Afær dyuezse Wezkes made/ tianslated and achieued/ha uyng noo Werke in hanæ. I sittyng in my studye Wheœ as laye many oyuerse paunflettis and lookys, happened that to my hande cam a lytyl woke in frensie, which late was tranflated out of latyy by some noble clerke of frauce Whi che looke is named Enepos/ made in latyn by that noble poet & grete clerke Byrgyle/ Which booke I salbe ouez and wow thezin. Holb after the genezall æstruccyon of the gæ te Twoye, Eneas departed frynge his olæ faær anchises Bpon his sholdres/his lityl fon yolus on his honde,his ty Fe Woyth moche other people folowynge/and hold he shypped and departed wyth alle thystorye of his aduentures that he had er he cam to the achicuement of his conquest of ptalye as all a longe shall be shelbed in this pæsent woke. In Whi che Booke I had guete playfyz.by cause of the fapt and hone st æzmes & Words in frenshe/ Whyche I neuer salbe to fo relyke.ne none so playsaunt ne so ibel ordred which loos ke as me femed shold be moche requpfyte to noble men to fee as wel for the cloquence as the historyes/ Holb bel that many honderd yerys passed was the sayd booke of eneyoos Wyth other Werkes made and kerned dayly in scolis specyal ly in ytalye & other places/which historye the fayd Bygyle max in metċe!And WhaŋI had aduysed me in this sayd lo ke. I delpherd and concluded to translate it in to englysshe And forthwyth toke a penne e ynke and wowote a leef or tweyne /Whyche I oueisalbe agayn to covecte its And Whã I falbe the fayz & straunge termes therin/I wußted that it holo not please some gentylmen which law blamed me sayeng ý in my tranflacpons I had ouez curyous termes Which coude not & Bnæzstand of comyy peple /and æsiæd me æ Bse old and homely termes in my translacyons, and A Page from "The Boke of Eneydos," printed by Caxton in 1490 CAXTON AS AUTHOR 273 modernised it will be seen how nearly he approaches the standard English of our day: Great thanks, laud, and honour ought to be given unto the clerks, poets, and historiographs, that have written many noble books of wisdom, of the lives, passions, and miracles, of holy saints, of histories of noble and famous acts and feats, and of the chronicles with the beginning of the creation of the world unto this present time, by which we be daily informed and have knowledge of many things of whom we should not have known if they had not left us their monuments written. Among whom and in especial to-fore all other we ought to give a singular laud unto that noble and great philosopher Geoffry Chaucer, the which for his ornate writing in our tongue may well have the name of a laureate poet. For to-fore that he by his labour embellished, ornated, and made fair our English, in this royame was had rude speech and incongrue, as yet it appeareth by old books, which at this day ought not to have place nor be compared among us to his beauteous volumes and adornate writings, of whom he made many books and treatises of many a noble history as well in metre as in rhyme and prose, and them so craftily made that he comprehended his matters in short, quick and high sentences, eschewing prolixity, casting away the chaff of superfluity, and showing the picked grain of sentence uttered by crafty and sugared eloquence. Of whom among all other of his books I purpose to imprint by the grace of God his Tales of Canterbury, in which I find many a noble history of every estate and degree, first rehearsing the conditions and the array of each of them as proper as possible is to be said, and after these tales, which be of noblesse, wisdom, gentleness, mirth, and also of very holiness and virtue, wherein he finisheth this said book, which book I have diligently overseen and duly examined to the end that it be made according to his own making. For I find many of the said books which writers have abridged and many things left out; and in some places have set certain verses that he never made nor set in his book, of which books so incorrect was one brought to me six years passed which I supposed had been very true and correct. And according to the same I did to imprint a certain number of them, which anon were sold to many and divers gentlemen, of whom one gentleman came to me and said that this book was not according in many places to the book Geoffry Chaucer had made. To whom I answered that I had made it according to my copy, and that by me was nothing added or minished. Then he said he knew a book which his father had and much loved, that was very true and according to his [Chaucer's] own first book by him made, and said more, if I would imprint it again he would get me the same book for a copy, howbeit he wist well that his father would not gladly depart from it. Caxton proceeds to describe how, the more correct manuscript being courteously placed at his disposition by the gentleman's father, he amended his former edition by its aid. The probable date of this edition is 1478, and that of the improved one 1484. The episode shows how faulty MSS. were becoming when printing appeared to stop further degeneracy, but also in some cases to perpetuate errors already existing. He was succeeded by his apprentice, Wynkyn de Worde, and Richard Pynson about the same time took up the business of his rival, William de Machlinia. We part from him with the remark that in his day literature was first officially recognised as a meet subject for encouragement by Government by a proclamation of Richard the Third repealing duties on the importation of books, and allowing them to be sold in England by foreign booksellers. VOL. I S Scotch and ture CHAPTER IX THE LITERATURE OF SCOTLAND TO THE END OF THE We have now arrived at the brink of the great revival of literature which has ballad litera- continued to our own times. The chief barrier between writer and reader has been broken down by the invention of printing, and henceforth the stream of literary production is to be continuous, and literature is to acquire more and more influence as an agency in the affairs of the world. Hitherto, as we have had ample opportunity of observing, the course of literature has been liable to such interruptions as to render it difficult of treatment as a whole but henceforth every people with pretensions to civilisation has a continuous literary history. The wish to preserve as much continuity as possible in the record of British literature has induced us to reserve for special treatment two departments clearly demarcated from the rest of the subject. These are the literature of Scotland and ballad literature, both originating and attaining a considerable development before the introduction of printing, and therefore to be dealt with ere we trace the consequences of the greatest intellectual revolution hitherto effected by a material process. This parenthesis involves no considerable retrogression in our narrative, as literature hardly existed in Scotland before Barbour in the middle of the fourteenth century: and the ballad, though already on the lips of the people, rarely enlisted the pen of the scribe until an even later date. English and Scotch nationality virtually identical Before entering upon the history of Scottish literature, it may be necessary to remove some misconceptions. We are accustomed to regard the Scotland prior to the accession of James I. as a foreign country, but in fact, however politically estranged, the Lowland Scotch, with whose literature alone we are concerned, were in blood and character as English as any of the dwellers to the south of the Tweed. There was indeed a large Celtic admixture in the Western Lowlands, where British chieftains had for a considerable period maintained their independence, but this has for centuries ceased to be recognisable. The Anglian colonisation of the Eastern Lowlands is manifested by the fact that the Scottish metropolis itself bears the name (Edwin's burgh) given to it by the Northumbrian monarch who made it his capital in the seventh century. At subsequent periods, indeed, the Eastern Lowlands were conquered, now by Celts, now by Danes, but the close resemblance of the Northumbrian dialect to the Scotch shows how slightly the composition of the population was affected by these political changes. "The Danes chose ENGLISH LITERATURE IN SCOTLAND 275 Deira, not Bernicia; their traces are found in Yorkshire, not in Northumberland." Cumberland for a long time belonged to Scotland, the English Kingst did not finally renounce their claims upon the Lothians until 1016, but neither the linguistic nor the ethnological character of the districts was affected except by the absorption of the Celtic element. Meanwhile a powerful Celtic monarchy was growing up in central Scotland, formed by the fusion of the Picts, an ancient people of uncertain extraction, but entirely Celticised, with the Scoti or immigrants from Scotia, i.e., Ireland. But the monarch under whom this kingdom was finally consolidated, Malcolm Canmore, was half an Englishman in virtue of his mother; his queen, a princess of the royal family of Hungary, was half Saxon also; and ere long a succession of matrimonial alliances made his successors Anglo-Normans. When, at the beginning of the twelfth century, King Edgar made Edinburgh his capital, the Celtic element retired definitively into the background. The institutions of the kingdom became substantially Anglo-Norman; and, except in the illiterate Highlands, Saxon speech prevailed so thoroughly that the Scotch poets describe their language as "English." The first author who professed to write "Scottish" was Gavin Douglas, under the influence of the anti-English feeling generated by the disaster of Flodden Field. literature The slow literary progress of Scotland in comparison with England is Slow progress solely attributable to external causes the poor and unpeopled condition of of Scotch the country, the perpetual feuds, foreign and intestine, and the absence of any foundation for a literary superstructure. England possessed a national literature before the Conquest, which although almost obliterated was capable of revival: she also had an imported literature which for long supplied its place, and by which, when the time for fusion came, it was enormously enriched. Scotland had no ancient indigenous literature for modern writers. to develop, and no imported literature to rouse the emulation and stimulate the ambition of her own children. The themes of her poets were frequently national, but their execution and even their language were English. The best of them continually remind us of Chaucer, but not until near the close of the fifteenth century do they seem in any measure to prefigure Burns or Scott. No one thought of attempting prose literature. Scotland in the thirteenth century produced powerful minds in Michael Scott and Duns Scotus, but they wrote in Latin on subjects infinitely remote from the comprehension of ordinary readers. No one seemed to have an idea that the ordinary speech could be fit for anything beyond the transaction of the ordinary affairs of life. Many, perhaps most, ancient literatures claim a patriarchal founder, who from some points of view wears the semblance of a fable and from others that of a fact. Scotland has her Orpheus or Linus in THOMAS of ERCILDOUNE, called Thomas the also THOMAS the RHYMER, who does not indeed precede her Ennius, John Rhymer Barbour, by any immense interval of time, but is still sufficiently in advance of him to fulfil the requisites of a venerable ancestor, could we but be sure that he was indeed an author. His actual existence is unquestionable. Ercildoune or Earlston is a village in Berwickshire, and ancient parchments demonstrate that two Thomases, father and son, dwelt there as landowners in the thirteenth century. The tradition of poetry appears to attach to the elder, whose appellation of "Thomas the Rhymer" might seem decisive on the point if, by a strange coincidence, " Rhymer" were not also another form of "Rymour," a surname then common in Berwickshire. His claim to the gift of prophecy, the most exalted attribute of the vates sacer, is shown to have really existed in the popular estimation by the circumstantial account of his prediction, which should perhaps rather be regarded as an instance of second sight, of the death of Alexander III. in 1285. He is also the subject of fairy legends, to be subsequently adverted to, and is named as a poet and author of a romance on the story of Tristrem in Robert Mannyng's metrical English Chronicle, composed in 1338. Mannyng's testimony is very clear. He says, complaining of the corruption of poetical texts by the minstrels : I see in song, in sedgeyng' tale Of Erceldoun and of Kendale 2 None them says as they them wrought, If men it said as made Thomas. But I hear it no man so say, That of some couple some is away: Is their travail near forlorn. Mannyng, then, writing fifty or sixty years after Thomas of Ercildoune, affirms him to have been the author of a poem on Tristrem, sufficiently popular to be habitually in the mouths of minstrels and reciters. This is a strong testimony. It is thought to be invalidated by the fact that Gottfried of Strasburg, writing his standard poem on the Tristrem story nearly a century before Thomas of Ercildoune, declares himself indebted for it to another Thomas, Thomas of Brittany, whom chronology forbids us to identify with the Rhymer. But it is by no means clear that Thomas of Brittany was a poet. Internal evidence proves Gottfried's poem to be derived from a French version, which may have been a translation from a poem by this Breton Thomas, but is just as likely to have been merely based upon traditions transmitted by him. He is not mentioned elsewhere, and we are inclined to identify him with a Welsh Thomas of the eleventh or twelfth century, the Thomas ab Einion Offeiriadd who is recorded to have collected, not invented or versified, the traditions relating to Taliesin. He probably did not rest there, and if he put together the story of Tristrem, and his redaction passed into Brittany, he may well have been the common source drawn upon by 1 Saying, narrative. 2 66 Kendale" does not seem to be mentioned elsewhere as a poet; perhaps he is to be identified with Richard Kendall, a writer on music of uncertain date, who is said to have been a monk of Sherborne. 3 Esteem |