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He who excels all other poets in his own language, were it possible to do him right, must appear above them in our tongue, which, as my Lord Roscommon justly observes, approaches nearest to the Roman in its majesty; nearest indeed, but with a vast interval betwixt them. There is an inimitable grace in Virgil's words, and in them principally consists that beauty which gives so inexpressible a pleasure to him who best understands their force. This diction of his, I must once again say, is never to be copied; and since it cannot, he will appear but lame in the best translation. The turns of his verse, his breakings, his propriety, his numbers and his gravity, I have as far imitated as the poverty of our language and the hastiness of my performance would allow. I may seem sometimes to have varied from his sense; but I think the greatest variations may be fairly deduced from him; and where I leave his commentators, it may be I understand him better; at least I writ without consulting them in many places.

(From the Preface to the Second Miscellany, 1685.)

Spenser and Milton.

[In epic poetry] the English have only to boast of Spenser and Milton, who neither of them wanted either genius or learning to have been perfect poets, and yet both of them are liable to many censures. For there is no uniformity in the design of Spenser; he aims at the accomplishment of no one action, he raises up a hero for every one of his adventures, and endows each of them with some particular moral virtue, which renders them all equal, without subordination or preference: every one is most valiant in his own legend: only we must do him that justice to observe that Magnanimity, which is the character of Prince Arthur, shines throughout the whole poem, and succours the rest when they are in distress. The original of every knight was then living in the court of Queen Elizabeth; and he attributed to each of them that virtue which he thought was most conspicuous in them: an ingenious piece of flattery, though it turned not much to his account. Had he lived to finish his poem, in the six remaining legends, it had certainly been more of a piece, but could not have been perfect, because the model was not true. But Prince Arthur, or his chief patron, Sir Philip Sidney, whom he intended to make happy by the marriage of his Gloriana, dying before him, deprived the poet both of means and spirit to accomplish his design. For the rest, his obso lete language and the ill choice of his stanza, are faults but of the second magnitude; for notwithstanding the first, he is still intelligible, at least after a little practice; and for the last, he is the more to be admired that, labouring under such a difficulty, his verses are so numerous, so various, and so harmonious, that only Virgil, whom he professedly imitated, has surpassed him among the Romans, and only Mr Waller among the English.

As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much.

justice, his subject is not that of a heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and his human persons are but two. But I will not take Mr Rymer's work out of his hands: he has promised the world a critique on that author, wherein, though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated his Grecisms, and the Latin elegancies of Virgil. It is true he runs into a flat of thought sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spenser did Chaucer. And though perhaps the love of their masters may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet in my opinion obsolete words may then be laudably revived. when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice; and when their obscurity is taken away by joining other words to them which clear the sense, according to the rule of Horace for the admission of new words. But in both cases a moderation is to be observed in the use of them; for unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival, runs into affectation: a fault to be avoided on either hand. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him by the example of Hannibal Caro and other Italians who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme (which I have not now the leisure to examine), his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it, which is manifest in his Juvenilia, or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer, though not a poet.

(From the Discourse on the Original and Progress of Satire, 1693.)

Dryden's plays appeared in two folio volumes in the year of his death, and were afterwards re-edited by his friend Congreve, in six duodecimos. The Fables, supplemented by most, though not all, of his earlier non-dramatic verse, make another folio volume of the same date. One or two somewhat imperfect editions of his poems appeared during the eighteenth century; and Malone gave an admirable collection of the prose in four volumes. But all editions were superseded by that of Sir Walter (then Mr) Scott in 1708 This was reprinted in 1821, and in 1883-93 re-edited (in 18 vek) Scott's with additions and corrections by the present writer. Life is excellent, and is the standard; but the editions of Bein Mitford, and Christie are useful. The new Aldine edition (by Hooper, 1892) is in 5 vols. Mr Churton Collins edited the Satire, in 1893, and Professor W. P. Ker a selection of the Essays in 100 See Dryden in the 'Men of Letters' series (1881) by the preser writer, and the notices in Johnson's Lives, in Hazlitt's Englan Poets, in the first series of Lowell's Among my Books, and in Dr Garnett's Age of Dryden (1896). The section of the British Musen Catalogue on Dryden, separately obtainable, is a full bibliography.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

SCOTTISH LITERATURE.

A

From the Civil War On.

T page 505 and elsewhere it has been sufficiently insisted on that alike in volume and in quality Scottish literary production had declined to a low ebb during the troublous seventeenth century, when Scotland was truly a most distressful country, rent by factions and antipathies, tyranny and persecution, intrigue and war. Most of what came from the printing-presses, and what chiefly absorbed the interest of the nation, was not literature in the stricter sense at all, but theology, mainly polemical, and controversial politics. Yet of the small number of the second series of Scottish seventeenth-century writers it may at least be said that they are wonderfully representative of the most opposite tempers and parties: the royalist Montrose who made so much of the Highlanders, the Cameronian colonel who jeered at them in verse and foiled them in the field; Rabelaisian Urquhart and ultra-Puritan Gillespie; the sainted Archbishop Leighton and the irreconcilable Presbyterian mystic Rutherford face to face with the Sempills, delineators of rude and vulgar merriment; the persecutor of the heroes of the Covenant and their panegyrist; and Fletcher, a whole party in himself. Some wrote in English almost as Englishmen understood it, some in the broadest west-country vernacular, some in parti-coloured transition between the two, while one at times wielded a language known to himself alone. Most were men of mark in their time, but none of them great men of letters. Meanwhile home-keeping Scotsmen were becoming more and more familiar with that larger literature-now no longer foreign ---to which their own was contributory; English books of all kinds, religious as well as secular, were standard reading in Scotland, where Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress were not read as the work of aliens.

(JAMES

The Marquis of Montrose GRAHAM; 1612-50), the brilliant royalist soldier, whose loyalty, after six meteoric victories, brought him disastrous defeat and death on the scaffold, was an apt scholar of St Andrews University, an accomplished man of the world, and the author of a few passionately loyal poems. Unhappily, by far the most memorable-containing two thricefamous verses-was not definitely ascribed to him till 1711, when it was printed in Watson's Collection of Scots Poems, and cannot be proved his. At most it is an adaptation of an old English song.

Napier, Montrose's biographer, interprets what seems to be a spirited love-poem as a political allegory, in which King Charles I. is the lover and the kingdom the mistress.

I'll Never Love Thee More.

My dear and only love, I pray
That little world of thee
Be governed by no other sway
Than purest monarchy;
For if confusion have a part,

Which virtuous souls abhor,
And hold a synod in thine heart,
I'll never love thee more.

As Alexander I will reign,

And I will reign alone;
My thoughts did ever more disdain
A rival on my throne.

He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.

But I will reign and govern still,

And always give the law,
And have each subject at my will,
And all to stand in awe ;
But 'gainst my batteries if I find

Thou kick, or vex me sore,
As that thou set me up a blind,
I'll never love thee more.
And in the empire of thine heart,
Where I should solely be,
If others do pretend a part,

Or dare to vie with me;
Or committees if thou erect,

And go on such a score,
I'll laugh and sing at thy neglect,

And never love thee more.

But if thou wilt prove faithful, then,
And constant of thy word,
I'll make thee glorious by my pen,
And famous by my sword;
I'll serve thee in such noble ways
Was never heard before;

I'll crown and deck thee all with bays,
And love thee more and more.

Lines written after Sentence of Death.
Let them bestow on every airt a limb, quarter of heaven
Then open all my veins, that I may swim
To Thee, my Maker, in that crimson lake;
Then place my par-boiled head upon a stake,
Scatter my ashes, strew them in the air:
Lord! since Thou know'st where all those atoms are,
I'm hopeful Thou 'lt recover once my dust,
And confident Thou 'lt raise me with the just!

See the selections from Montrose and Marvell by R. S. Rait (1901). 'I'le never love thee more' is an old Northern (i.e. North English) tune of the reign of James I., and the oldest set of wordsone of many sets to the same air-belongs to the early years of the seventeenth century:

'My dear and only love, take heed

How thou thyself expose;
And let not longing lovers feed
Upon such looks as those.

I'll marble thee around about,

And build without a door;
But if my love doth once break out,
I'll never love thee more.'

Simion Grahame, son of an Edinburgh burgess, was a competent scholar, a soldier and traveller of dissolute life, and ultimately an austere Franciscan brother. He must have been born about 1570; Dempster -a poor authority-fixes the end of his very varied career in 1614, probably too early. He spent the last years of his life in Italy. He dedicated to his patron, James VI., a collection of verses called The Passionate Sparke of a Relenting Mind in 1604, and in 1609 to the Earl of Montrose (father of the famous Marquis) his Anatomie of Humors-a dedication which may justify us in introducing him in this section along with his patron's son. The most notable thing about the Anatomie is that it has been conjectured to have given Burton more than a suggestion for his Anatomie of Melancholy. The work, interspersed with verse, gives striking pictures of typical charactersquacks, parasites, and many others—somewhat in the fashion of the 'characters' of Hall and Overbury. He wrote in what is approximately English of the period; but undisguised and unmistakable Scotticisms in words, spellings, and construction appear constantly. Love is, as usual, the humour most elaborately anatomised, and was especially fair game for a friar. This is a fragment on the lover:

Being alone in their retearing [retiring] walks they surfat the solitarie deserts with the sorrowful voice of a discontented minde, with weeping eies in splaine [spleen, a fit] of passion. O, saieth he,

The furious force of love's consuming fire

No tyme can quench, nor thoght can not expell:
Such is the restles rage of my desire,
Which makes my wits within myselfe rebell:

Thus am I wrongd and ever saikles slaine, blameless
I shift my place but cannot shift my paine.

They ever esteeme their paines worse than the paines of hell; such are the sort of penitentiall lovers, who are alwaies anatomisd with humorous follie: and yet how often it coms to passe that they who taks most pains to please are most displeasd, for it is knowne be unfallable experience that the duetifull lover in a respected persute is often rejected with many ingratfull disdains. . . . How perrillous it is to beleeve a Lover, how tempting their words will be, and how they will straine them selves to speak with vehemencie. Lady Rethorick ever hants the mouth of a Lover, and with borrowed speeches of braver wits doeth enlarge their deceit, his perjured promises, his oathes, his vowes, his protestations, his waiting-on, and all his iron sences drawen to feed upon the attractive humors of her Adamantall beautie. .. Her smile is his heaven, and her frowne is his hell: she is the only

idoll of his minde, for when he should serve God, he worships her; if he comes to Church, his looking on her behaviour takes away his hearing, robs him of devotion, and makes him a sencelesse blocke; with staring on her face he learns the arte of Physiognomie, his vain apprehentions will reade a woman's thought in her visage; and when he lookes on her hands, O then hee becomes a rare Palmister, for he will not spare to reade her fortunes by lynes, for heere (says hee) is the true score of death, and there goes the score of life. . . . Hee spendes the time in his Chamber with no other thing but with a great Looking-glasse, how to take off his hatt, how to make his gesture, and in a discourse how to frame the motion of his hands, to kisse his finger, to make courtesie with his legge, to set his arme, to smile, to looke aside, to walke; and then he stands gazing on the full proportion of his own bodie, which I sweare is not else but the very true image of superstitious vanitie.

There are two forms of a poem written from Italy, thus beginning, and addressed

To Scotland his Soyle.

To thee, my Soyle, where first
I did receive my breath,
These obsequies I sing

Before my Swan-like death.
My love by nature bound,

Which spotlesse love I spend, From treasure of my hart

To Thee I recommend.

And he praised the United Kingdom in another, much longer and more elaborate, in which he takes opportunity to congratulate and compliment the king as the good genius of the now united realm: With nine-voyc'd mouth my Delphin song I sound; Of all the world blest bee thou, Brittaine's Ile! Thou, onely thou, within this mortall round, On whom the heav'ns have lov'd so long to smile: For Phoenix-like thou hast renew'd thy kinde, In getting that which lay for thee inshrin'de.

Robert Sempill of Beltrees in the Renfrewshire parish of Lochwinnoch (1595 ?-1659), humorous poet, was the son of Sir James Sempill of Beltrees, himself son of Lord Sempill, and so distantly related to the older Robert Sempill author of the Sempill Ballates (see page 232 Sir James was contemptuously called by Know 'the dancer' from his various social accomplishments; was conspicuous at the court of James VI, whom he assisted in the preparation of the Basilicon Doron; and wrote controversial works on the Presbyterian side, as well as the satirical poer against the Catholic Church, The Packman's Pater noster. His son Robert continued this satire, wrote various pieces, but is remembered as author of the Life and Death of Habbie Simson, Piper å Kilbarchan, which gives a graphic and humorous account of old Scottish amusements. Both Ramsay and Burns were influenced by this poem, and copied the form of verse, which became characteris tic of Scottish vernacular poems, especially those of facetious type.

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have made the Scots version. The song 'Maggie Lauder,' found in most Scotch song-books, is very probably his. 'The Blythsome Bridal,' claimed

also for Sir William Scott of Thirlestane, an accomplished writer of Latin verse, is more likely Sempill's. The first verse is:

Fy, let's a' to the bridal,

For there will be lilting there,

For Jockie's to be married to Maggie, The lass wi' the gowden hair.

And there will be lang kail and pottage, And bannocks of barley meal,

And there will be good salt herring

To relish a cog of good ale.

The nine stanzas of this song, rough, rude, and vulgar though they be in tone, rhymes, and words, are only more uncouth than some of Fergusson's, and are in the humour of Peblis to the Play and Christis Kirk of the Grene. The same is true of 'Hallow Fair,' generally credited to Sempill, and quite distinct in plan and rhyme from the much later poem of the same name by Fergusson. The earlier one thus begins :

There's mony braw Jockies and Jennies
Comes weel buskit into the fair,

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Francis Sempill (1616?-82), Robert's son, was also a vernacular poet, who, like his father, forms a link in the almost broken chain of humorous popular Scottish poetry, a link between Peblis to the Play and Sir David Lyndsay and the vernacular revival under Allan Ramsay. Francis Sempill was also of the court party, inherited heavily burdened estates, and though he alienated some of his properties, welcomed the relief of the debtors' sanctuary at Holyrood as recorded in his autobiographical 'Banishment of Poverty,' dedicated (with thanks rather for expected favours, apparently) to the Duke of York. He was ultimately Sheriff-Depute of Renfrewshire. He unquestionably wrote a good deal of verse; but many of the things attributed to him are so credited on slender evidence. She rose and let me in' is, as we have seen, Tom Durfey's, though Sempill may

Maggie sae brawly was buskit

When Jockie was tied to his bride,

The pownie was ne'er better whiskit pony-whacked
Wi' a cudgel that hung by his side.
Sing fal de ral la de.

The following much less uncouth verses from 'The Banishment of Poverty' describe his first occupations in Edinburgh while still dogged by that unwelcome comrade, and show the Scots equivalent for dining with Duke Humphrey':

We held the Lang-gate to Leith Wynd,
Where poorest purses use to be;
And in the Calton lodgèd syne,
Fit quarters for such company.
Yet I the High-town fain would see,
But my comrade did me discharge;
He willed me Blackburn's ale to pree,
And muff my beard that was right large.
The morn I ventured up the Wynd,

And slunk in at the Netherbow,
Thinking that troker for to tyne,
Who does me damage what he dow.
His company he doth bestow

On me to my great grief and pain ;
Ere I the thrang could wrestle through
The loun was at my heels again.

now Princes

Street

taste trim

familiar-lose

can

rascal

I greined to gang on the plain-stanes, longed-pavement
To see if comrades wad me ken:
We twa gaed pacing there our lanes,

The hungry hour 'twixt twelve and ane.
Then I kenned no way how to fen; fend, make shift
My guts rumbled like a hurl-barrow; wheel-barrow

I dined with saints and noblemen,

Even sweet Giles and Earl of Murray.

Samuel Rutherford (1600?-61), a pectoral theologian (to use Neander's phrase) if ever there was one, was born at Nisbet, near Jedburgh, and passed M.A. at Edinburgh in 1621. In 1623 he was appointed Professor of Humanity; the scandal created by his falling into disgrace with the girl he afterwards married caused his resignation in 1626; but next year he received Episcopal ordination and was settled as minister of Anwoth. Here from the first he was a zealous student and devoted and beloved pastor; and here, within a year after his disgrace, he began that correspondence with his godly friends which has been called 'the most seraphic book in our literature.' He seems never to have fully conformed to the Perth articles, which were utterly obnoxious to all Presbyterians. Exercitationes pro divina Gratia (1636) was written against the Arminians, and brought him an invitation to a Divinity chair in Holland and a summons before the High Commission Court in July 1636, when he was forbidden to preach, and banished to Aberdeen; and there he wrote many of his most spiritual letters to his parishioners and friends in the south. There he was also free to debate with the Episcopalian-Arminian 'Aberdeen doctors.' The national uprising and the Covenant gave him the welcome opportunity of returning to his parish; but under the Covenant he was appointed Professor of Divinity at St Andrews in 1639, and in 1647 Principal of the New College; in 1643 he was sent to the Westminster Assembly. He wrote many works of controversial divinity and devotional theology, combining high Presbyterian divine. right, Calvinistic orthodoxy, and fervid religion. His Due Right of Presbyteries (1644), Lex Rex (1644), Trial and Triumph of Faith (1645), Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself (1647), belong to this period. His Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience was pronounced by Bishop Heber as 'perhaps the most elaborate defence of persecution which has ever appeared in a Protestant country;' Milton included him amongst the 'new forcers of conscience' named in his sonnet. After the Restoration his Lex Rex was burned by the hangman in Edinburgh in 1661, and its author deposed and summoned for hightreason; but he received the citation on his deathbed. Livingston said 'he had most sharp piercing wit and fruitful invention and solid judgment.' But it is by the infectious fervour of his Letters that he remained for nearly two centuries a power amongst his countrymen; the work was eminently popular in all ranks of Scotsmen, and cherished in Scotland the less conspicuous graces of Presbyterian faith and love. To many the succession of highly sensuous images under which Rutherford expresses the ecstatic mood of an exalted sense of communion with Christ and God is non-natural, extravagant, and repellent. The letters are largely a catena of scriptural fragments and phrases, a tangle of mixed metaphors, Hebraic and Scottish. Yet the command of apt words is as remarkable

as the fertility in imagery. Though the letters are conceived in sound English, Rutherford makes frequent, skilful, and very effective use of peculiarly Scottish words and phrases, and does not always avoid homely and even grotesque figures. Thus he adjures an afflicted friend 'to be faithful to Him that can ride through hell and death on a windlestrae and His horse never stumble'—a windlestrae being a stalk of grass. He not merely conceives the relation of Christ to the Church according to the old allegorical interpretation of the Song of Solomon, but uses the same language of Christ and the individual believer. There is, accordingly, perpetual iteration of Christ's kisses, wooing, ‘loveembracements,' of marriage with Him, even of being dandled on His knee, of the smell of His breath and of His garments; too great love of one's children is thus adultery, and the Catholic Church is Rome's brothel-house.' It is characteristic that in a long letter to the Countess of Kenmure, daughter of the Earl of Argyll and wife of the patron who presented him to Anwoth, Rutherford mentions as it were casually in the very last short paragraph : 'My wife now after long disease and torment for the space of a year and a month is departed this life. The Lord hath done it; blessed be His name.' The following are extracts from letters to the same Countess, of date 1628, 1630, and 1631:

Ye have lost a child: nay, she is not lost to you who is found to Christ. She is not sent away, but only sent before, like unto a star, which going out of our sight doth not die and evanish, but shineth in another hemisphere. Ye see her not, yet she doth shine in another country. If her glass was but a short hour, what she wanteth of time that she hath gotten of eternity; and ye have to rejoice that ye have now some plenishing up in heaven. Build your nest upon no tree here; for ye see God hath sold the forest to death; and every tree whereupon we would rest is ready to be cut down, to the end we may fly ani mount up, and build upon the Rock, and dwell in the holes of the Rock. .

For this is the house of wine, where ye meet with your Well-Beloved. Here it is where He kisseth yen with the kisses of His mouth, and where ye feel the smell of His garments; and they have indeed a most fragrant and glorious smell. Ye must, I say, wait upen Him, and be often communing with Him, whose lips are as lilies, dropping sweet-smelling myrrh, and by the moving thereof He will assuage your grief; for the Christ that saveth you is a speaking Christ; the Church knoweth Him by His voice, and can discern His tongue amongst a thousand. . . .

It is God's mercy to you, madam, that He giveth you your fill, even to loathing, of this bitter world, that ye may willingly leave it, and, like a full and satished banqueter, long for the drawing of the table. And at last, having trampled under your feet all the rotten pleasures that are under sun and moon, and having rejoiced as though ye rejoiced not, and having bought as though ye possessed not, ye may, like an old crazy ship, arrive at our Lord's harbour, and be made welcome, as one of those who have ever had one foot loose from the earth, longing for that place where your soul shall feast and banquet for ever and ever upon a glorious sight of

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