Praise Sir Topas for a noble tale, And scorne the story that the knight tolde. The satiric note of indignation rings true in these lines, carelessly written as some of them are. For such careless lines Wyatt has suffered much in critical esteem, but he had the root of the matter in him as no English poet had had since Chaucer, and deserves, for what he did as well as for when he did it, a higher place among English poets than is usually assigned him. In turning from Wyatt to Surrey it is usual to contrast the smoothness and finish of the younger poet with the crabbedness of the elder. If we look only to their sonnets the contrast is obvious enough, for Surrey had the wit to invent the spurious but effective sonnet form of three quatrains and a couplet-a metre in which smoothness is lightly attained and easily surpasses Wyatt in these poems. His sonnet to Geraldine has already been given; for another we may take his farewell to his squire, Clere, who saved his life at the cost of his own in a skirmish Montreuil : outside called Anne Boleyn Norfolk sprung thee, Lambeth holds thee dead, recovery Ere summers four times seven thou couldst fulfill. Ah! Clere! if love had booted, care, or cost, Heaven had not won, nor earth so timely lost. The allusiveness of this closely packed sonnet no doubt hinders its popularity, but not many finer have been written, and the warm personal feeling which runs through it is not often found in Surrey's poetry. It appears in a lighter vein in the poem written during his imprisonment in Windsor : So cruell prison how coulde betide, alas, In greater feast than Priams sonnes of Troy : The large grene courtes, where we were wont to hove, hover The palme play, where, dispoyled for the game, stripped Have mist the ball, and got sight of our dame, comrade wherin he reproveth them that compare their Ladies with his,' he is seen at his best : Geve place ye lovers, here before That spent your bostes & bragges in vaine, And thereto hath a trothe as just I could rehearse, if that I wolde, I knowe, she swore with ragyng mynd. That could have gone so nere her hart. Sith Nature thus gave her the prayse, To matche the candle with the sonne. Our last extract-part of Æneas's tale of the sack of Troy-is from Surrey's translation of the second and fourth books of Virgil's Eneid, published, after his death, in 1557, the same year as the Songes and Sonettes. This book has a double importance, first as our earliest English example of verse translation from a classical author as opposed to adaptation, and secondly and chiefly as written in the blank verse, the invention of which will always preserve Surrey's name in the history of English poetry: Whom when I saw assembled in such wise, So desperatly the battail to desire : Then furthermore thus sayd unto them, O ye yong men of courage stout, in vaine For nought ye strive to save the burning town. What cruel fortune hath betid: ye see The Gods out of the temples all ar fled, That uttermost that now may us befall, The blank verse halts at times, but to have established the use of the metre in English poetry was a great achievement, bearing out the chief claim that may be made for both Surrey and Wyatt, that they opened new fields, foreshadowed new possibilities, for our literature. Without Wyatt and Surrey as forerunners the Elizabethans had never entered into their kingdom, and from them our modern poetry takes its beginning. The stretches of green pasture and fair flowers in the long journey we have taken since Layamon's Brut have been too many and too fair (at least to a lover of old things) to compare them to oases in a wilderness, travelling through which we have at last reached a Mount Pisgah and the sight of a fairer land. But in both poetry and the drama, and to a less extent in prose, the reign of Elizabeth, despite its dull beginnings, marks a new epoch in English literature, and brings to a close the epoch of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance of the previous three centuries and a half. BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The references given in connection with the quotations from all the leading authors of this period indicate in every case what is believed to be the best edition. The best general bibliography of the subject, giving information not only about editions but as to the manuscripts on which they are founded, is Dr Gustav Körting's Grundriss der Geschichte der Englischen Litteratur (Münster, 1887); valuable notes as to editions will also be found in the various articles in the Dictionary of National Biography, most of which have also the highest biographical and critical value. Of general surveys of the subject, Ten Brink's History of English Literature (3 vols. 1883-96) still remains the best; but in vois iii.-viii. of the late Henry Morley's English Writers: An Attempt towards a History of English Literature (1888-92), a wealth of historical and biographical information will be found, together with some useful epitomes and straightforward criticism. For criticism, always original and interesting, A Short History of English Literature, by Professor Saintsbury (1898), is well worth consulting; while in his 'Periods of European Literature his own volume on The Flourishing of Romance and Rise of Allegory. Mr F. J. Snell's The Fourteenth Century, and Mr G. Gregory Smith's The Transition Period bring the British literature of over three centuries into connection with those of other countries. For the history of the language no complete manual exists, thoug much help may be obtained from Professor Skeat's introductions to the Clarendon Press Specimens of Early English, from Dr Sweet's Middle-English Primers, and Mr Kington Oliphant's Old and Middle English (1876). Stratmann's Middle-English Dictionary, as edited by Dr Henry Bradley (1891), is the only good lexicon. Most of the books of this period appear on the lists of the publications of the Early English Text Society, founded in 1854, er the Scottish Text Society, founded in 1884. The Chaucer Society (founded in 1868) has printed the complete text of most of the best manuscripts of Chaucer's works, and specimens of the others. The Wyclif Society (founded in 1882) confines itself to printing the numerous Latin works of Wyclif which had remained unpublished. His Select English Works were printed by Thomas Arnold in 1869-71, our quotations being taken from a supplementary volume, The English Works of Wyclif hitherto Unprinted, edited by Mr F. D. Matthew for the Early English Text Society in 1880. Of the four chief cycles of miracle-plays, the York Plays were edited by Miss Toulmin Smith for the Clarendon Press in 1885; the Towneley Plays (the Wakefield Cycle) for the Surtees Society in 1836, and again for the Early English Text Society in 1897; the Chester Plays and Coventry Plays for the Shakespeare Society, the former by Thomas Wright in 1843, the latter by J. O. HalliwellPhillipps in 1841. Vol. i. of a new edition of the Chester Plays was issued in 1892 by the Early English Text Society, which in 1896 reissued the Digby Plays, edited by Dr Furnivall for the New Shakspere Society in 1882. Of books about these plays, Thomas Sharp's A Dissertation on the Pageants anciently performed at Coventry (1825) is still valuable for its information, in addition to its text of the Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors' Company; there are also the present writer's English Miracle-Plays (Clarendon Press; 3rd ed. 1898), and a larger collection (3 vols.), edited by Professor Manly for the Athenæum Press series, Boston, U.S.A. Of collections of the Romances, the more important are Ritson's Ancient Engleish Metrical Romancees (3 vols. 1802); Webers Metrical Romances of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Centuries (3 vols 1810); Utterson's Select Pieces of Popular Poetry (2 vols. 1817); The Thornton Romances, edited by Halliwell-Phillipps (1844); and Armour's Scottish Alliterative Poems (1897). Of books about Chaucer, Studies in Chaucer, his Life and Writings, by T. R. Lounsbury (3 vols. 1892), is valuable though discursive; the present writer has put all he knows into a shilling Chaucer Primer (1891); and Professor Skeat, in The Chaucer Canon (1900), has given an interesting account of the poet's grammatical usage, and the method by which it may be used to test pieces wrongly assigned to him. Of Langland, M. Jusserand has given a picturesque sketch in His Piers Plowman, a Contribution to English Mysticism (1894). ALFRED W. POLLARD, SCOTTISH LITERATURE. N building up the great fabric of English literature Scottish writers have had no unimportant share. One of the very oldest extant documents in the English tongue is the inscription on the Ruthwell Cross; and more than once in our history Scotsmen have been our foremost writers. When we now speak of Scottish writers and Scottish literature, we think almost solely of the Teutonic tongue of the Scottish Lowlands. But at the beginnings of English speaking and writing, the words Scot, Scottish, and their derivatives meant something widely different. Scotia Latin formation, possibly from a Cymric or Welsh word-is first used of some of the inhabitants of Ireland by Ammianus Marcellinus, in describing the recent inroads of the Scots and Picts into Roman Britain in 360 A.D. When Bede was writing at Jarrow on the Tyne early in the eighth century, and for two hundred years later, Scotia meant Ireland, and Ireland only. Scoti from this Irish mother-country had, indeed, established themselves in Argyll, and in the ninth century united themselves with the Picts to form the kingdom of Alba. But it is not till well on in the eleventh century (about 1034) that Scotia is used for any part of North Britain, and then only for Alba, the country north of the firths of Forth and Clyde-excluding, however, Argyll, the first headquarters of the Scots, as that region was now overrun by Norsemen. Scotia was a Latin form; but in like manner Scottaland or Scotland, an English word entirely foreign to the Celtic peoples and their speech, was the term used by Anglians and Saxons for Ireland at first, and afterwards for the northernmost kingdom of Britain. Picts as well as Scots now spoke a Celtic tongue of the Goidelic, Gaelic, or Irish type. But the blood of the Picts, much the most numerous people in the north, was probably in the main not Celtic at all. The Picts had been Celticised by invaders from the south; probably the bulk of them were descendants of one of the swarthy savage racessometimes called Ivernian-who occupied Britain and Ireland before the first Celtic immigrants came hither from the Continent. The history of the country south of the firthsby far the most important part of what we now call Scotland-is wholly distinct. Possibly the descendants of the neolithic man survived through all comings and goings; a wave of Goidelic invasion had no doubt flooded the south of Scotland, and only partly passed on; but during the Roman occupation of Britain it was a British or Cymric country, and in the fifth and following centuries it was overrun and occupied by invading Angles. How far the new-comers exterminated or expelled the Welsh or other natives, and how far they absorbed them, is not known; but it seems certain that Lothian and the Merse became at least as English or Teutonic as the most English part of England. Early in the seventh century Lothian and Berwickshire formed an integral part of the dominions of the most powerful English kings of the age. They were included in Bernicia, the northern, as Deira was the southern, of the Northumbrian kingdoms. Edwin, or Eadwine, was king of Northumbria (617-633), and overlord of most of the rest of England; his sway was undisputed from Humber to Forth, and from sea to sea; Edinburgh, founded or refounded by him, is still a monument to the great Northumbrian; and the specifically English name of the Scottish capital-Edwinesburch or Edwinesburg in early twelfth-century documents-testifies to the fact that the original burch or fortress stood on old English ground. Strathclyde, bordering on Lothian, was a Welsh kingdom; Galloway was a distinct Pictish-Gaelic principality. Edinburgh, Lothian, and the Merse had for centuries no connection with the Scots save through their missionary enterprise. Strathclyde and the south of Scotland seem to have been partially Christianised before the coming of the Angles; the Irish Columba was at work among the Picts in the sixth century. Not till 627 did Northumbria welcome the gospel at the hands of Paulinus, the Roman missionary from Kent. The permanent conversion was, however, really begun in 635 by Irish missionaries from Iona, who, after thirty years' labour, were expelled as schismatics on the triumph of Roman over Celtic forms. After that revolution a Northumbrian bishopric was founded at Abercorn in West Lothian in 681; and by 730 Ninian's foundation at Whithorn was an Anglian see. In the tenth century Northumbria had fallen on evil times the kingdom was at an end, and great part of it was held by the heathen Danes. The kings of Alba, now coming to be called Scotia, made inroads and assaults; the harassed Northumbrian Earls could hardly resist; and in 1018, when Earl Eadulf was defeated in a bloody battle at Carham, Northumbria benorth the Tweed was formally ceded to the Celtic but Christian kings of Scots, whom doubtless the Angles preferred to pagan Danish masters. But it was on condition that Lothian should retain its Anglian laws and customs; of its Anglian speech there never was question. The great Danish king Cnut, now firmly established on the throne of England, did not disturb this arrangement, which is the chief turning-point in the history of the northern kingdom. The last addition to its population, the alien Anglian people, were soon to become the dominant element in the north; to substitute their North-English or Anglian speech for the various Celtic tongues spoken in Alba, Strathclyde, and Galloway; to give Scotland their laws and usages ; and to make Scottish civilisation what it has been. The monarchy identified itself with its new Anglian subjects, and became gradually alienated from the original Celtic polity. To speak of the Lowlands as Scotland is really a misnomer, unless it be remembered that the name denotes a political alliance only in blood and tongue and temper the people of the Lowlands, though no doubt a very mixed race, especially in the west, are English rather than Scottish, and even in the west are as English as the people of Lancashire or Cumberland. They are English in a sense that the southern English are not Anglian and not Saxon. The Lowlanders of Scotland are Scotch very much as the people of Brandenburg are Prussian. The Brandenburgers, though they have long been subjects of the Prussian monarchy, are in no wise Prussian in blood, and are not even akin to the Prussians proper, the Slavonic or Lithuanian inhabitants of the eastern parts of the kingdom. The cession of Lothian in the eleventh century did not make it Scottish save in its political connection. Contrariwise, it was the Anglian Lowlander who became the 'typical Scot,' the very antithesis of the Celt. According to the authorities the Celt is amiable, winsome, impressionable, changeable and easily discouraged, voluble in speech, witty and humorous, instinct with poetry and the love of art-Titanic' even; whereas, we are told, the Englishman is hard, matter-of-fact, repellent, pragmatic, unsympathetic, dull in perceptions. Yet on the same showing the Englishman is a very Celt -courteous, debonair, chattering, laughing, and effusive-as compared with the 'typical Scot,' who is described as dogged, dour, unimpressionable, undemonstrative, obtuse to wit and sprightliness, slow and uncouth of speech, persistent, selfassertive, and cautious and 'practical' to a pitch undreamt of in England, though (in the heroes and heroines of novels especially!) possessed of certain surprising and contradictory saving graces. Verily the Lowland Scots are Anglis ipsis Angliores; and the actual Highlander himself more closely resembles the typical Scot than he does the theoretical Celt. After the cession of Lothian, as before, it was Northumbrian English that was the speech of the people there. Until the cession, Lothian was part of an English kingdom; and Edinburgh was well within the limits of the country in whose tongue the first great writers of English spoke and wrote. Cadmon and Bæda, Cynewulf and Alcuin, spoke the tongue common to York and Edinburgh, not the tongue of London, Winchester, and Canter bury; and the great school or university of York, founded by Ecgberht, had grown to its highest fame ere Lothian ceased to be English territory in the fullest sense of the word. And it was a Lothian saint-St Cuthbert-who spoke in a vision to Elfred in his dark days at Athelney, and encouraged him to make the stand that saved Britain from becoming Danish. In the eleventh century Scotland had nearly attained its permanent limits, although Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isles, and Argyll remained Norwegian; and although Strathclyde and Galloway were not fully incorporated till after 1125. Scotland was not yet a nation in the twelfth century, but it was well on the way. It was in the eleventh century that the names Scotia and Scotland were applied to part of North Britain: the Lothians were from the twelfth century recognised as part of the kingdom the Angles (not the Celtic Scots) called Scotland; but not for long after this did the Angles of Lothian dream of calling themselves or their language Scottis. The Scottis tongue meant till the sixteenth century the Celtic or Gaelic language of the Highlanders. The kings of Scotland in the thirteenth century issued writs Scotis, Anglis, et Francis—to their Gaelic, Anglian, and Norman-French subjects. Fordun says his countrymen spoke some of them Scotic and some Teutonic; the earlier Lowland writers called the tongue they used Inglis or English - Barbour, Wyntoun, Blind Harry, Dunbar, all professed to be writing Inglis. Dunbar not merely professed to write Inglis himself, but regards his own as essentially the same language with Chaucer's; Chaucer is the flower of oure tong,' 'of oure Inglisch all the lycht.' It was in Inglis tong' that Kennedy, sneered at by Dunbar as a Carrick Highlander, undertook to instruct his ignorant countrymen. Gourlay, vicar of Dollar, burnt as a heretic in 1534, was charged with teaching his congregation to pray to God in Englische ;' and he admitted that, as his parishioners were rude and knew no Latin, it was forced on his conscience to teach them the ten commands 'in Inglische,' and the Lord's Prayer likewise ' in thair awin mother tounge.' Lyndsay wrote in Inglisch, and praised Douglas as 'of our Inglis rethorike the rose.' Gavin Douglas, writing in the very year Flodden was fought, and the author of the Complaynt of Scotlande, in the year after Pinkie —both at a time of special embitterment against the 'auld enemy' in the south-are the first Lowland writers who profess to write in Scottis. But the long wars between England and Scotland had bred in the northern kingdom such an increasing antipathy to the southern foes that the northerners more and more disliked to be in any way mixed up with the English name. And from the middle of the sixteenth century Scottislater contracted to Scots, or in the English form Scottish and Scotch - superseded Inglis as the regular name for the Teutonic speech of southern Scotland; the form Scots now frequently used even by English writers not being properly a southern English word at all, but a foreign and borrowed form. It stands to Scottis exactly in the same relation that Scotch does to Scottish; the first two being the northern, the latter two the normal southern forms. For centuries before and after the Conquest the Northumbrian from the Humber to the Forth was essentially the same tongue. But before, and especially during and after, the wars that led to the assertion of Scottish national independence at the beginning of the fourteenth century divergences became more and more marked. 'South of the Tweed and the Cheviots,' as Dr Murray has said (in Chambers's Encyclopædia, vol. ix. p. 248), 'the Northumbrian sank from the rank of a literary language used by poets, preachers, and chroniclers, to that of a local dialect, or group of patois, overshadowed by the king's English of London, and more and more depressed under its influence. After 1400, or at least after the fifteenth century, it disappears from the view of the student. But north of the Tweed and Solway the Northumbrian remained the language of a court and a nation; it spread westward and northward over districts formerly occupied by British and Gaelic (or it may be Pictish) populations, from which it sustained modifications phonetic and structural; it received literary culture, and especially contracted alliances with French and Latin on its own account; so as to acquire by the close of the fifteenth century distinctive and strongly-marked features of its own not found in the cognate dialects in the north of England. From the close of the fourteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century it was the vehicle of an extensive and in many respects brilliant literature, it was the medium of legislation and justice, and fulfilled every function of a national language. But a serious shock to its independent development was given by the Reformation, in consequence of the close relations between the leaders of that movement and the English Protestants, and the use of English books, especially of the English version of the Geneva Bible, printed at Edinburgh in 1576-79. followed the accession of James VI. to the crown of England, the transference of the seat of government to London, and the consequent disuse of the "Scottis toung" by the court and by the nobility, who found it desirable to speak the king's English, and gradually grew ashamed of their Scotch. After this, few works were written in the native tongue, except such as were intended for merely local use. It became obsolete in public legal use at the time of the Commonwealth, and though retained a little longer in the local records of remote burghs and kirk-sessions, it disappeared from these also by 1707. But though it thus became obsolete in official and literary use, so that Scotchmen thenceforth wrote in English tinged more or less with Scotticisms, or words, phrases, Then and idioms derived from their native speech, it still continued, in several dialectal varieties, to be the vernacular of the people, and after a period of neglect it bloomed forth anew as the vehicle of ballad and lyric poetry, in Lady Wardlaw, Allan Ramsay, Burns, and their numerous fellowsingers.' But the modern Scotch, as well as that used in the dialogue of novels by Sir Walter and his successors and imitators, is, as we shall see, a very different tongue from the old literary Scotch, and is, indeed, very largely modern English written or pronounced in the Scottish manner. The early literature of the Gael in Scotland— Columba and Adamnan, author, about 700, of the famous Vita Columbæ, were both Irish-born -can hardly be disentangled from that of Ireland. In the Middle Ages, though Scotsmen became familiar and prominent at foreign universities, Scotland produced few great thinkers or writers. Yet the Borders have a good (though not undisputed) claim to two of the most conspicuous European scholars of their time-Michael Scott in the earlier. and Duns Scotus in the later years of the thirteenth century. Michael Scott, Aristotelian and philosopher, was even more eminent as astrologer and magician, and played a large part at the learned court of the Emperor Frederick II. Duns Scotus, the Doctor Subtilis' of the Franciscans, renowned alike for his learning and his originality, divided the allegiance of the Schoolmen with the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, and for centuries gave the name of Scotists to half the medieval theologians of Christendom. Their works, in Latin, deal with matters beyond our province. Dr Murray describes as Early Scottish all verse and prose down to about 1475-corresponding in time to the Middle English Period in England. Middle Scottish comes down - not, of course, unaltered to about 1650, when from a national speech the tongue had sunk to a dialect, and corresponds to early modern English. The most outstanding fact about the early Scottish language is that it is identical with contemporary north English, insomuch that we cannot from the language alone say on which side of the Border a book was written (see pages 43, 51). The similarity will be easily seen on comparing the specimens of the Scottish work of this period with the extracts from English Northumbrian books given above, such as the Cursor Mundi (page 47) or the writings of Richard of Hampole. The reader will find a specimen of northern English (not Scotch) as it sounded to Chaucer's ears at page 72, and will recognise many characteristic northern forms still current in modern Scotch-banes, atanes, rae for roe, bathe for both, gas (i.e. gaes) for goes. Even in Chaucer's southern English are many forms or pronunciations now preserved only in northern dialect, though not in origin peculiarly northern. Thus in our Chaucerian selections the northerner will note with interest such words or |