddiman, with Jamieson's notes for his Dictionary, is in the hands of Mj Alexander Gardner, Publisher, Paisley. 20 The Man and his Fame Kuddiman quoted Bale's Summarium of 1548, along with the testimonies of Abbot Myln, Polydore Vergil, Bishop Leslie, and George Buchanan, and also used letters which were still in manuscript. Sage's Biography Sage, in enumerating Douglas's works, suggests that the AurecB Narrationes mentioned by Dempster and Vossius as by the Bishop is the same as the Comment referred to by Douglas himself, and he conjectures this to have been a treatise on " Poetical fictions of the Ancients, with an BxpUcation of their Mythology." We, of course, know that here Sage spoke in ignorance of what this Comment really was, as he had not either heard of or seen it. This biography was the first step towards a real, full, and modem life of the translator. Athenian Mercury It would be interesting if we knew who wrote, in the Athenian Mercury,^ quoted by Ruddiman, the recommendation that, in regard to secular poetry, people should read " old merry Chaucer, Gawin Douglas's .kneads (if you can get it) the best version that ever was, or, as we believe, ever wiU be, of that incomparable Poem." FawJces Across the Border the occasional interest in Douglas as a poet was at this time manifested when Francis Fawkes, Vicar of Orpington, in Kent, published a paraphrase of Douglas's twelfth Prologue, A Description of May ^ ; and also of the seventh Prologue, A Description of Winter. In regard to the former, he speaks of this flowery lay Where Splendid Douglas paints its blooming May. He gives also some account of the Scottish author ; and he printed the text and his own paraphrases on opposite pages, with a glossary. These appeared together in his Original Poems and Translations,^ in the company of Anacreon, Sappho, and others. ' Vol. 12, No. i., 24th October 1693. Conducted by Dunton, brother-in-kw of Samuel Wesley. Influenced The Taller. ' London, 1752; London, 1754. 3 jygj The Man and Ms Fame 21 Jerome Stone In our own country, a somewhat forgotten personality inter- esting in connection with the Ossianic tradition, Jerome Stone, Schoolmaster at Dunkeld, did a similar work for Douglas in his Description of a May Morning, which appeared in The Scots Magazine} where he designated the Twelfth Prologue as " the most pompous description of that enlivening season I ever met with." Stone stated that he had endeavoured to accommodate the delicacy of the performance to modern ears. He renders the first Unes thus : Aurora, joyful harbinger of day. Now from the skies had chased the stars away ; The moon was sunk beneath the western streams, And Venus' orb was shorn of half its beams, which may be compared with Douglas's — Dyonea, nycht bird, and wach of day, The stamys chasyt of the hevyn away. Dame Cynthia dovn roUyng in the see, And Venus lost the bewte of hir E. Here one sees all the difference between the eighteenth century poetic conventions and those of the nearer fringe of the Middle Ages, where, in the compass of four lines, Venus is twice referred to, first by the Ovidian epithet, and then by her own name. Douglas makes her planet the shepherd of the stars, who, watching on the verge of night, drives them into the fold when day takes up the vigil over the awaking world, closing her own eyes then in slumber, — a far richer and more intensely beautiful bit of poesy than the modem grasped in his paraphrase. Thomas Warton Thomas Warton, in his History of English Poetry,^ included certain of the Scottish poets, and printed a large part of Douglas's Prologues VII and XII, using for this the Edinburgh edition of 1710 by Ruddiman, and turning them inaccurately into English prose. He suggests that " a well-executed history of the Scotch poetry from the thirteenth century would be a valuable accession to the general literary history of Britain." He truly ^ Vol. xvii., 1756. " Vol ii., 1778, pp. 289-93. 22 The Man and his Fame says, further, " The subject is pregnant with much curious and instructive information, is highly deserving of a minute and regular search, has never yet been uniformly examined in its full extent, and the materials are both accessible and ample. Even the bare lives of the vernacular poets of Scotland have never yet been written with tolerable care : and at present are only known from the meagre outUnes of Dempster and Mackenzie." Perth Prologues The Prologues ^ were again offered to the public in 1786, with a reprint of the Police of Honour, by Morison of Perth. Thomas Gray But a far finer mind, and a truly great poet, was attracted to Douglas, in Thomas Gray,^ who, in his Sketch of a projected History of English poetry which he communicated to Warton, included the names of Douglas, Lyndsay, Bellenden, and Dunbar. Speaking of Spenser's Eclogue, August, he says, discussing English metre, " Bishop Douglas, in his prologue to the Eighth ^neid, written about eighty years before Spenser's Calendar, has something of the same kind." This can only mean that Spenser had written a poem in dialogue with a pastoral threnody in it, under the influence of very strong alliteration, for other- wise there is not the sUghtest resemblance. Gray spoke from memory. Nevertheless, if the Rev. Norton Nicholls, his intimate friend, in his Reminiscences, records him truly. Gray also followed the usual erroneous impression, which showed that he really had read about the poet but had not read him in the full translation of Virgil. For Nicholls says of Gray, " He was much pleased with Gawen Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, the old Scotch Translator of the Mneid, particularly with his poetical prefaces to each book, in which he had given Uberty to his muse, but has fettered himself in the translation by the obligation he has imposed on himself of translating the whole ' iv., vii., viii., lii., and xiii. ^ 1716-1771. Vide Mitford's Edition, vol. v., 1843, pp. 242-53. Also Tovey's LetUrs of Thomas Gray, vol ii. p. 280, 1904. The Man and his Fame 23 poem in the same number of verses contained in the original," ^ — ^a purpose which, of course, never had any existence. James Sibbald James Sibbald,^ gives abridged examples of Prologues IV, VIII, XII, and XIII, and certain specimens of the Mneid, with a note on the language of Doi^las. Pinkerhm John Pinkerton,^ the savage critic of all men's work but his own, declared that Prologues Seven, Twelve, and Thirteen, " yield to no descriptive poems in any language." Yet he had a painful fear of the vulgar tongue. He protested that his work amongst the relics of ancient Scottish poetry was not intended to prolong the Ufe of the dialect, — " None can more sincerely wish the total extinction of the Scottish colloquial dialect than I do." He speaks of Scotticisms as barbaric, and mocks at the Edinburgh idioms. He wishes Scots to be maintained as an old poetical language ; and so he preserves the old spelUngs studiously, to take it " out of the hands of the vulgar." He selected from the Maitland Manuscript, in his work. He pro- posed to issue the seven poets of Scotland whom he considered to be truly classical, namely, Dunbar, Drummond, Douglas, James I, Barbour, Lyndsay, and BUnd Harry ; and he in- tended in this project to omit all of Douglas's Mvieid work except the Prologues. Ritson Joseph Ritson,* his rival, agreed with him in regard to the place of Douglas, but went further than Pinkerton, for he speaks of " the admirable translations of Douglas." To all the writers of modem times, it is as the poet that Douglas stands out clearly in the hght, and in association with Dunkeld ; as when George Dyer writes — But thou, as once the muaes' favourite haunt, Shalt live in Douglas' pure Virgilian strain. 1 Mitford's Edition, voL v. p. 36, 1843. * 1745-1803. Vide Chronicle, voL i, 1802 ; also voL iv. pp. xW-vl » 1758-1826. Vide Ancient Scoitish Poems, n86. « 1752-1803. 24 The Man and his Fame In the anonymous poem prefixed to Alexander Eoss's Helenore (2nd Edition, 1778), and attributed to Beattie, Douglas is spoken of as " that pawky priest." The picture of Scott is, however, usually accepted as the portrait of the poet-bishop — More pleased that in a barbarous age He gave rude Scotland Virgil's page, Than that beneath his rule he held The bishopric of fair Dunkeld.* The ecclesiastic, tossed in the swelter of squabble for preferment, and the poUtician, wading in plots with the Enghsh Court, have dropped aside. And so a gentler thought has clothed the memory of Gawain, the VirgiUan student, who in rude times brought the Koman into touch with the poetry of our Northern land. NOTE Alter Ruddiman's edition the next in point of time is that of the text only, printed from the Cambridge Manuscript in two volumes, in 1839, and published by the Bannatyne Club. In 1874 appeared the edition of the complete works, by John Small, LL.D., Librarian of the University of Edinburgh, in four volumes, the ^neid covering ii., iii. and iv. This edition is annotated, and has intro- ductions, with fascimiles in lithograph, and certain letters printed for the first time. The Editor states that his edition is printed from the Elphynstoun Manuscript, but this is a statement of intention and not of execution. An edition by the Scottish Text Society is being prepared. Douglas is dealt with in David Irving's History of Scottish Poetry (1861), chapter xii. ; in Dr John M. Ross's Scottish History and Idteratwe (1884), chapter vii. : T. P. Henderson's Scottish Vernacular Literature (1910), chapter vii. : Gregory Smith, M.A., in The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. ii., chapter x. The article in the Endydoposdia Britannica, tenth edition, is by Dr Small, that in the latest edition is by Gregory Smith ; and there are brief notices in the Imperial Dictionary of Biography, Chambers's Dictionary, and others. Under this general heading fall the Introduction by Andrew Lang, in Ward's Poets : W. A. Neilson in Origins and Sources : also an introduction in E3rre Todd's Abbotsford Poets : and Geddie's excellently useful Bibliography of Middle Scots (Scottish Text Society). ' Marmion, Canto vi. st. 11. II THE MAN AND HIS WORK To set a poet like Gawain Douglas in his place demands a careful glance before and after. A man and his work are inevitably beset by the environment and circumstance of his time. A period of quick activities may snatch away his Ufe and thought from the levels of their beginnings, and swing them forward and upward, as into a new world with farther horizons and wider vistas than he has known hitherto, if he be not an originator of those very in- fluences. Or it may sUp its hold upon him. Or himself may falter, looking over his shoulder, and he may return to the Cities of the Plain. " And his works do follow him." Or he may abide Uke a fossil in the centre of great growth, recording an arrest in a life's development. Erasmus the Humanist, — who raised his foot and let the tide of the Reformation rim away from under, imuplifting, — and all such souls, who seem «ither to resist the jog and tug of a new period of fresh-thought impulse, or who seem too deeply rooted in the past to be lifted into the future that calls the awaking world to move onward, always give pause for judgment, to the estimating mind of the recorder of men and matters. Gawain Douglas had the rising "waters of the new birth-time of the world all about him ; and we cannot help but wonder how much of their far cry found response in his heart, and timed the message and meaning of his thought. How does he stand in relation to it, with his life and work ? The Renaissance The Renaissance itself is not easily defined. There had been, in different lands, episodes with its mark upon them,^grey hints of the dawn, with crimson touches on the clouds, that 26 The Man and his Work faded into grey again. A partial Revival of Letters manifested itself in the twelfth century, when the works of Aristotle were discovered ; and the labours of Grosteste and Roger Bacon, with the foundation of the Universities, were signs of awakening. But these fell into the hands of the Churchmen and Scholastics, whose conservatism numbed the enthusiasms and delayed the dawn. The Renaissance is generally tmderstood to be the outbreak of the human spirit into freedom of thought and utterance ; the love of everything beautiful and true, for its own sake ; the enrichment of life by the advent of the natural and spon- taneous ; the dissatisfaction of the mind with the cold and trite ; and the protest against convention which, like a desert wind, withered thought upon its stalk. The joy of existence broke into the wilderness of stereotj^e with a fresh interpreta- tion of human experience. It turned the soul toward the fountains of reality, wherein lay the deep sources of truth and poesy. The Renaissance meant, first of all, a recognition of the Ufe of humanity, pagan in its revulsion from mediaeval mysticism, and its rebellion against the bondage of the other world, the conventions of Allegory and Theological symboUsm. It de- manded that knowledge of the best literary monuments of " the golden past of classical antiquity," which gave birth to the Revival of Letters, when the faith and the literature of days long dead were bom again into the later day. This was what Cyriac of Ancona meant when he said, "I go to awaken the dead." It was a quest after the wisdom of the past to enrich and enlighten the present. And it passed on to an elevation of the vernacular as a Uterary medium. We see in Douglas's work the touch of the last set of these influences, though scarcely the mark of the first. The Renaissance was not the clock striking a definite hour in the fifteenth century. It was a movement, — ^not a moment ; a process rather than an explosive event. Men could not set their watches by it, but they could float their spiritual emprise upon it. It did not come Uke one wave. The breathing of a great, far-drawn, on-pressing tide made itself felt through long The Man and his Work 27 prepaiation. The atmosphere and life of the period were gradually saturated by a new spiritual influence. An all-per- vading general uplift was felt, and it spoke through poets as widely apart as Dante and Langland. The Revival of Learning, consequent upon the Fall of Con- stantinople in 1453, which scattered the Greek scholars over Europe, with their classical treasures and erudition, is generally thought of as the Renaissance, but this was only one of the results of the vast movement. " The Candles of the Renaissance " The key to the Renaissance is naturally found in Italy. In fact it was only in Italy or Greece that a rebirth was possible. The Commedia of Dante Ahghieri, the Sonnets of Petrarch, and the Decamerone of Boccaccio are the monuments of the literary awakening. Petrarch was, in an especial sense, the awakener of mediaeval Europe from its sleep. Into his life came the influence of Boccaccio, whom he met in Naples when on an embassy from the Papal court in 1343 ; and one of his best pieces of work was a Latin version of Boccaccio's Griselda. Yet, though Boccaccio helped him, he also helped Boccaccio, by turning him towards ancient sources of culture.^ His was pre-eminently the spirit of true scholarship, under the touch of which the age quickened, and found a new, fresh, simny, and onward-moving activity. From Italy the movement spread, like a sunrise, through Germany, France, and England; and the best works of Italy were thus passed on to Scotland, with the classics. Petrarch the Awakener Bom in 1304, Petrarch became, by deliberate choice, a man of letters and a scholar, refusing his father's soUcitations to follow his own profession of law, and resisting temptations of ecclesiastical and scholastic positions which must have led to the very highest preferments in his age. Unlike Douglas, he kept himself disentangled from what might hinder his poetic and literary pursuits, avoiding thus the risks of distracting ^ See his Epiatles generally. 28 The Man and his Work ambitions and the jealousies of smaller minds. In 1337 he sought the touch of Nature in solitary study and reflection. This was the quickening thing which gave its most telling impulse to the new Thought. Nature Vision The text of his oration, when he was laureated at the Capitol in April 1341 : Sed me Pamasi deserta per ardua dtilcis raptat amor,^ -was the keynote of the new age, whose characteristic was a " passion for Parnassus," uplifting hearts, as with the spirit of ■Spring, out of the hard-beaten tracts of old-time conventions. This love of the wild, combined with the expression of the sympathetic fallacy in verse, iinds a kind of maxim utterance in Lorenzo de' Medici's lines : Non di verdi giaidin, omati, e colti . . . Ma in aspre selve, e valli ombrose colti. Sospir d'amore . . . L'aure son sute, e pianti d'Amor I'acque. It was this impulse which moved Bernardo Pulci to translate, in 1470, the Eclogues of Virgil, the first attempt to render the classics into the Italian language. The same spirit impelled Pietro Aretino to declare, " Nature, of whose simplicity I am the secretary, dictates what I set down before me " ; and stirred Politian to feel it was Nature and Youth that turned him to translate Homer's epic of the struggles of men near the world's dawn. In Douglas's Mneid, also, when his own voice speaks, and «specially in his Prologues, we find the open-air vision char- acteristic of the new time ; though in him are found, also, some of the older framework of mediaeval conventions. These things were amongst the stock materials of poetry, then ; and a poet would have seemed odd amongst his fellows, not to have adopted them. He had, of course, the dialect and imagery of his predecessors and contemporaries pressing around him. And though to later generations these mediaeval furnishings and materials had become trite, and worn to the bone, they ^ Georgics iii. 291. The Man and his Work 29 were in his day fresh enough to those who used them. The time came when a protest had to be made against them, as in King James VI's Reulis and Cautelis of Scottis Poesie} which, though a juvenile work, had much good sense in it. The royal critic warns the poets : " Descryve not the morning, and rysing of the Sunne, in the preface of your verse ; for thir thingis are sa oft and dyverselie written upon be Poets already that gif ye do the lyke it will appeare ye bot imitate, and that it cummis- not of your awin invention." This was just and soimd criticism in the seventeenth century, but would have been a literary heresy in the early sixteenth. The search for the Norm The influence of Petrarch as a humanist was, in reality, greater than as a poet, and it touched the later day of the singers of the remoter North. For he brought the scholars of his own time into direct contact with the scholarship of classical times, and gave a guiding impact to literary enquiry. He was the pioneer in the collection of hbraries, in the study and com- parison of manuscripts, and in the recognition of authorities, himself receiving manuscripts of Homer and Plato from Nicolaus Syocerus of Constantinople. His influence was seen in the indefatigable restlessness of the scholars, searching everywhere for the hidden treasures of the classics, — men like Poggio,^ who unearthed in the Monastery of St Gall the com- plete copy of QuintiUan, and the first three and part of the fourth books of the Argonautica, " not in the Ubrary but in a dark and filthy dungeon at the bottom of a tower," succeeding also in securing for Rome, by the hands of Nicholas of Treves, the first complete copy of Plautus, and dragging out of their hiding-places Lucretius, Sihus Italicus, Columella, and ap- parently also the poems of Statins, as commemorated in the elegy by Landinus, declaring how these notables had been brought as guests out of gloom into undying light, — Poggius at sospes aigia e caligine tantas Ducit ubi seternum lux sit aperta viros. And Guarino Veronese,^ returning with his recovered wonders, ' 1584. Vide Arber's Reprint. * 1380-1459. » 1370-1460. 30 The Man and his Work himself losing all, and the world losing so much, by shipwreck, reveals but a part of the adventure of scholarship seeking after truth in this time of dawn. The Classical Revival The sensuously beautiful, revealed in the dawning hght of the new age, was like a fresh creation. It demanded a new expression. The divine seemed to be splendidly humanized, and loved for its own sake. It required a wide channel for its exercise. Homo swm, humani nihil a me alienum puto ^ was the Humanist's maxim and aspiration, and it led him by the only door of escape from the anarchy of his times, torn between feudalism and ecclesiasticism, and the failure of each of these to foster the highest in the soul of man and of society. The result was an almost fevered revival of classical learning. Each land and each generation took its own way through the magic forest. The wine of the fountain of Bacbuc tasted different in the mouth of every man that drank it,^ but it gave each a sense of beauty ; a realization of his own power, individuality, and dignity ; the acknowledgment of Nature ; and the re- estabUshment of joy in life. The Individual Liberty In the first burst of freedom that broke like a new creation out of the shadow-land of Thought, some men leapt into licence ; and of this Poggio's Facetiarum Liber, with Beccadelh's Herma- phroditus were notorious examples. In such a movement it is the new man as much, almost, as the new Letters, that becomes manifest, with the glow of anticipation on his face and the voice of the morning in his utterance. He will not be found haunting graves, but, Uke Adam, outside of old fenced gardens, turning over the soil of a new earth, creatingly, though it may be, reveahng much that is not lovely, in the labour of it. Villon and Dunbar are perhaps as interesting in this respect as Petrarch, set up against the level of Medisevahsm. In them you find the directness of outlook, the individuahty of inter- ^ Terence : Heaut. i. 1-25. ' Rabelais : Oargantua and Pantagrud, bk. v. c. 42. The Man and his Work 31 pretation, the free step marching to fresh music, no longer hobbling to trite tags of conventional measures, no more a thing of ghosts, but of the living soul,^ — men whose every word proves how the old conventions have palled, that poesy is no longer a thing of draping lay figures in a fresh robe, or the re- petition of the shibboleths of his predecessors. Though Villon was mediseval in form and knowledge he was renascent in reahsm and self-revelation. These went with their own basket to the table of the gods, carried their own pitcher to the well of Parnassus, and, traversing fresh ground of Nature and humanity as personal explorers, speak in the voice of the Rebirth, the Renaissance of Thought and Ait, seeking for the reality of things. Such influences are seen in the light of very clear contrast in the second part of Le Roman de la Rose. The first part,^ by de Lorris, 4000 Unes, under the influences of Ovid and Chretien de Troyes, was intended to be a kind of Art of Love, clothed in the characteristics of its time, formal, learned, and allegorical. But when Jean de Meung,* forty years later, added his 18,000 fines, he poured into this mass not only the scholastic learning of the Middle Ages, but also that encyclopaedic and heterogeneous knowledge and voluminous thought characteristic of the new age, and far ahead of his own, in its intellectual tendency; while underlying it all was his doctrine of the Worship of Nature, setting him in the light as a forerunner of the Renaissance. This mental activity fell to nought amid the stormy confusions in France of the Hundred Years' War, followed by the disasters of civil war, which left the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries probably the most barren of her fiterary periods. This gave the classics a new signi- ficance for the hearts of men. And Douglas was one of those whose heart was turned towards that quest, as towards a land of sealed temples, and places where Truth lay waiting for the awaking touch. The Renaissance at first led to disdain of the vernacular, beUeving that cultured thought could find fit clothing only in the tongue of the ancient masters, the cosmopolitan medium of Uterary feeling. We find Douglas's fear of the 1 c. 1237. ' 1250-1305. 32 The Man and his Work uncopiousness of the Scots mother-tongue in the author of The Complaynt of Scotlande, and elsewhere, a fear also which shrank as from lowering the work of the classical writers into the vulgar medium. Petrarch and Boccaccio valued their own vernacular works at a cheaper rate than those in the classical tongue, and their influence helped the contempt of the vulgar phrase. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, however, Lorenzo de' Medici and PoUtian, having absorbed the beauty and excellence of classical Uterature, handed it forward in the chaste and natural sweetness and power of the vernacular. The Awakening of the Vernacula/r The hunger of the classics opened the door which a dead language barred, and its influence enriched the style, the literary form, and the vernacular. It is true that at first there was a crushing and distortion of expression into Latin mould, futile for final utility, as regards Uterary purpose, but yet helping towards elasticity of phrase and quickening of mentality, and prompting to analysis of the records of human passion and achievement. The influence of the Rhetoriqudres was felt in this, in their effort to enrich and improve the mother-tongue for literary purposes by Latinisms, and they affected strongly the writing of the early sixteenth century, though they also carried forward the mediaeval allegory and metrical intricate forms. It stirred a new and deepening desire to use the vernacular as a medium of literary expression. This arose from the yearning to lead the heart of the world to the truth which heretofore had been reached only by the learned. Truth, and the joy of humanity, were to be within the right of all, and no longer the privilege of the few. More than once Douglas ex- presses this as his ideal in his work. Nevertheless it needed courage, and a defence. In this respect Lorenzo de' Medici, speaking of the astonishing power of the vernacular, shows, as if it were a discovery, in Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the three " candles of the Eenaissance," how these have fully proved with what facihty The Man and his Work 38 the Italian tongue may be adapted to the expression of every sentiment. In Dante, he says, " we shall find in perfection those excellencies which are dispersed among the ancient Greek and Boman writers." ^ He compares Petrarch's treatment of love with that by Ovid, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, or any other of the Latin poets ; while he holds Boccaccio to be un- rivalled " not only on account of the invention he displays, but also for the copiousness and elegance of his style. ... So considering, we may conclude that no language is better for the purpose of expression than oui own." Leo Battista Alberti ^ also defended and developed his mother-tongue, from the point of view that a dead language cannot suffice for adequate ex- pression of the living thought of a living people : and forsaking Latin as a medium he used the vernacular. In this way, and by such men, the work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio was continued and lifted into recognition by all as employing an instrument of dignified literary utterance. We find also cor- roboration in a true note struck by Joachim du Bellay, in the middle of the sixteenth century, in his tractate,* so full of the spirit of modernity, wherein he endeavours to shew that the French tongue may not only become a literary medium, but as a living thing may receive enrichment as well. If anywhere, we find in this a sense of what was the critical and creative impulse of the Benaissance, in the attempt to bring native culture into touch with that of the classical age reborn into his own time. He protests against the idea that the Greek and Latin languages were the last repositories of full utterance and of perfect taste. And he objects to culture being kept, like a curio in a casket, imprisoned in Greek and Latin books, instead of being restored as from the dead, and sent forth into the region of living utterance on words that should wing their daily course along the lips of men. He deprecates the neglect by Frenchmen of anything written in their own language, and laments the common idea that the vulgar tongue is contemptible. He pleads that in one's mother tongue are found ahke the ' Oommento di Lorenzo. Ed. Aldo., 1554. ' 1405-1472. • Iia Deffense et lUiutration de la Langue Fratifoyee. Cf. Speroni's defence of the Italian tongue. Vide Villey's Edition of du Bellay. 1908. a 34 The Man and his Work greatest freedom for the utterance of passion and the finest music for such expression. What he says here is of universal application. It had been implied in Douglas's labour, and was said, in efEect, by Lyndsay, and acted upon by him. The author of the Prologue to The Testament of Love ^ summed up the same cause when he wrote : " Let then clerkes enditen in Latin, for they have the propertie of science and the knowing in that f acultie ; and lette Frenchmen in their French also enditen their queint terms, for it is Mndely in their mouths ; and let us shew our fantasies in such wordes as we lemeden of our dames tongue." We find this feeling even in the letter of the Earl of March in 1400 ^ who, writing to King Henry IV of England, had excused his use of EngUsh, as being " mare cleir to myne understandyng than Latyne or Fraunche." Douglas had the same hope as those others for his native language, though he tried to enrich it too speedily by the in- troduction of terms and phrases which remained aUens in their Scottish environment. In his page we find a fresh and in- dividual attempt to create a new vehicle of utterance, though he does not shake himself away from the ancient influence, because Uke many in other lands in his day, he cannot quite liberate his tongue from the thought that common speech is not fit worthily to express the idea of the sublime, and the majesty of divinely passionate experience. Douglases Work The translation of the Mneid was begun, according to Douglas's own statement, in 1512, and it was finished, as he says in his epilogue, Apon the fest of Mary Magdelan, Era CrjBtis byrth — ^the dait quha list to heir, A thousand fyve himdreth and thretteyn zeir,' that is to say, on 22nd July 1513, two months before Flodden's sorrow. Douglas attributes the credit of the initiation of the work to his cousin Henry, Lord Sinclair, under whose protection ' Long attributed to Chaucer : now decided to be by Thomas Usk, executed in 1386. » National MSS. of Scotland, 1870, vol. ii. ' Tyme, etc., 2. The Man and his Work 35 he places himself against carping critic and unkind backbiter. Alas ! his noble patron was amongst the brave who fell at Flodden, so his book had to stand upon its own merits. Henryson had made the same excuse in his Dedication of the Fables : Nocht of my self for vane piesumptioun, Bot be requeist and Precept of ane Lord . . . whether a genuine plea or a poetic shelter cannot be decided, although it was the tradition of poets, in accordance with which even Virgil himself began the Mneid to please a patron. Douglas pleads that his translation, though begun on the request of his relative and patron, was in reaUty but the ful- filment of a promise made to Venus, in the Palice of Honour, when he undertook to translate a book in her name ; and, in rendering the story of ^neas her son into the Scottish tongue, he had now kept his word. The poets were, of course, imiquely the devotees of Venus, love being so largely the staple of their verse, — and the singers of France, in an especial degree, were in this category. Gower, in his Confessio Amantis, makes the goddess herself say : And grete wel Chaucer when ye mete. As my disciple and my Poete.^ And the convention had a hardy life. Douglas's reference, shorn of its poeticism, seems simply to indicate that he had kept in contemplation, at any rate, the work which now he issues to the world. In his Dedication, or Dyrectioun, he says he now fulfills his aid promyt Quhilk I hir maid weil twelf zheris tofor : As wytnessith my Palyce of Honour.^ He had promised it : Sum tim efter, quhen I hav mair lasier.^ As with John Milton, the shadow of a great purpose had floated before his imagination through the progress of his earlier laboirrs. He was " midway on the journey of his Ufe " when he finished 1 MS. HarL 3490. " Dyrectioun, 120. » Palice of Honour, Small, voL L, p. 66, L 20. 36 The Man and his Work his translation in 1513,^ and he bade farewell to poesy when he laid down his pen. He stakes his all upon it. Thus vp my pen and instrumentis full zore On VirgiUis post I fix for evinnore Nevir from thens syk materia to disoryve. My muse sal now be cleyn contemplatyve, And solitar, as doith the byrd in cage. Sen fer bywom is all my childis age, And of my days neir passyt the half dait That natur sidd me grantyn, weil I wait.* He may in this have recalled the tradition that Virgil himself had also intended on the completion of his masterpiece to leave the pnisuit of poetry and devote himself to philosophy. Douglas's Ajwlogia He gives his pleas for having laboured as he had done. His work will give innocent pleasure to many. It will enable them to pas the tyme and eschew idylnes.' But it will also, he justly claims, be of use as an educational medium, at a period when the Latin tongue was, in fact, the main vehicle of instruction. It will be of advantage to those who wald Virgill to childryn expone.* And, from the Church Councils of the age in which he wrote, it may be gathered, as by an intelligent eavesdropper, that the inferior clergy had little enough grasp of the classical tongue, many of them being scarcely conversant with their liturgy, much less with the great Latin literature which was the staple of mediaeval culture.* He feels that he may, by right, expect gratitude from them at least. Thank me, thaifor, masteiis of grammar sculys, Quhar ze syt techand on zour benkis and stulys, Thus haue I nocbt my tyme swa occupy That all suld hald my laubour onthryfty.' * Goncljisioune, 19. » lb. 13. ' Dyreciioun, 40. ♦ /6. 43. ' See Statutes of the Scottish Church, 1225-1559, Scottish History Society ed. Dr Patrick, 1907, p. 84. The preamble of the Statutes of the Provinoia C!ouncil held in BlacbiriaT's Church, Edinburgh, 27th November 1549, acknow ledges " crass ignorance of literature and of the liberal arts " as one of the causes of dissensions and occasions of heresies. Vide Hay Fleming's Reforma- tion in ScoUand, 1910, c. iii. • Dyrectioun, 47. The Man and his Work 37 It was not undertaken as a refuge from idleness, but as the task of a loving heart in scanty leisure. Douglas tells us how it for othir gret occupatioun lay Onsteryt clos besyd me mony day.* Whatever that " othir gret occupatioun " was, while he was engaged upon this work he must have used special diligence, for he tells us, also, as God lyst len me grace It was compylit in auohtejrn moneth space.' It may be concluded from internal evidence that he began the Seventh Prologue in June 1512 : wrote the twelfth Book in May, and the Mapheus Book in June, 1513. And, gathering from his own words that he was hindered for two months,^ it would seem that he took ten months to the first Six Books, and eight to the concluding Seven of the translation. He apologizes for its unrevised and unpolished condition, feeling that gret scant of tyme and bissy cuyr Has maid my wark mair subtell and obscur And nocht sa plesand as it aucht to be.* The work itself does bear proofs, in many ways, of haste and lack of revision, but apologies on such grounds were the common pleas of all the poets of the time. Notwithstanding this, he has the author's pride in his own offspring, which resents, while it fears, meddlesome editing : for he appeals to writers and readers to give the book a fair chance — nother maggil nor mysmetir my ryme, Nor altir not my wordis I zow pray.' He makes an appeal, above all, to those who are expert in poesy, — ^those who are entitled to claim skill in the critical art, — to authorities rather than to authority, a poet's rather than a churchman's cry — Sure capitall in veyn poeticall.* He leaves the work to their judgment, after they have read it through. The sense of their sympathy then assured, he is 1 Tyme. etc., 5. • lb. 12. ' lb. 13. * lb. 17. * Tyme, 24. Cf. Chaucer. — Preye I to God that non myswrite the, Ne the mya-metero. Troylut and Creseide, V. 1809. ' Dyrectioun, 57. 38 The Man and his Work blinded to all shame in his task, and he offers himself willingly to the " weiriours," or doubters and cavillers, QuhOk in myne E fast staiis a mote to spy.^ He heeds not Quha sa lawohis heirat, or hedis noddis,' nor does he intend to trouble himself quhidder fulys hald me deviU or sanct.' He has in this the spirit so fearlessly reflected in Sir John Trevisa's Epistle : " as God granteth me grace, for blame of backbiters will I not blinne ; for envy of enemies, for evil spiting, and speech of evil speakers, will I not leave to do this deed." It is fine to encounter a man who has faith in himself and his work. A man dedicated to his purpose touches the world to consecration and sacrifice. There is a great inspiration in every " Ego Athanasius contra mundum." His Critics He had apparently plenty of harsh contemners, who cen- sured him for wasting good time in the work ; and he feels that he has suffered somewhat in consequence, — Quhairthrow I haue wrocht myself syk dispyte.* It was doubtless considered, by many, a vain and futile labour to be dallying with fenzeit fabillys of idolatry.' What dealt with gods and children of the gods fell under this category, " for all the gods are idols dumb." By this work, considered by so many to be but misdirected industry he had been, in the eyes of some, degrading his office, and making of himself, as he puts it, a butt to shoot at. This fear of blame for spending serious time in bringing before his period what so many seemed to think lying and obsolete superstitions and myths about persons that had never existed, had quite obviously been haunting him pretty closely, > Dyreciioun, 66. « lb. 67. ' lb. 71. ■* lb. 20. » lb. 26. The Man and his Work 39 and may have had some effect in causing him to follow certain modifications of a religious kind, quite in the spirit of the scholars of other countries. Further, for friendship's sake, and loyalty to his patron, not for reward or praise, he had laboured, for he is no " cayk fydler," no soming minstrel strumming for a meal. He is a friend writing for a friend, and trying to liberate a poet, locked up in a scholar's language, away from the general mass of the people. He thinks these should be the better for a share in the poetic delight and the moral guidance to be derived from the loosening of his thought into the vernacular. In fact, he is making Virgil tree to all who list to read him, if they be athirst for his rich spirit. And it is no inferior poet whom he has translated, bringing forward out of obscurity Na meyn endyte, nor empty wordis vayn, Common engyn, nor stile barbarian.' He has led the majestic flood of noblest eloquence, in piofund and copyus plenitude,' over the levels of his native plains enrichingly. And here he seems to have touched Dante's Or se' tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte Che'spande di parlar si largo fiume ? . . . Yet, while he is confident of the merits of his labour, he is prepared for the accuracy of his rendering being questioned. He knows how detractouris intil euery place Or evir thai reid the wark byddis bym the buke,' cruelly spying out deficiencies, and crowing over their discoveries of faults, sayand in euery manis face, Lo, heir he failzeis, sa thair he leys, luyk.* These, however, he challenges to go and do better for themselves. At any rate, he declares, if in a phrase here and there he may have erred, the sense of the poet he has truly grasped. ' Dyrectioun, 53. ' lb. 56. ' Exclamatioun, 11. * lb. 17. 40 The Man and his Work The Apologies of Poets In all this, although what he says and hints may have been quite true, he more or less followed a fashion, examples of which can be plentifully found in the current Uterature of his time.* Thus,— in the Prologue of the Persones Tale, — Chaucer says : this meditacioun I put it ay under correcoioun Of clerkes, for I am not textuel ; I take but the sentens, trusteth wel, Therfor I make protestacioun That I wol stonde to correccioim. The same kind of conventional humility is to be found in Henryson's Prologue to his Fables, where, having duly apologized for his " rudenesse," he pleads. And if I faile, bi cause of ignorance. That I erre in my translaoioun, Lowly of hert and feythful obeisaunce I me submyli to theyr correcioun To theym that have more cUere inspecioun. In matiers that touchen poyetry And to reforme, that they me not deny. Wyntoun, in his Orygynalle Chronykil, has the same throb. My wit I ken sa skant thartill That I drede sair thame till ofiend That can me and my work amend . . . For as I said, rude is my wit. . . . Even the modern translator had the same mind, and makes the same claim as Douglas, when he writes, " I acknowledge that I have not succeeded in this attempt, according to my desire ; yet shall I not be wholly without praise if in some sort I may be allowed to have copied the clearness, purity, easiness, and the magnificence of his style," ^ — at once an apology and an assurance of the deepest and the highest, combined ; perhaps a little turned towards the " pride that apes humility," probably pardonable in poets. A poet is, perhaps, not always to be taken exactly at his word when he speaks either of his humility or incapacity. And Douglas's protestations may very well mean, " I know what I * And earlier ! See the prologue of the grandson of Jesus the Son of Sirach, regarding his translation of Ecclesiaaiicus from Hebrew into Greek, 130 b.c. Cf . also Abacuo Bysett's Rolment of Courtes. « Dryden's Preftux. The Man and his Work 41 have achieved. Hands off from meddling." A poet, then as now, may say, " It is a poor thing, but mine own," and so be ready to defend his offspring to the last extreme. Genius is, of course, both modest and self-assertive. It touches the former things and is touched by them, while it must make the venture of faith into the new. And so, while it feels its wings, it must at the same time be conscious that its footing is unsteady. Even Virgil had not the self-assurance of Horace or of Douglas in regard to the abidingness of the fruit of his labour. In fact, in a letter written to Augustus, which Macrobius quotes, he spoke of his having undertaken a work so immense as the Mneid, in a moment of folly, — paene vitio mentis. In effect, however, it is what Eossetti's plea amounts to, when that poet speaks of his own translations as " not carelessly undertaken, though produced in the spare time of other pursuits more closely followed " ; while he assures the reader that " on the score of care at least he has no need to mistrust it." ^ The old proud spirit which, at a later period, made a great race ^ write on the walls of their dwelling-places, — " Thai say. Quhat say thai ? Lat thaim sai," supported Douglas as he declared, quhen all thar rerd is rong. That wycht mon speke that can uocht hald hys tong.' Though he has spoken somewhat doubtfully of the criticism that awaits him, and the carping time through which he has persevered, he yet has the true poet's confidence in his achievement : now ankyrrit is our bark, We dowt na storm, our cabiUys ar sa stark.* Douglas felt the labour of translation a heavy task indeed. He speaks thankfully of the finish of the lang desparit wark. And he was not alone in thus deploring the drudgery of it. * Intioduction, Earlg Italian Poet*. • The Keiths, Earls MarischaL ' Exdamatioun, 35. * lb- 4. 42 The Man and his Work Elphynstoun, the transcriber of the manuscript called after him, in Edinburgh University, after writing Explicit Liber Decimus tertius Eaeados, expressed his deepest feelings on finishing his transcription, in the pregnant phrase — Quod Bocardo et Baroco. These are the mediaeval names of the two hardest forms in Logic, from which whoso was entrapped into them found utmost ■difficulty in escaping ; atnd this seems to cover the emotions of the wearily thankful scribe. Churchmen and Virgil Alongside of Douglas's apologies we must of course remember that the only fit critics of such works as his, were Churchmen ; and that, in their eyes, the Latin tongue was too sacred to be lightly touched ; while there was also that ecclesiastical pre- judice against the vernacular, which made a translator be looked upon as one who was casting pearls before swine. Besides, in the Middle Ages, Virgil, — as with so many whose «xceUing natural abilities were explained as being due to trans- actions with the shady side of the other world, — ^had, through many strange mutations, become, in the common view a mythical philosopher and magician. An entirely false scheme of biography had rooted itself, in regard to him, in the popular imagination.^ Tales of magic, of the most fatuous kind, obscured the character of the poet; and this distorted fame spread over Europe. Petrarch was amongst the earliest of his defenders against these ridiculous calumnies; while, in 1630, Gabriel Naude defended many of the famous men whose names had been associated with legends of the Black Art, — ^ Vide Letter from Chancellor Conrad, 1194, reproduced in Arnold of Lubeck's ■continuation of Helmold's Ch/ronicon Slavicum : John of Salisbury : Gervase of Tilbury's Otia Impericdia, bk. iii. [circa 1211): Alexander Neckham, 1217 : H^linand, 1227 : Oesta Bomanorum : Qower's Oonfessio Amantis : Lydgate's Bochas : separate romances collected circa 1499 in Chap-book, Les Failz MerveUleux de Virgille : Thoms, Early English Prose Romances, 1853 : Com- paretti, Virgilio net Medio Evo, 1872 : Bodocanachi, Etudes et Fantaisies Historiques, Paris, 1919. Cf. legends of Horace at Palestrina, Thomas the Rhymer, Michael Scot, Faust, etc. The Man and his Work 43 Virgil amongst them, witli Aristotle and Jiilius Csesar. It should not have been difficult to clear the fame of the poet from such ridiculous stories as that, a lady in Rome having shghted him, he cast a glamour over the city so that not a fire could be lighted anywhere till she had apologized : that he built a palace in Rome, in which he could hear everything which was even whispered in the city : and that he married the daughter of the Soldan of Babylon, their mutual visits being made by means of a bridge of air ! The tales of his wonder, and especially of his mischief, were almost without number. A somewhat similar Puck-ish transformation was made of George Buchanan, the great poet and humanist, who, to popular imagination, was, and in some places still is, considered to have been the king's jester, the creator of many ridiculous situations, and author of innumerable vulgar jokes.^ The Church, following TertulUan rather than Origen, was opposed to the works of the heathen authors finding a popular vogue. Gregory the Great said, " The praises of Christ cannot be fitly uttered in the same tongue as those of Jove," ^ and so clinched the argument for the language of the Latin Church. St Jerome's dream, which made him lay aside his favourite classic when the voice said, " Ciceronianus es, non Christianus ; ubi enim thesaurus tuus, ibi est cor tuum," * fully expressed the ecclesiastical attitude. Thus, also, Grwculus was taken as equivalent to hmreticus : while Latin was under frequent sus- picion as being the instrument of immoral teaching. And Alcuin forbade the reading of Virgil in the monastery over which he presided, as tending to sully the pious imagination, and rebuked a secret lover of the poet by the title Virgilian, instead of Christian* Douglas, therefore, probably foresaw objection to his work, in the survival of such an attitude, as well as in the envy of those who did not love him. He also argued for the contact of Virgil with Christian teaching, as we shall see. > Vide Chap-book, The Witty and Entertaining Exploits of George Buchanan, the King's Jester. This placed Buchanan at the English Court of James, twenty-one years after his death ! " MnllingeT : Schools of Charles the Qreat, p. 77. » Epistola ad Eustochium. ' Mulhnger, p. 110. 44 The Man and his Work Virgil's Position Among classical poets, Virgil, of course, occupied in the Middle Ages the sublimest position. Dante was steeped in Virgil, who was to him the very personification of Philosophy and Science, and therefore most suitably the guide of his pilgrimage through the world of shadow. To Petrarch, also, Virgil meant as much, as we find from the note in his copy of the Eoman poet, in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, where he records the time of his first meeting with Laura, and the date of her death. " I write in this book," he says, " rather than anywhere else, because it comes more frequently under my eye." That Virgil's name was held in the very highest estimate is further proved by the admiration and reverence shewn to him, while others were neglected ; and when printing came to the help of authors he was an immediate beneficiary, for ninety editions, at least, were issued from the press before the beginning of the sixteenth century. The respect awarded to him by Dante confirmed his position. It is a little strange, in this connection, that Douglas does not mention Dante's name. He probably would be more inclined to recall the poet-exile of Florence in his own dark days of exile, when the sweet labour of his muse had, alas ! become but as a dream of Ught, remembered from the years that were dead. Such silences are not uncommon. Even Dryden does not mention Douglas, his own great predecessor in the work of translation. Nevertheless, one should have expected otherwise of Douglas, if only under the influence of Chaucer, who spoke of the great Florentine, and shewed the remembrance of his touch, in Troylus, and in The Parkment of Foules ; as well as from his own pioneer position. Virgil in Scotland By the period of Gawain Douglas the Eoman was the favourite of all who anywhere loved lofty literature, Homer being known in Scotland only through Latin, as Greek did not penetrate to that country as an educational medium until 1534, when Erskine of Dun brought with him from his travels a teacher of the language, whom he settled at Montrose. The The Man and his Work 45 story of Troy was more familiar in tlie now forgotten pseud- epigraphs ^ of Dictys of Crete, and Dares the Phrygian, which were supposed to be free from Homer's anti-Trojan prejudice. His Ap-peal to Douglas Douglas was drawn to Virgil both as a Churchman and a scholar. The works of the Koman poet had, in the Middle Ages, a pseudo-philosophical character attributed to them ; and the method of Sortes Virgilianw ^ lifted them into a position almost equal to that which the Bible held in this respect amongst our forefathers. Men left serious decisions, in crises of grave moment, to the phrases which first caught their eye on a chance opening of the page. He was, in common repute, an associate of Aristotle, EucUd, Solomon, Samson, King Arthur, and many others of similar standing. Allegory moved through the alleys of the Roman's thought, with dim candle ; and had long believed that it saw a kind of shadowy Christianity veiled in the noble utterance and stately phrase. It seemed as though Virgil carried a lantern which left his own path obscure but lit the path of those who followed him. This convention notably influenced Douglas in one side of his work. Though Douglas tells us that his cousin Lord Sinclair had given him the great alternative — With grete instance diuers tymys seir iRrayit me translait Virgill or Homeir, he could not have attempted the Greek poet at first hand. But he naturally knew his Latin classics, and speaks as with immediate acquaintance, of the misct and subtill Martial, • (o) Pretended discovery in fourth century of a MS. of the Trojan War, said to have been uncovered in the tomb of Dictys of Crete, by an earthquake ; written in the time of Nero, in Phenician characters, in the Greek language, by Dictys, companion of Idomeneus, mentioned in the Iliad, and translated into Latin by Quintus Septimus. (6) Trojan contemporary history by Dares the Phrygian — discovered at Athens by Cornelius Nepos, who had turned it into Latin. These pseudo-historical writings had great vogue. Vide House of Fame, iii. 377, and Troylus and Creseide, i. 146, where these are set alongside of Homer. Vide M. Joly, Roman de Troie. " Cf. in this respect the portent so obtained by Alexander Severus, in ^n. vi. 852 ; and Charles the First in Mi. iv. 615-620. Vide Rabelais, bk. iii. c. 10. (X. the mother of Goethe, in the same spirit, pricking the Bible with a pin to discover the chances of her son's recovery ! Vide Tennyson's Enodi Arden. 46 The Man and his Work and of Horace as the morall wise poete. He refers again to Homer in a prose note to the Sixth Book, which appears in some copies of the Black Letter Edition, of 1553, wherein he suggests that in the preceding Books Virgil had followed the Odyssey, for the perils through which ^neas had passed ; and in the other six Books had followed the Iliad, in describing battles. Humanism and Christianity The attempt of the scholars of the fifteenth century to re- concile Christianity and the ancient religion of Greece was probably, at root, the result of the instinct to give humanity as much as possible to feed upon, — ^practically the shifting of the flock of Thought to fresh grounds and virgin pastures. The ecclesiastical and feudal systems had failed, and the soul sought earlier sources for truth and hfe. The gods of Greece ceased to be looked upon with abhorrence ; their story became a new treasure-house of untrammelled art and poetic speculation. It is true that Gemisthus Pletho ^ had declared his aim to supersede the Christian Church and religion by a neo-Platonic mysticism ; but Ficino,^ when, according to tradition, he kept a candle burning before a bust of Plato and another before the Virgin, is perhaps more representative of the comprehensiveness of the new Spirit, for one large section of its scholars at any rate. Douglas leaves no reader in dubiety as to his position. He admires the genius of the pagan, but he lays his work on the shrine of divine truth.* The Appeal of Universal Truth The Renaissance spirit awoke in man the feehng that he was a citizen of all the world of truth and beauty. Art became an integral part of religion, and no longer a mere acolyte at sacred shrines, or even a proselyte of the gate. The heathen Olympus was scaled by Christian poets ; and Hippocrene became the refreshing well in the desert for the pilgrim of 1 1355-1450. ^ 1433-99. ^ q^ p^qL vL The Man and his Work 4T Christian thought to rest beside. All souls met on the common ground of humane thought. There entered into this new atmosphere a fresh appeal of the gods who once had deigned to tabernacle in the tents of men and talk with rustic shepherd* by their desert fires. And even Churchmen were turned thus, with a freshly sympathetic interest, to the pages of the ancient authors. The Science of Comparative Religion appeals to-day with something of the same power, to the human mind, kaleidoscopic in its intuitions, which are the touchstones of the veracity of every age. But the fifteenth century had no Theory of Evolu- tion, or of mental progression from less to more, a process of the soul from darkness, through the dawn, to noonday. Nor had it, as the product of experience, that grasp of historic com- parisons which marks modernity. Allegory was the key to the divine mystery, and a world of analogues was evolved, in the misty border land between the old light and the new. The divinities of Olympus, and their speakers. Homer and Plato, addressed the children of the Middle Ages with the same power as the patriarchs and prophets.^ Pomponazzo ^ went so far as to declare that Moses, Mahomet, and Christ, were all of equal authority. The residtant process in literature was somewhat like a modem restoration of the shattered glass in an ancient ruined window, or the rekindling of extinguished fires. In- congruity, and a world of flickering and uncertain shadows, was the natural result. The Astrologers, the Cabbala, Plato, Homer, Holy Scripture, Boccaccio, and whatsoever the soul encountered in its awaking, were used as quarries for pseudo- philosophy and poesy, which sought to find, under fables of the gods of old, the substratum of universal truth. The issue was a semi-amalgam of the sacred and profane. The Revival of Learning cleared the field of its confusions, which had made Boethius equal to Plato, and even Homer inferior to Ovid. 1 Cf . On loft is gone the glorius Apollo. Dimbar : Of the Besurrection of Christ, 1. 22. It has been unnecessarily argued from this that the Catholic Church did not adopt the Miltonio idea that the heathen gods were evil spirits. 2 1452-1525. 48 The Man and his Work The Discovery of the Age Humanism found that a great secret of vitality had been dug out of the forgotten dust into which convention had trodden it. Whatever had touched the living interest of man had touched it vitally, and did not lose its force. No word that had spoken awaMngly to a living heart had died utterly; no vision that had ever unfolded the wonder of its beauty was futile entirely. The soul of a truth went eternally marching on, through all victorious spiritual progressions. It was in this that the imchristened wisdom and beauty of Virgil made their direct appeal to Douglas. And so he clothed them in the fairest vesture he knew, and tuned their music as fitly aa he could to divine melody, for the benefit and enUghtenment of the heart of man. Petrarch regarded the thinker and poet, thus, as also teachers of truth, without trammel of the dead hand. Progress towards perfect vision and utterance through the sense of individual personaUty using all the wisdom that lay in the words of Church father, and classical author, and, above all, in the page of Holy Scripture, was the true ideal of a hving man, in his eyes. And Douglas, in his Virgilian labours, is filled and guided by the same spirit. Petrarch and Virgil Petrarch's deep devotion to ancient culture did not paganize him. He did not stumble into the custom and usage of later Italian humanists, whereby pagan and Christian ideals were awarded equality of reverence. Yet he says to Virgil : " Did wandering j^neas welcome thee, and hast thou gone through the ivory gate ? . . . Dost thou inhabit that stiU expanse of heaven which receives the blessed, where the stars shine softly on the peaceful shades of the renowned ? Wast thou received thither after the conquest of the Stygian abodes, on the arrival of the Highest King who, victor in the mighty conflict, crossed the unhallowed threshold with feet that were pierced, and with might indomitable beat down the bars of Hell with his wounded hands ? " He plainly accepted, as an aid to the intellectual mastery of human questions, the classical writers, in their The Man and his Work 49 degree, in co-operation rather than in co-ordination with the revelation of Jesus Christ. His grasp of the meaning of the true light kept him from materialistic impiety. All his work was anticipatory of the splendour, and with formative influence upon the age that succeeded him in Art and Letters. The Result While the awaking of the soul to expression of individual revolt from Mediaevalism as a sealed and ultimate scheme of thought, prompted the flight of the spirit in reality into a world where all facts were relevant, there was at the same time an attempt to prove or discard theories by reference to their norm, — a long stride away from Allegory and ecclesiastical dogma into critical direct study of poets, historians, scriptural and patristic literatures, in their original forms. This involved, for some, escape from Aristotle to Plato, while many were turned back to the New Testament and the Fathers. For the first, it gave philosophy a chance. They found, as others had, how povera e nuda va filosofia.' And Lorenzo de' Medici spoke what many felt when he made his appeal to Eeason, to break her bonds, leaving false hopes, and seeking freedom, her birthright. Leva dal collo tuo quella catena Ch' avolto vi tenea falsa bellezza : E la vana speranza, che ti mena, Leva dal cuor, e f a il govemo pigli Di te, la parte piti beUa e serena. For the second, it seemed as though early Christianity were bom again, — ^that the divine Spirit of the universe touched directly the divine which had been sleeping in the clay, or muttering in its slumber. For all, it meant enrichment of fancy, extension of knowle^e, and a draught of poesy fresh from wells that had been sealed against the Ups of all except the learned. And the hand of Douglas rolled away the stone for his own people. As Jebb points out, not only in Philosophy, nor in Literature nor in Art alone, but in every form of in- tellectual activity the Kenaissance threw open " a new era for mankind." 1 Petrarch : Sonnet, La gola e'l sonno, etc. 50 The Man and his Work Virgil and Christianity — Douglas's use of him — Douglas's View — Lymbus This movement was not, however, permitted to pass without protest. Padre Pompeo Venturi ^ leading against Dante for his having mingled paganism with Christianity. In fact, throi^hout mediaeval times Christian thought was in an almost constant grapple with the traditions of pagan antiquity and the deep reverence for the great Roman poet ; but many frag- ments of ancient behefs actually passed at this time, without baptism, into Christianity. Even Erasmus expressed the fear that with the revival of pagan literature would come the revival of actual paganism, and he and his fellows busied themselves with the revival of simple Christianity — " primitive apostoUc sincerity." It was known that St Augustine had commended Virgil as the first and best of poets, though St Jerome condemned him. Lesser lights followed the big candles, pro and con, so that, while some monasteries treasured manuscripts of Virgil's works, others held him to be opposed to the Psalms, and protege of the powers of evil. Douglas, however, had a far other view of his poet, and is prepared to quote the pagan as a defender of the Christian faith, or, at any rate, as a Christian evidence, though bom out of due time. He was, of course, not a pioneer in this ; for, in the early Uturgical play, Prophetce,^ of about the eleventh century, we find standing among the thirteen witnesses invoked for testimony to the divine mission of Jesus Christ,— and named as having predicted His advent,^ — -Virgil, along with John the Baptist, Nebuchadnezzar, and the Sibyl, — ^with direct reference, of course, in Virgil's case, to that poet's fourth Eclogue. The play itseU was evolved from the pseud- epigraphic Sermo contra Judceos, which, attributed to St Augustine, was honoured in certain churches by having a place awarded to it in the offices for Christmas. In its earUest form it followed the Sermo closely, but the dialogue was expanded at a later time, and Balaam also inserted among the prophets. In this connection it is worth noting with what hardihood such a mode of thought survived, when we fimd that even in 1670 ' Notable Commentator on Dante, b. 1693, d. 1752. ' Vide Sepet, Les Prophiies du Christ, Paris, 1878. The Man and his Work 51 John Eachard, in his Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy, could write ironically, " It is usually said by those that are intimately acquainted with him, that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey contain mystically all the Moral Law for certain, if not a great part of the Gospel." The same remark might have been made in regard to Virgil, whom Douglas very seriously quotes along these Unes, insisting, in fact, in his Prologue, that the Si3±h Book of the JEneid is an inspired allegory of the future life.^ Schawls he nooht heir the syimys capital ? Schawls he nocht wikkit folk in endles pane ? And purgatory for synnys venyall. And vertuns pepU into the plesand plane ? At al sik sawis fantasy, and Invane ? He schawls the way ever patent down to hell. And rycht difficil the gait to hevin agane. With ma gude wordis than thou or I kan tell "... And, thocht our faith neid nane authorising Of gentiles hukis, nor by sik helthln sparkis Zit Virgil writis mony just claus conding, Strengthing our beleve, to confound payan warkis. Qhow oft rehersis Austyne, cheif of clarMs, In his gret volume of the cite of God, Hundreth versis of Virgil quhHk he markis Agane Bomanys til vertu thame to brod.^ He gathers together what he considers to be the Christian teaching of Virgil's Sixth Book as to the other world : principally the sted of fell tormentis . . . Ane other place quhilk purgator representls, And dar I say the Lymbe of faderls aid, With Lymbus puerorum.* In support of this last-named doctrine he takes those lines of the Mneid as authoritative : Contiauo auditse voces, vagltus et ingens, Infantumque animse flentes, in limine prlmo Quos dulcis vitse exsortis et ab ubere raptos Abstuht atra dies et funere mersit acerbo . . .' Ah qhow thir helthln cluldlr thar weirdis wary, Wepand and waland at the first port of heU ..." Virgil seems to teach in the Mneid that a fuU term of hfe, ended 1 Cf. Fenelon's Letter to Chevalier destouches: "You love Virgil . . . Well, I refer you to Horace . . I undertake to inculcate to you almost all the Christian counsels which yon need ... or to dispone them under Unes of Horace." Vide Sainte-Beuve, Causerie, 1st April 1850. • ProL vi. 41 » lb. 57. ■• lb. 89. ' 426. " Prol. vi. 55. 52 The Man and his Work by natural or honourable death, is necessary in order to win admission to the fields of rest in the under-world of shades. He therefore places suicides, those who have been wrongly condemned, and those who have died of love's sorrow, cut ofE before their time, in Limbus, next to infants. TertulUan apparently agrees with this, but has an additional idea, as to the period of termination of this state : " Aiunt et immatura morte praeventas eo usque vagare istic, donee reUquatio com- pleatur setatum quas pervenissent si non intempestive obiisent." Douglas followed in regard to this ^ those who had gone before him along the same way. The first use of the word Limbus in its theological sense is in the Summa of Aquinas, and its extension was much helped by Dante's Inferno, Canto IV, where, in the uppermost of the nine circles into which the place of expiation and doom is divided, Virgil shews the souls, of whom himself is one, along with Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucian, and all the figures of the great, from Scripture and from pagan writings — ^who, without offence, were yet of the world's period before Christ, and so being unbaptized, fell short of the full peace of the blessed. In the day after Douglas's day Archbishop Hamilton, in the Scottish Catechism,^ expiscates the belief, shewing that it refers to the home of babes unbaptized ; but, being free from actual transgression, their only penalty is deprivation of glory, in consequence of their ordinary human heritage of original sin. The influence of Douglas in this matter of theology in literature is felt later on when Dr Farmer, in the famous Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, refers to him in connection with the doctrine of Purgatory thus : " Gawain Douglas really changes the Platonic hell into the punytion of soulis in purgatory." ' And he draws attention to the similarity of the phrase used by the ghost in Hamlet, to that used by Douglas. The ghost informed Hamlet of his imrestful doom, ' The first decree of the Church on the subject is found in the Council of Florence, 1439. Cf . Newman's Dream of Gerontius. ^ 1 552. Reprinted in facsimile 1 882, with historical introduction by Professor Mitchell of St Andrews : also in 1884, with introduction by Dr T. G. Law. A copy is in the Library of Edinburgh University. It is very rare. Laing's copy in 1879 brought £148 at Sotheby's, and in 1905, £141. » Second Edition, 1767, p. 43. The Man and his Work 53 Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away.^ Douglas's explanation is, Quhen that the lif disseueris fra the body. Than netheles not zit ar fullely All haime ne cryme fra wraclut saulis separat. Nor aid infectioun come of the body layt : And thus aluterly it is neidf ull thing The mony vyois lang tyme indinryng Contrackit in the corps be done away And purgit.* It is true that all voices won their listeners at that period almost with equal weight, and were not looked upon, as now we take them, in their degree, in the natural growth of mind interpreting phenomena. But Douglas strikes out from the accepted standpoint, when he declares, as he appeals to the Virgin Mother : AU other Jove and Phebus I refus Lat VirgUl hald hys mawmentia to him self I wirsclup nowder ydoll, stok nor elf Thocht furth I write so as myne autour dois.' Douglases Muse In the light of his period, Douglas, the Churchman and Christian poet, naturally feels in his poem that he must invoke the " Prince of Poetis," who is the very King of kings, to be his gydar and laid stem.* He turns also from CaUiope to Mary Mother : Thou virgyn moder and madyn be my muse . . . Albeit my sang to thy hie maieste Accordis nocht.* And again he cries : Thou art our SibO, Cristia moder deir." In similar thought he calls her Son, that hevynly Orpheus Grond of all gude, our Saluyour Ihesus.' ' Act i. 5, 12. ' vi. 12, 31. ^ Prol. X. 152. Mahometa, i.e. idols, as with early writers, used also of Satan. Cf. Burns, " Auld Mahoun." " Prol. i. 453 (Small, 459). ' lb. 462 (SmaU, 468). " Prol. vi. 145. ' Prol. i. 468 (SmaU, 474). 54 The Man and his Work His Interpretations Again, in his Comment, he explains, in this spirit, the meeting of Mneas with Venus his mother " in liknes of a vergyn or a mayd : by the quhilk ye sail understand that Venus was in the ascendent, and had domynation in the hevyn the tym of his natyAritie ; and for that the planet Venus was the signifiar of his bjrrth and had domination and speciall influens towart hym. . . . And weyn nocht for this thocht poetis fenzeis Venus the planet, for the" Cans foirsaid, to be Eneas mother, at thai beleve nocht he was motherles . . . and that Venus metis Eneas in form and lyknes of a maid is to be onderstood that Venus the planate that tym was in the syng of the Virgyn." All this is consonant with that borderland period of thought in which a man, one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the dawning age of neo-classic literature, could look upon Christ as a diviner Plato, or Plato as a Christ in posse. In the same spirit of semi-philosophical interpretation he follows Boccaccio's interpretation of the gods, as in the De Genealogia Deorum of that poet, — Juno being " the erth and the water," Jupiter " the ayr and the fyre," etc. For all kindred information he refers to " John Bocas," with the reverence of a devout follower. He also quotes Landinus,^ " that writis morally apon VirgiU," as shewing how " Eneas purposis to Italy, his land of promyssion ; that is to say, a jiist perfyte man entendis to mast soueran bonte and gudnes, quhilk, as witnessyth Plato, is contemplation of godly thingis or dyvyn warkis. His onmeysabill ennymy Juno, that is fenyeit queen of realmys, entendis to dryve him from Italy to Cartage : that is Avesion or concupissence to ryng or haf wardly honouris, and draw him fra contemplation to the active lyve ; quhilk quhen scho falls by hir seK, tretis scho with eolus, the neddj^r part of raison, quhelk sendis the storm of mony wardly consalis in the just manis mynd." And so forth. With all his love for the heathen poet Douglas never forgets himself as " the reverend father in God . . . Bishop of Dunkeld." And herein his needle just trembles from its Renaissance polestar. But he had his Eenaissance moments. > b. 1424 ; d. about 1508. The Man and his Work 55 In fact, his translation of Virgil was itself a Renaissance act. Oleams of the new day flash along his line. His invocation in the opening of his work : Lawd, honour, praysyngis, thanMs infynyte To the and thy duloe ornate fresch endyte, Maist reuerend Virgill, of Latyn poetis prynce, shews his estimate of his original, as lofty as Ovid's regarding the Mneid : quo nullum Latio clarius exstat opus.^ The author of Lancelot of the Laik has the same phrase in regard to the poet's " fresch enditing of his laiting toung " ; ^ and Douglas's invocation might well be an echo of Dante's verse : O degU altri poeti onore e lume, Vagliami il lungo studio e il grande amore, Che m'ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume, for, over and over again, he displays a similar spirit of close devotion to his poet. His Originality In his work Douglas claims originality, in that he has not tried to imitate any other scholar, but that he follows eftir my fantasy.' And he claims no inspiration, nor the possession of aught beyond what a scholar should possess, doing his best, Not as I suld, I wrait, hot as I couth.* And when he says he passes on the spirit of the ancient poet, new fra the berry run,' not in artificial phrase, but in haymly playn termys famyliar,' he is making that personal stroke which is characteristic of the neo-classicism in its search back to sources, and its claim for the rights of the vernacular. > IL Eleg. xxxiv. 66 ; de Art. Amor. iii. 337. » Prol. 327. » Dyreetioun, 98. * lb. 110. » lb. 90. ' lb. 94. 56 The Man and his Work Douglas and Caxton Douglas objects to Caxton's work, which Caxton described as founded on, and as being practically a translation of, " a lytyl booke in Frenche, which late was translated oute of Latyn by some noble clerk of Fraunce,^ which booke is name Eneydos, made in Latyn by that noble poete and grete clerke Vyrgyle." His condemnation of Caxton's book is quite modern both in its reason and in its scathingly searching scorn. The original was, in reality, not at all a translation from Virgil, but from a loose French version of an Italian paraphrase of certain portions of the Mneid, — a kind of eclectic romance based on that poem and The Fall of Princes by Boccaccio. It never reached, in Caxton's rendering, a second issue, though the Printer seems to have executed a large edition, to judge by the frequency of the copies extant. Caxton himself was painfully conscious of difficulties before him in his task, owing to the diversity of English dialects, and the fact that he was not acquainted at first hand with Virgil, as he explicitly declares. For he mentions how he had submitted his work to John Skelton, skilled in English, having " late translated the epystles of Tulle, and the boke of Dyodorus Syculus, and diverse other werkes oute of Latyn in to Englyshe, not in rude and olde langage, but in polyshed and ornate termes craftely, as he had redde Vyrgyle, Ouyde, Tullye, and all the other noble poetes and oratours to me unknowen." Douglas justly complains that it is not Virgil ; that in time, place, style, spirit and character, it is wrong, and unfair to the author in whose name it is put forward. And here he is in touch with the Eenaissance, and with its reverence for the norm. He mentions point after point where Caxton's book goes astray, and where it is deficient. He deplores that any one So schamefuUy that story dyd pervert ; I red hys wark with harmys at my hart. That syk a buke, but sentence or engyne, Sud be intitillit eftir the poet dyvyne.^ He mourns that his poet should be misrepresented With sych a wyoht, quhillt trewly, be myne entent. Knew neuer thre wordia of all quhat Virgill ment. 1 Guillaume de Roy. ' Prol. i. 144. The Man and his Work 57 He returns to the attack in the Proloug of the Fyft Buik, again condemning the audacity of Caxton : Now harkis sportis, myrthis and myrry plays. Full gudly pastans on mony syndry ways, Endyte by Virgil, and heir by me translate, Quhilk William Caxton knew never al hys days : For as I sayd befor, that man forvays, Hys febil proys beyn mank and mutulate.^ It seems a very persistent and hard attack, but Caxton's phrase, written, of course, in ignorance — " made in Latyn by that noble poet and grete clerke Vyrgyle " — ^provoked it. And probably also Caxton's appeal, " And if any man . . . findeth such terms that he cannot understand, let him go and learne Virgil or the pistles of Ovid," only deepened the provocation. The " Good Bishop " was not, therefore, " furiously angry with Caxton for not doing what he never pretended to do with Virgil," 2 but was genuinely irritated over what he felt to be a misrepresentation of the poet to whom he was honestly devoted. Douglas and Mafheus Yet, notwithstanding his fierce attack on Caxton as having represented as Virgil's what Virgil never wrote, he himself included in his own book, on the level of companionship with the immortal Eoman, the work of Mapheus Vegius, who had written a supplement to the poem, as a thirteenth book of the JEneid. Mapheus was Almoner to Pope Martin the Fifth, and died in 1458, so that his fame was quite fresh, and some of his Italian countrymen esteemed him as the best of all poets who had appeared for a thousand years, not excluding even Petrarch. His works were much read, and his supplement set without scruple alongside of Virgil's in the Edition of 1480 by Rubeus, the Venetian of 1482, and hosts of others later. Douglas whimsically explains his action in the matter by narrating, in mediaeval fashion, how, in a dream, during his walk abroad in the fields, having fallen asleep in a pleasant evening in June, he encoimtered this poet as an aged man who is much displeased by Douglas's neglect of his poem. He asks,. 1 Prol. V. 46. ^ Saintsbury : English Prosody, vol. i. 275. 58 The Man and Ms Work Gyf thou has afore tyme gajm onrycht Followand sa lang Virgill a gentile clerk, Quhy schrynMs thou with my schort cristyn wark ? For, thooht it be bot poetry we say, My buke and VirgiUis moraU bejm, baith tway.' Here he looks over his shoulder from the New Light, and feek that the Christianity of Mapheus recommends his work to equal treatment with that of the pagan poet, though the Renaissance writers were inclined to reverse that plea. His Renaissance gird at Caxton is not only weakened here in regard to its in- fluence on his position, but he steps still further back into the dark when he adds to his impeachment the complaint that Caxton does not do justice to what is veiled luider " the cluddes