ments which his judgment and imagination had disclosed. Yet during this poetical dearth in England, as if the singu lar fortunes of James I. were shaped on purpose to transfer the manner and spirit of Chaucer's poetry into Scotland, that country produced a race of true poets." One of the earliest after James I. is Robert Henryson. Of this poet's era little is known. He was alive and very old about the close of the fifteenth century, and was at some period of his life a school-master at Dunfermline. He wrote a series of fables, some miscellaneous poems, and the beautiful pastoral of "Robyn and Makyne," printed by Bishop Percy in his "Reliques."

William Dunbar, whom Sir Walter Scott considered a poet unrivalled by any that Scotland has ever produced, and who may perhaps be placed on the same line with the inspired ploughman in comic power and superior depth of passion, is even said to excel him in strength and general fertility of invention. His works were, with the exception of one or two pieces, confined to an obscure manuscript, from which they were only rescued when their language had become so antiquated as to render the world insensible in a great measure to their many excellences. From this circumstance, popular fame has done but little justice to this gifted poet, who is said to have been alike master of every kind of verse.

Dunbar flourished at the court of James IV. at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. After taking his degree, in 1479, at St. Andrew's, he became one of the order of Grey Friars, and travelled in that capacity for some years in England and France as well as Scotland, preaching, as was the custom of the order, and living by the alms of the pious. The poet renounced at last this sordid profession, which involved a constant exercise of falsehood, deceit, and flattery.

He is thought to have been afterward employed by King James in connection with various foreign embassies, and in this capacity to have visited Italy, Spain, and France, besides England and Ireland, thus acquiring that knowledge of mankind which is an important part of the education of the poet. For some years ensuing he is said to have lived at court, receiving a pension from his royal master, whom he regaled with his compositions and the charms of his conversation,—a servile life which ill accorded with his manly Scottish spirit, and at which he repines greatly in his poems. He died about 1520, at the age of sixty.

Dunbar's poems are of three classes, the allegorical, the moral, and the comic. Of his allegorical poem entitled "The Dance," it has been said that "for strength and vividness of painting it would stand a comparison with any poem in the language."

Another of the distinguished luminaries that marked the restoration of letters in Scotland at the commencement of the sixteenth century is Gavin Douglas. Descended from a noble family and born in the year 1475, Douglas was a scholar of distinguished elegance. His accomplishments obtained him high promotion in the Church. In the year 1513, to avoid persecution, he fled from Scotland to England, where Henry VIII. received him graciously, and in consideration of his literary merits allowed him a liberal pension. He died of the plague in London and was buried in the Savoy Church in the year 1521.

Douglas was eminent for his cultivation of the vernacular poetry of his country. His most remarkable production is the translation of Virgil's Æneid into Scottish heroics, being the first version of a Latin classic into any British tongue. Though in too obsolete a language ever to regain popularity, this work is allowed by critics to be a masterly

performance. His principal original composition is a long poem entitled "The Palace of Honour," bearing so strong a resemblance to Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" that it is thought Bunyan could scarcely have been ignorant of it.

Sir David Lyndsay, born about 1490, closes the list of Scottish poets belonging to this period. He was an officer at court and a favorite of James V., and died about the year 1555.

Lyndsay cannot lay claim to any high imaginative power, but his poems are characterized by infinite wit, spirit, and variety in all the familiar forms of poetry. He chiefly shone as a satirical and humorous writer. Aiming his satire at the dissolute clergy, he is said to have lashed up the popular contempt for that venerable but then tottering fabric, the Catholic Church, and thus to have done high service to the Reformation in Scotland.

For nearly the whole of the seventeenth century not even the name of a Scottish poet occurs. The religious aus

terity of the Covenanters, still hanging over Scotland, had damped the efforts of poets and dramatists; yet still among her banks and braes, singing low and sweet to itself like a hidden April rill, went many a comic song of broad rustic humor, and many a tear-steeped ballad in "homely westlin jingle," preluding the rich song of that glorious peasantpoet who woke at last among her hills a harp passionate and melodious as that which burning Sappho swept of old in classic Greece.

Allan Ramsay, born in 1686, is accounted the proper successor of Sir David Lyndsay, after the lapse of more than a century and a half. Ramsay belongs to the order of self-taught poets, his original profession being that of a wig-maker. At twenty-six he commenced writing, and was made poet laureate to a convivial society of young men, called the "Easy Club," writing various light pieces,

chiefly of a local and humorous description, which were sold at a penny each, and became exceedingly popular. In the year 1712 he married the daughter of an author, Christina Ross, who was his faithful partner for more than thirty years.

Ramsay's continuation of King James's "Christ's Kirk on the Green" was his first published performance, executed with genuine humor, fancy, and a perfect mastery of the Scottish language. In 1712 appeared his "Gentle Shepherd," which was received with universal approbation, and republished both at London and Dublin.

In the mean time, the poet had left off wig-making, and opened a bookseller's shop. Ramsay established the first circulating library in Scotland; and led by the promptings of a taste then rare in his country, expended his savings in the erection of a theatre for the performance of the regular drama, which the Edinburgh magistrates shut up for him, leaving him, it is said, without redress.

Ramsay associated with the leading nobility, lawyers, wits, and literati of Scotland, and was the Pope, or Swift, of the North. He died in 1758. His verse is in general neither very refined nor imaginative; he excels in native humor and in lively, original sketches of Scottish life. His lyrics lack grace and elegance, yet many of them abound in rustic hilarity and humor, and though far inferior to those of Burns, are still favorites with the lovers of Scottish song. Ramsay has taste, judgment, and good sense, and it has been said of him that "though he wrote trash in all departments, he really failed in none." His fame rests upon his "Gentle Shepherd." which is his great work, and has been allowed by a modern critic to be perhaps the finest pastoral drama in the world. Pope greatly admired this poem, and Ramsay was, both with himself and Gay, a favorite.

In his life Ramsay showed that citizen-like good sense which Heaven too seldom bestows upon the poet. With true Scottish thrift he kept his purse well filled, and wisely gave over poetry before age had cooled his fancy, unwilling to risk the reputation he had already acquired, as he thus tells us, like the canny practical Scotchman that he

was:

"Frae twenty-five to five and forty

My muse was neither sweer nor dorty;
My Pegasus would break his tether,
E'en at the shagging of a feather,
And through ideas scour like drift,
Streaking his wings up to the lift;
Then, then my soul was in a low,
That gart my numbers safely row.
But eild and judgement gin to say,

Let be your sangs, and learn to pray."

Burns was immediately preceded by a few native poets of talent and popularity, Alexander Ross, a school-master in Lochlee, died in 1784; John Lowe, from 1750 to 1798, author of the fine pathetic ballad entitled "Mary's Dream," his only work worthy of preservation; Lady Anne Barnard, who wrote that most perfect and tender of all ballads, "Auld Robin Gray," and kept its authorship a secret for the long period of fifty years; and Robert Fergusson, born 1751, died 1774. The melancholy story of Fergusson's life, shortened by dissipation, darkened by remorse, and ending in insanity, is of mournful interest, which deepens when we regard him as the immediate forerunner of Burns, rising on Scotland like that

"... Prophet star,

That in the dewy trances of the dawn,

Floats o'er the solitary hills afar,

And brings sweet tidings of the ling'ring morn."