CHAPTER IV DEVELOPMENT OF THE IDEA OF THE STATE IN POETRY: SIR DAVID LYNDSAY: THE MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES: THOMAS SACKVILLE. THE most brilliant representatives of the noble society immediately connected with the Court were thus seeking to refine the English language into an instrument of metrical expression. But their skill was, as a rule, devoted to giving the warmth and colour of words to fictitious emotions and artificial sentiments, which lingered like the afterglow of the sunset of chivalry. Meantime a deeper sense of poetry was stirring in the soul of the nation at large. The philosopher, the moralist, and the statesman, were alive to the conflict of tragic forces in the life about them, and strove, however imperfectly, to represent them in verse. Hence, in much of the poetry conceived in England and Scotland during the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII. and in the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, an increased prominence was given to the idea of the State. We have seen in the course of our history that the development of the political element in English poetry had been long foreshadowed. The equal balance of rival races and antagonistic powers in England, and the deeplyrooted attachment to Saxon laws and customs, had caused the universal European conflict to present itself in this country in a much clearer form than in any other of the Western monarchies. From the reign of King John the quarrels arising from time to time between the Court and the baronial party, the nation and the pope, the civil and ecclesiastical courts, furnished the poets with subjects for treatment in verse. Politics had formed the staple of such poems as the Vox Clamantis of Gower, the Vision of Piers the Plowman of Langland, the De Regimine Principum of Occleve. But in all these the political disorder of the times is regarded as proceeding from the disarrangement of the Catholic and Feudal Order of Europe at large; and the subject is treated from an ecclesiastical point of view, and in that allegorical form which presupposes an acceptance of the principles of the scholastic philosophy. The examples by means of which the poet enforces his moral, are taken from universal history, just as his moral itself is taken from the Schoolmen's interpretation of the Scriptures. It is in this respect that we find the chief difference between the poems just mentioned and such political compositions as those of Sir David Lyndsay and The Mirror for Magistrates which we have now to consider. The latter, indeed, preserve in their design much of the mediæval framework; but we meet less frequently with the scholastic citation of Scripture, and the attention of the poet is concentrated almost entirely on the affairs of his own nation. Sir David Lyndsay possessed a genius racy of the soil of Scotland while it was still a separate kingdom, and he might therefore be regarded as falling outside the roll of English poets with which we are concerned. He has, however, been included by Warton in his History of English Poetry, and even if it were otherwise, there would be good reasons for assigning him a place in this volume. The last Scottish poet sprung of the lineage of Chaucer, he belongs to an age when the theory of the Christian Republic still survived, and the outlines of international law were yet indistinct; and he accordingly exhibits in his poetry many of those universal features of the mediaval style which were described in the preceding volume. I think it is also probable that his poems suggested the composition of The Mirror for Magistrates, so that a comparison of his work with that of his English followers will throw an instructive light, by means both of likeness and contrast, on the advance of the art of poetry in England. David Lyndsay, eldest son of William Lyndsay of Garmylton, was born about 1490, and was educated at the University of St. Andrews between 1507-1509. In 1512 he became page to the heir-apparent to the throne, then just born, and he describes, in an extremely pleasing and natural vein, the manner in which he amused the young prince who, in 1513, in consequence of the fatal battle of Flodden, became his sovereign under the title of James V. How as ane chapman beris his pack He continued in attendance on the King till 1524, when the latter, by Act of Parliament, was put into possession of his power, and was allowed to choose his councillors, one of whom, the Earl of Angus, kept him in close constraint, and caused Lyndsay to be dismissed from the royal service with a pension. In 1528, however, James escaped from his tyrants, and in that year Lyndsay composed his Dreme, which he dedicated to the King. This was followed in the next year by his Complaynt, a poem in which he appeals directly to the King for advancement on the strength of old association; and it was perhaps in answer to this prayer that in 1530 he was knighted and made Lyon King of Arms. Relying on the royal favour, he wrote in that year his satirical Complaint of the Papingo, and in 1535 his interlude called The Pleasant Satire of the Three Estates. In his capacity of herald he helped 1 Par cœur. 3 The tune of that name. 2 To hear. 4 Lyndsay's Complaynt. to negotiate his master's successive marriages with two French princesses; but after the King's death in 1542 his influence naturally sank, and he joined himself more or less closely in opposition with the party of John Knox. A bitter enemy of Cardinal Beaton, he wrote, after the murder of the latter in 1546, The Tragedie of the Late Cardinall. His Squire Meldrum, a poem which would appear like Chaucer's Sir Thopas to have been written in ridicule of the romances, was published in 1550, and in 1553 appeared his longest poem, entitled Monarchie or A Dialogue of this World's Miserie Between Ane Courtier and Experience. Lyndsay died about 1558. He married in 1532 Janet Douglas, but left no children. The history of Scotland, from the accession of James I. down to the period when Lyndsay began to write, presented striking materials to the imagination of a moralising poet. The genius of feudalism seemed to have chosen that country as the scene of its most capricious experiments. A series of well-intentioned kings, aided by the estates of the realm, had endeavoured, with fluctuating success, to establish a system of law and civilisation in the midst of a half-secular hierarchy, a turbulent nobility, a host of marauding tribal chieftains. Of these kings not one had died a natural death. James I., a true lover of justice and letters, was murdered by his lawless Highland subjects. James II., who attempted, but more capriciously, to follow in his father's footsteps, was killed by the accidental bursting of a cannon. James III., with a character resembling, in its gentle weakness, that of Henry VI. of England, was assassinated after the second battle of Bannockburn. The country, nevertheless, remained free from dynastic disputes, and when James IV. became king it seemed as if the monarchy had gained a brilliant opportunity of establishing its authority on an enduring basis. James himself was a gallant knight and an accomplished scholar. He was anxious for the prosperity and good government of his realm. His court, a centre for the new ideas of refinement flowing in from France and Italy, maintained a crowd of poets of whom the chief were the brilliant William Dunbar and the scholarly Gavin Douglas. But a curse, like those recorded in the Greek legends, seemed to attend the family of Stuart, and in a moment of infatuation James entered on the fatal expedition which cost him his own life, and Scotland, in a single day, as much of her best blood as had been wasted in England by a whole generation of civil war. This catastrophe was followed by a long minority with all its attendant evils. Perpetual factions among the nobility naturally led to the interference of foreign powers, the party of the Regent Albany leaning on the aid of France, the party of the Douglases turning for protection to England, while a third party, prosecuting the interests of the Church, invoked the authority of the Papacy. To the mind of Lyndsay these misfortunes appeared primarily in the light in which the disasters of their times had presented themselves to all the poetical moralists of the Middle Ages,-to Dante, to Langland, to Gowernamely, as the fruits of original sin. Whenever he makes them the subject of his verse he founds his reasoning about them on Scholastic Theology, and conveys his ideas to the reader in the established forms of allegory. In the Dream, the earliest of his compositions, he treads closely in the steps of his master, Chaucer. After a dedicatory "Epistle" to the King's Grace, in which he reminds James of his old attendance on him, and makes the inevitable apology for lack of art in his poem, he relates how in the Calends of January, being unable to sleep, he went out to gaze upon Dame Flora in the sad weeds of the season. By a really beautiful and original image he describes how The tender flouris I saw Under Dame Nature's mantill lurkyng law, and how, going on to the sea-shore, he walked up and down the sand, and then climbed into a cave where the sound of the wind and the waves put him to sleep. In the dream which, of course, followed, he encountered Dame Remembrance, under whose guidance he passed into Hell, where he saw many popes and other ecclesiastics, emperors, |