Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/123

Rh It is to the credit of the king, however, and characteristic of the generous disposition of the earlier Stuarts, that he never forgot or forsook the friend of his infant and boyish years. For when he fell under the power of the Douglases in 1524, and when Lyndsay had to take his dismissal from court, James took care that his salary should continue to be paid him ; and no sooner did he escape from their domination than Lyndsay was at once recalled, and the appointment of lyon-king conferred upon him. This was in 1529, and it is a remarkable proof of the reputation which Lyndsay had by this time acquired for prudence and sterling practical ability that he was at various times sent abroad in connexion with embassies from Scotland. In 1531 he went to the Netherlands to renew the com mercial treaty with that country. On this occasion the embassy had a personal interview with the emperor Charles V., and the mission was perfectly successful. A few years afterwards (in 1536) he formed one of the envoys sent to France to conclude a treaty of marriage between the Scottish king and Marie de Bourbon, daughter of the Due de Vendome. It is evident therefore that Lyndsay s position and employments must have enabled him to gather much experience of life, and to obtain a somewhat varied knowledge both of men and things. His last sad office to his beloved sovereign was to attend at his bedside when the poor king was dying of a broken heart at Falkland, in December 1542. Lyndsay survived the king about thirteen years. At the time of Cardinal Beaton s assassination he held a seat in parliament as commissioner for the burgh of Cupar. In 1548 he was despatched to Denmark to negotiate a free trade, particularly in grain, for the Scottish merchants, which was readily granted. Mr Laing, on the authority of an entry in the Privy Seal Register, states that his death must have taken place early in 1555. When Lyndsay was driven from the court by the advent of the Douglases to power, he no doubt felt it as a bitter misfortune and a disappointment of all his highest hopes. But we are greatly mistaken if he did not ere long come to regard it in a very different light. Like most men of genius, he had evidently two sides to his character. On the one side he had a taste for pleasure, sociality, pageantry, and frivolous amusements ; and a few years more of these might have deadened his nature to everything else, and converted him into a mere dangler after royalty. But he had also elements of a better kind. He was well educated and accomplished ; he had read somewhat extensively, and was master of most of the knowledge to be had in books at that time. He had seen not a little of the world, both in Scotland and in foreign countries ; he was an acute dis- cerner of character, and had both knowledge of and skill in affairs. Now then was just the time for a man like him, arrived at the full maturity of his intellect, to turn all these varied acquisitions to account. Lyndsay therefore, we may infer, retired to his country seat, either at The Mount, or as we fancy more likely to Garleton (that he might be more within call should a change take place in the political situation at Edinburgh), and there, after the first dull pang of disappointment was over, he doubtless found that there was no lack of subjects to engage his best thoughts. One of tha great crises in the history of Europe and in the progress of human thought had just arisen. The trumpet of the Reformation had been sounded in Germany, and its reverberation had already been heard in Scotland, where both political and ecclesiastical disorder had nearly reached their worst, and were becoming the source of deep anxiety and desire for redress to all good men. For Lyndsay, therefore, there was something else to do than to brood moodily over his own private griefs. He had to make up his mind on a variety of great public questions, as well perhaps as to settle the great personal question of his own 107 religious faith ; and in his earliest work, The Dreme, which seems to have been composed at this time, we have a somewhat vivid picture of the turn his thoughts took. He represents himself as having spent the long winter night with out sleep, through heavy thought, remembering of divers thingis gone.&quot; On getting up and walking out, he finds the dull winter season, with its bitter blasts and sharp sleety showers, but ill-fitted to console him, and only too much in harmony with his own melan choly. He goes down to the sea-shore, but things are no better there; for the &quot;weltering of the waves&quot; at once associates itself in his mind with &quot; this false warld s instability.&quot; Thus far, then, his meditations seem to have had a merely personal reference. But by and by, on retiring into a cave near the shore, lie falls into a trance, in which his thoughts take a wider range. The miserable state of his country, from misgovernment on the part of its rulers and the vices of both clergy and laity, fills his mind, and, reflecting on the ultimate fate of such men, he finds himself in the twinkling of an eye in hell, where he sees wicked popes, kings, conquerors, princes, and lords temporal, with no end of churchmen, &quot;mansworn mer chants,&quot; &quot; tinleil laboraris,&quot; craftsmen &quot; out of number,&quot; &quot; hurdaris of gold and common occararis,&quot; all &quot;tormentit with pains intoler able.&quot; Then, leaving this &quot;dolorous dongeon,&quot; ho has a passing sight of purgatory, though apparently with some misgiving as to its reality, his significant remark being &quot; Sic things to be great clerkis does conclude, Hovbeit my hope stands most in Christ is blood.&quot; Proceeding then to the realms of bliss, he sees something of the rewards of good and just rulers and righteous men ; and by arid by returning to the earth, and at length looking down upon Scotland, he sees a region both good and fair, its seas abounding in fish, its mountains covered with pasture, the valleys fit for corn, the forests full of game, mines with gold and silver, the people fair, intelligent, strong, and noble-minded, and yet with all this, the country poor and the inhabitants miserable. What could be the cause? and the answer given is that the realm wants good government, impartial administration of justice, and freedom from war and discord. View ing the country all over on the borders &quot; Betwixt the Mersc and Lochmaben, He could not knaw a leil mnn from a thief. To show their reif, theft, murther and mischief, And vicious works, it would infest the air.&quot; In the Highlands it was no better : &quot; Unthrift, sweirness, falset, poverty, and strife Put policy in danger of her life.&quot; And even in the Lowlands, where better things might be expected, it was impossible for a poor man to live by his industry. If he settled in the towns, &quot;singular profet&quot; (by which we understand him to mean the system of monopolies and of close trade corpora tions, which everywhere prevailed) &quot;gart him soon dislodge.&quot; And if he attempted to get redress to his wrongs there was no help for him anywhere. The spiritual state, plunged in simony, covetous- ness, pride, ambition, sensuality, and the love of pomp and pleasure, &quot;held him at disdain&quot;; and among the nobility and gentry &quot; liberality and lawte both are lost,&quot; knightly courage is &quot;tnrnit in brag and boast,&quot; and disorder and civil war have produced a state of things in which &quot; there is nocht else bot ilk man for himself.&quot; The moral of the whole is &quot; Woe to the land that has ouer young ane king!&quot; &quot;there sail na Scot have comforting till that I seethe country guided by wisdom of ane glide auld prudent king.&quot; The poet is then awakened by the sound of cannon from a ship of war approach ing the coast, the suggestion, as we imagine, being that the existing state of things can only end in violence and uproar, in tumult and rebellion, most probably in foreign invasion and revolution. On the whole The Dreme appears the most finished and artistic of Lyndsay s works. It has a tone of greater seriousness, bears the marks of more care and elaboration in the composition ; and, though it has a good deal of the crudeness of a first attempt, we think we can discover an effort at least at a finer proportion and harmony of parts than in any of his subsequent poems. In its subject- matter it strikes the keynote of almost all that he after wards wrote. The evils, the wrongs, the misgovernment of his country evidently filled his whole soul with grief, indignation, and the desire for reform ; and we almost doubt if there is to be found anywhere except in the old Hebrew prophets a purer or more earnest breathing of the patriotic spirit. Indeed if we may judge from the motto- prefixed to his Dreme we should almost fancy that he had made them his model : Prophetias nolite spernere. Omma autem probate : quod bonum est tenete. Lyndsay accordingly is to be judged of less as a poet than as a great political