With solace and gladnes, So maydenly, Or hawke of the towre: Swete pomaunder, Goode Cassaunder; Stedfast of thought, Wele made, wele wrought; Far may be sought, Erst that ye can fynde Or hawke of the towre. FROM COLYN CLOUTE. I Colyn Clout As I go about And wandryng as I walke There shall no clergy appose A straw for Goddes curse! Is but a hermoniake 1, Over this, the forsayd raye God wot to theyt great paynes, 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; Full falsly on you they lye A man might say in mocke Of the steple of Poules, And thus they hurt their soules Some say ye sit in trones And shryne your rotten bones With pearles and precious stones, 7 By taxyng and tollage, Ye have monks to have the culerage That committed is a collage, And not par service de socage, 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 |