Page images
PDF
EPUB

With solace and gladnes,
Moche mirthe and no madness,
All good and no badness,
So joyously,

So maydenly,
So womanly,
Her demenyng
In every thynge,
Far, far passynge
That I can endyght,
Or suffyce to wryghte,
Of mirry Margarete,
As mydsomer flowre,
Jentyll as fawcoun

Or hawke of the towre:
As pacient and as styll,
And as full of good wyll
As faire Isaphill;
Colyaunder,

Swete pomaunder,

Goode Cassaunder;

Stedfast of thought,

Wele made, wele wrought;

Far may be sought,

Erst that ye can fynde
So corteise, so kynde,
As mirry Margaret,
This mydsomer floure,
Jentyll as fawcoun

Or hawke of the towre.

FROM COLYN CLOUTE.

I Colyn Clout

As I go about

And wandryng as I walke
I heare the people talke;
Men say for syluer and golde
Miters are bought and sold;

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 simoniake,

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

1 A word unexplained by Dyce. Mr. Skeat suggests that harmoniac= promoter of harmony; a man who makes things pleasant all round. ? anchorite.

' mules.

linen made at Rennes in Brittany.

4

• adorned.

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 Poules,

And thus they hurt their soules
In sclaunderyng you for truth,
Alas it is great ruthe!

Some say ye sit in trones
Like prynces aquilonis 3,

And shryne your rotten bones

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

7

[blocks in formation]

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 :

[ocr errors]

'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

« PreviousContinue »