There shall no clergy appose
A myter nor a crosse
But a full purse.

A straw for Goddes curse!
What are they the worse?
For a sinoniake,

Is but a hermoniake 1,
And no more ye make
Of symony men say
But a childes play.

Over this, the forsayd raye
Report how the pope maye
A holy anker 2 call
Out of the stony wall,
And hym a bysshopp make
If he on him dare take
To kepe so hard a rule,
To ryde vpon a mule
Wyth golde all betrapped,
In purple and paule belapped.
Some hatted and some capped,
Rychely be wrapped,

God wot to theyt great paynes,
In rochettes of fine raynes3;

Whyte as morowes mylke,

Their tabertes of fine silke,

Their stirops of mixt golde begared*,

Their may no cost be spared.

Their moyles golde doth eate,

Theyr neighbours dye for meat.

What care they though Gill sweat,

Or Jacke of the Noke?

The pore people they yoke

With sommons and citacions

And excommunications

'A word unexplained by Dyce. Mr. Skeat suggests that harmoniac – fromoter of harmony; a man who makes things pleasant all round ' anchorite. 3 linen made at Rennes in Brittany.

• adorned

'mules.

Aboute churches and market;
The bysshop on his carpet
At home full soft doth syt,
This is a feareful fyt,
To heare the people iangle!
How warely they wrangle,
Alas why do ye not handle,
And them all mangle?

Full falsly on you they lye
And shamefully you ascry',
And say as untruly,
As the butterfly

A man might say in mocke
Ware 2 the wethercocke

Of the steple of Poules3,

And thus they hurt their soules
In sclaunderyng you for truth,
Alas it is great ruthe!
Some say ye sit in trones
Like prynces aquilonis3,

And shryne your rotten bones

With pearles and precious stones,
But now the commons grones
And the people mones

4

For preestes and for lones
Lent and neuer payde,

But from day to day delaid,
The commune welth decayd.
Men say ye are tunge tayde,
And therof speake nothing
But dissimuling and glosing.
Wherfore men be supposing
That ye geue shrewd counsel
Against the commune wel,
By pollyng and pillage
In cities and village,

By taxyng and tollage,

Ye have monks to have the culerage

For coueryng of an old cottage,

That committed is a collage,
In the charter of dottage,
Tenure par service de sottage,

And not par service de socage,
After old segnyours

And the learning of Litleton tenours,

Ye haue so ouerthwarted

That good lawes are subuerted,

And good reason peruerted.

SIR DAVID LYNDESAY.

[Born circ. 1490, died 1558.]

Dunbar's attitude toward the change of religion, in his time impending, is that of a wholly unconscious precursor; he is a minor Chaucer, who would have had less sympathy with men like Wyclyffe than his master had. Sir David Lyndesay was a 'spirit of another sort'-a child of the new age, when the trumpets of the Reformation had summoned the strong minds of the time to take their sides for or against the old order. Indefinitely less of a poet,-hardly a poet at all, he was yet a literary power filling a place and discharging a function of his own; a trenchant satirist, almost a dramatist; a political and moral pamphleteer, whose versified pamphlets are always sustained at a high level by vigour and courage, and occasionally illumined by gleams of imagination.

Lyndesay's life is part of the history of his time. The following dates are its mere landmarks. He was born at The Mount in Fifeshire about the year 1490, the junior by ten years of Luther and Sir Thomas More, the senior by fifteen of Knox. He was a student of St. Andrews in 1508, and passed from the University to the service of the court. In 1513 he was present with James IV at Linlithgow when a supposed apparition came to warn the monarch against his fatal expedition. Subsequently he was gentleman-usher to the young prince-a fact to which he alludes in one of those appeals for promotion, which recall the similar petitions of Dunbar :

'When thou was young, I bore thee in mine arm,

Full tenderly till thou begowth to gang.'

In 1530 he was knighted and made Lyon King of Arms, or chief court herald, in which capacity he served in several foreign embassies. In 1535 his Thrie Estates was acted at Cupar Fife, the court and company sitting nine hours to listen to it. 1536 must have been the date of the King's Flyting, one of the

most audacious compositions in the language.

Next year the

king's wife, Magdalene, died before her coronation, and Lyndesay wrote the Deploratioun, which may be compared, though unfavourably, with Chaucer's Lament for the Duchess. The metre is the rhyme royal, and the 147th line,

'Twynkling lyke sterris in ane frostie nycht,'

is transcribed verbatim from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. In 1542 the poet witnessed at Falkland the death of the king (James V), who had been his consistent patron. In 1547, after the assassination of Beaton, he was present with the garrison in the castle of St. Andrews, and was among the most urgent of those there assembled in persuading Knox to assume the direction of affairs. In 1555 we hear of his presiding over a meeting of heralds to pronounce on some point of their pseudo-science. In 1558 he died at his family seat, having mingled in all the great movements of his age.

Lyndesay's verse, on which his reputation as a writer depends, is all connected with the contemporary state of his country. To the lightest as well as the gravest-ranging from tedious allegory to lively ridicule-he has attached political and social applications. More than half his works are allegories. In the earliest, and as regards imaginative decoration the richest, The Dreme, he is led through a series of dissolving views of the past ages of the world, a journey to Hades, and a flight beyond the stars to an interview with 'Sir Commonweal,' who joins with him in lamentation over a realm misgoverned by an 'ouir young king' and dissolute priests. In the same strain he harps in his Complaynt, in the direct attack on ecclesiastical corruption put into the mouth of a dying parrot, under the title of The Testament of the Papyngo, and in The Tragedy of the Cardinal, the last of which passes on the moral of the Fall of Princes from Lydgate to Sackville. In all of these, and elsewhere, he preaches, with less consistency, the old sermon of Wyclyffe against the corruptions of wealth, and upholds, for the admiration of his readers, the poverty of the Apostolic age. In Kitteis Confession (c. 1541) he crosses the line drawn by Dunbar, and commits himself to a direct attack on one of the still established institutions of the Church, glancing incidentally at her foreign ceremonial—

VOL. I.

'And mekle Latin he did mummil,

I hard na thing but hummil bummil'

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