Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 15.djvu/300

 heart of the enemy's country. Meanwhile he had formed a valued friendship with Polydore Vergil, to whom he submitted what he considered a correct view of Scottish affairs to guide him on these points in his ‘History of England.’ Vergil records (in his History, i. 105) the death of Douglas. ‘In the year of our Lord ,’ he says, ‘he died of the plague in London.’ The death occurred, September 1522, in the house of his staunch friend, Lord Dacre, in St. Clement's parish, and in accordance with his own request he was buried in the hospital church of the Savoy, ‘on the left side of Thomas Halsey, bishop of Leighlin, who died about the same time.’ There is a ring as of the vanity of human wishes in the pathetic sentence closing the twofold record over the burial-places of the prelates: ‘Cui lævus conditur Gavanus Dowglas, natione Scotus, Dunkeldensis Præsul, patria sui exul.’

Of Douglas's ability, extensive and accurate learning, and strong and vigorous literary gift, there cannot be the shadow of a doubt. When we consider that his first considerable poem—marked by rich fancy, and compassing a lofty ideal—was produced when he was about the age at which Keats issued his last volume, and that all his literary work was done when he was still under forty, we cannot but reflect how much more he might have achieved but for the harassing conditions that shaped his career. His three works are: ‘The Palice of Honour,’ ‘King Hart’ (both of which are allegories, according to a prevalent fashion of the age), and a translation of the ‘Æneid’ with prologues. The theme of the ‘Palice’ is the career of the virtuous man, over manifold and sometimes phenomenal difficulties, towards the sublime heights which his disciplined and well-ordered faculties should enable him to reach. It is marked by the exuberance of youth, sometimes running out to the extravagant excess that allegory so readily encourages, but there is plenty in it to show that the writer has a genius for observation and a true sense of poetic fitness. It is manifest that he has read Chaucer and Langland, but he likewise gives certain fresh features of detail that anticipate both Spenser and Bunyan. The poem is a crystallisation of the chivalrous spirit, in the enforcement of a strenuous moral law and a lofty but arduous line of conduct. ‘King Hart’ likewise embodies a drastic and wholesome experience. It is a presentation of the endless conflict between flesh and spirit, in which the heart, who is king of the human state, knoweth his own trouble, and is purged as if by fire. The poet exhibits more self-restraint in this poem than in its predecessor; he is less turgid and more artistic, stronger in reflection and not so expansively sentimental, and much more skilful in point of form. A minor piece on ‘Conscience,’ a dainty little conceit, completes his moral poems. In his translation of Virgil, Douglas is on quite untrodden ground. He has the merit of being the first classical translator in the language, and he seems to have set his own example by working at passages of Ovid, of which no specimens exist. He must have done the whole work, prologues and all, together with a translation of the supplementary book by Maphæus Vegius, within the short space of eighteen months. He writes in heroic couplets, and his movement is confident, steadfast, and regular. In several of the prologues he reaches his highest level as a poet. He shows a strong and true love for external nature, at a time when such a devotion was not specially fashionable; he displays an easy candour in reference to the opinions of those likely to criticise him; he proves that he can at will (as in the prologue to book viii.) change his style for the sake of effect; and in accordance with his theme he can be impassioned, reflective, or devout. The hymn to the Creator prefixed to the tenth book, and the prologue to the book of Maphæus Vegius—descriptive of summer and the ‘joyous moneth tyme of June’—are specially remarkable for loftiness of aim and sustained excellence of elaboration.

The earliest known edition of the ‘Palice of Honour’ is an undated one printed in London, and probably to be assigned to 1553, the year in which W. Copland published the translation of Virgil. The poem, however, was issued several times in the sixteenth century, and the preface to the first Edinburgh edition (1579) contains a reference to the London issue, as well as to certain ‘copyis of this wark set furth of auld amang ourselfis.’ The latter cannot now be traced, but they are supposed to have appeared before 1543, when Florence Wilson imitated the ‘Palice of Honour’ in his ‘De Tranquillitate Animi.’ The Edinburgh edition, with the prologues to the Virgil, formed the second volume of a series of Scottish poets published in Perth by Morison in 1787. Pinkerton used the same edition in his ‘Ancient Scotish Poems,’ and the Bannatyne Club in 1827 likewise reprinted it, together with a list of the variations from the London edition. Of the Virgil the important editions are the first (1553), Ruddiman's, and the handsome edition, in 2 vols. 4to, of the Bannatyne Club (1839). ‘King Hart’ and ‘Conscience’ were both poems of recognised merit by the middle