Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 3.djvu/63

Rh modern allusions for the original, and, as this specimen testifies, to alter any personality respecting the author, so as to apply to himself. The translation of the " Remedy of Love," which must have been written before the year 1501, has not been preserved. In the year just mentioned, he wrote his " Palace of Honour," an apologue for the conduct of a king, and which he therefore addressed, very appropriately, to his young sovereign, king James IV. The poet, in a vision, finds himself in a wilderness, where he sees troops of persons 'travelling towards the palace of honour. He joins himself to the train of the muses, and in their company proceeds to the happy place. At this point of the allegory, his description of one of their resting places is exceedingly beautiful:

In his last adventure, he seems to allude to the law of celibacy, under which, as a priest, he necessarily lay. The habitation of the honourable ladies (which he describes in gorgeous terms) is surrounded by a deep ditch, over which is a narrow bridge, formed of a single tree ; and this is supposed to represent the ceremony of marriage. Upon his attempting to pass over the bridge, he falls into the water, and awakes from his dream. Of this poem, the earliest known edition is one printed at London, in 1553, in quarto. Another appeared at Edinburgh, in 1579, being printed "by Johne Roos, for Henry Charteris:" both are very rare. In the preface, however, to the Edinburgh edition, the printer mentions, that "besides the coppie printed at London, there were copyis of this wark set furth of auld amang ourselfis." These are totally lost to bibliographical research. There is some probability, however, that some of them appeared before 1543, as a work by Florence Wilson, entitled " De Tranquillitate Animi," and printed in that year, is said to be an imitation of the Palace of Honour. Sage, in his life of Douglas, prefixed to the edition of the $!neid, thus speaks of the poem under our notice: "The author's excellent design is, under the similitude of a vision, to represent the vanity and inconstancy of all worldly pomp and glory ; and to show, that a constant and inflexible course of virtue and goodness, is the only way to true honour and felicity, which he allegorically describes, as a magnificent palace, situated on the top of a very high mountain, of a most difficult access. He illustrates the whole with a variety of examples, not only of those noble and heroic souls, whose eminent virtues procured them admission into that blessed place, but also of those wretched creatures, whose vicious lives have fatally excluded them from it for ever, notwithstanding of all their worldly state and grandeur." This critic is of opinion that the poet took his plan from the palace of happiness described in the "Tablet" of Cebes. There is, however, a probability of a still more interesting nature, with which we are impressed. This is, that Bunyan must have adopted his idea of the Pilgrim's Progress from the "Palace of Honour." In the whole structure of these two works, there is a marked resemblance. Both are dreams, representing a journey towards a place superior to the nature of this world. In the one, the pilgrim of honour, in the other, the pilgrim of Christianity, are the heroes; and both are conducted by supernatural beings, on a march represented as somewhat trying to human strength. It is curious, also,