at Cambridge; while another was a Latin play "On the Papacy," probably intended to be enacted by his pupils. The same may have been the destination of the English Comedy, through which he holds his place in the general history of our literature. It is called "Ralph Roister Doister," from the name of its hero, a silly town-rake. The misadventures of this person are represented in it with much comic force. The story is well conducted; the situations are contrived dexterously; and the dialogue, though rough in diction, and couched in an irregular and unmusical kind of rhyme, abounds in spirit and humour. Its exact date is unknown; but it was certainly written before the year 1557.*

Ten years afterwards, our earliest tragedy was publicly played in the Inner Temple. It is known by two names, "Gorboduc" and "Ferrex and Porrex :" and it was probably the joint production of two authors, both of whom have already become known

* NICHOLAS UDALL.

From the Soliloquy with which his Comedy is opened, by Matthew Merrygreek, the knave of the piece.

As long liveth the merry man (they say)

As doth the sorry man, and longer by a day:
Yet the grasshopper, for all his summer piping,
Starveth in winter with hungry griping:
Therefore another said saw doth men advise,
That they be together both merry and wise.
This lesson must I practise; or else, ere long,
With me, Matthew Merrygreek, it will be wrong.
For know ye that, for all this merry note of mine,
He might appose me now, that should ask where I dine.
Sometimes Lewis Loiterer biddeth me come near;
Sometimes Watkin Waster maketh us good cheer;
Sometimes I hang on Hankyn Hoddydoddy's sleeve;
But this day on Ralph Roister Doister's, by his leave;
For, truly, of all men he is my chief banker,
Both for meat and money, and my chief sheet-anchor.

But now of Roister Doister somewhat to express,
That ye may esteem him after his worthiness;
In these twenty towns, and seek them throughout,
Is not the like stock whereon to graft a lout.
All the day long is he facing and craking
Of his great acts in fighting and fray-making:
But when Roister Doister is put to the proof,
To keep the Queen's peace is more for his behoof.
Hold by his yea and nay, be his white son;

Praise and rouse him well, and ye have his heart won:
For so well liketh he his own fond fashions,

That he taketh pride of false commendations.

But such sport have I with him, as I would not leese,
Though I should be bound to live with bread and cheese.

to us. The first three acts are said to have been written by Thomas Norton, the last two by Lord Buckhurst. Doubts have been expressed as to the authorship of the former; but they do not seem to rest on sufficient ground; and it would be wrong to reject hastily a claim to reputation, presented on behalf of one b. 1532. whom we know to have otherwise shown literary capad. 1584. bility. Norton, accordingly, may be allowed to share, with his more celebrated coadjutor, the honour which the authors of " Gorboduc" receive on two several grounds. It was the earliest tragedy in our language: it was the first instance in which the recent experiment of blank verse was applied to dramatic composition. Its story is a chapter from ancient British history, presenting to us nothing but domestic hate and revenge, national bloodshed and calamity. The old king of Britain having in his lifetime shared his realm between his two sons, these strive for undivided sovereignty. The younger kills the elder, and is himself assassinated by the mother of both. The exasperated people exterminate the blood-stained race and the country is left in desolation and anarchy. The incidents constituting the plot are very inartificially connected; and all the great events, instead of being directly represented in action, are intimated only in narrative, or in dumb shows, like those which we find in one or two early works of Shakspeare. Between the acts the story is moralized by a chorus. The dialogue is heavy, declamatory, and undramatic; and its chief merit, which is far from being small, lies in the stately tone of the language, no slight achievement in a first attempt, and in the solemnly reflective tone of the sentiments.*

* THOMAS SACKVILLE,

From the Fourth Act of Gorboduc: Queen Videna's Lamentation for the death of her elder son.

Why should I live, and linger forth my time

In longer life to double my distress?
Oh me, most woful wight! whom no mishap
Long ere this day could have bereaved hence!

Might not these hands, by fortune or by fate,
Have pierced this breast, and life with iron reft!
Or, in this palace here, where I so long

Have spent my days, could not that happy hour
Once, once have hapt, in which these huge frames
With death, by fall, might have oppressed me!
Or should not this most hard and cruel soil,
So oft where I have pressed my wretched steps,
Sometime had ruth of my accursed life,
To rend in twain, and swallow me therein !
So had my bones possessed now, in peace,

THE LITERATURE OF SCOTLAND.

9. The causes which make our roll of eminent English names so short for this period, acted yet more strongly in Scotland; and the effect was augmented by other circumstances. The most thoughtful and best instructed men concentrated their attention, with constant earnestness, on the theological and ecclesiastical questions of the time; national dangers and aristocratic feuds distracted the country without ceasing; and Scottish literature, notwithstanding the poetic brilliancy which had recently adorned it, occupied really, in the beginning of this period, a position much less advanced than that which was the starting-point of England.

It is impossible to avoid believing, that literary progress was seriously impeded by the state of the Living Language. Radically identical with that which was spoken in the south, it had yet by this time assumed decisively the character of a separate dialect. It retained much more of the antique than the English, did; because it had not received nearly so thorough a development in literature, and wanted especially the cultivation which would have been given by a free use of literary prose. It had also contracted, through the provincial isolation of the country, many peculiarities, which were neither old Saxon nor modern English and these were now receiving continual accessions. Not only, therefore, was the Scottish dialect a less efficient literary organ than the English, but, likewise, those who wrote and spoke it were not well qualified either for appreciating perfectly, or for dexterously transferring to their own speech, the improvements in style and diction which were going on so actively in England If there was ever to arise in Scotland a vernacular literature worthy of the name, it could be only through the adoption of the one or the other of two courses. The first of these would have consisted in a thorough cultivation, and enrichment and systematizing of the native dialect; a process which would have placed the two kingdoms of the island in a literary relation t

Their happy grave within the closed ground;
And greedy worms had gnawn this pinëd heart,
Without my feeling pain. So should not now
This living breast remain the ruthful tomb
Wherein my heart, yielden to death, is graved;
Nor dreary thoughts, with pangs of pining grief,
My doleful mind had not afflicted thus.

Oh, my beloved sou! Oh, my sweet child!
My dear Ferrex, my joy, my life's delight!
Murdered with cruel death!

each other, not unlike that which subsists between Spain and Portugal. This was a mode neither desirable nor likely. The other was, the adoption of the English tongue as the vehicle of the standard literature of Scotland. This step, which probably must have been, sooner or later, the issue in any circumstances, was hastened by the union of the two crowns in the beginning of the seventeenth century. From that date, accordingly, the literature of England comprehends that of the sister-country as one of its branches.

The fact last noticed co-operates with others, in making it convenient that this should be the last period in which we take separate account of Scottish literature. It will be in our power to learn all that needs to be known, by looking forward very cursorily to the literary events that occurred in Scotland during the reign of Elizabeth, and the Scottish reign of James. Even with this extension of the period, our review of the northern literature may warrantably be brief. The importance of the phenomena, in the aspect in which they are here regarded, was far from being commensurate either to the momentous character of the attendant social changes, to the great ability of many of the literary men, or to the extensive erudition that was possessed by some of them.

10. In the annals of Scottish poetry during the sixteenth century, the distinguished poets of its opening years having already been spoken of, there occurs but one name that claims a memorial. The brightness which had lately shone out proved to be that of sunset and the clouds of moonless night that succeeded, dimmed and hid the few scattered stars..

b. bef. 1500. Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, the youthful comd. aft. 1567.panion of James the Fifth, and afterwards his sagacious but unheeded adviser, is one of the most celebrated of Scotsmen, in his native country at least. His fame rests securely on the evidence of natural vigour which his works display, and on our knowledge of the influence which these had in promoting the ecclesiastical changes that began to be contemplated in his day. But very warm national partialities would be required, for enabling us to assign him a high rank as a poet. The chief characteristics of his writings are, their sagacious closeness of observation, their rough business-like common sense, and their formidable and unscrupulous vehemence of sarcastic invective. Living in a licentious court, and under a corrupt church, he attacks, with equal freedom, the follies and vices of the king and his comrades, and the abuses and weaknesses which deformed the ecclesiastical establishment.

His most elaborate work is called "The Satire of the Three Estates," a title which correctly describes it as aimed at a very wide range of victims. It is a drama of huge dimensions, and the earliest work of the kind that exists in the northern dialect. It is not so strictly a Moral-Play as an Interlude, bearing a considerable resemblance to the works of John Heywood. It abounds in such allegoric personages as King Humanity, Flattery, Falsehood, and Good Counsel, Chastity and Sensuality, Spirituality and Temporality, Diligence and Correction, the latter of whom hangs Theft in presence of the spectators. These figures, however, mix familiarly, in the scene, with characters representing directly the classes of the community. Among them is the Friar, who is Flattery in disguise; there is the Doctor, who delivers a pretty long sermon, answered in another, which is recited by Folly; there are the Bishop, Abbot, Parson, Prioress, and Pardoner; and the low comedy of the piece is played chiefly by the Shoemaker and Tailor, and the wives of these two. The date of the composition is conjectured to have been the year 1535, when it was acted at Cupar, in Fife, the native county of the author. The grossness of the humour, in many passages, is not surpassed by any thing in our old literature; and the satirical exposure of corruptions, though mainly made at the expense of the church, (for which, by that time, the rulers probably cared little,) cuts likewise so deeply into political questions, that the toleration of the exhibition by the government is almost as great a riddle as that which was shown to Skelton. It is needless to say that, in the controversial design of Lindsay's drama, we have a parallel to those pieces which were offered to uneducated audiences in England by the venerable Bishop Bale.

Our Scottish poet was certainly not endowed largely, either with poetic imagination or fine susceptibility. The allegorical inventions of the "Satire" have no great originality or beauty. His other large work, "The Monarchy, a Dialogue betwixt Experience and a Courtier," is a vast historical summary, with very little to relieve its dulness: and his "Squire Meldrum,” in which a contemporary gentleman is promoted to be the hero of a metrical romance, is, besides its gratuitous indecency, conclusive as a proof of the author's inability to rise into the imaginative and romantic sphere. He is much stronger in those smaller pieces which open up to him his favourite field of satire. The most poetical of these is "The Complaint of the Papingo," in which the king's parrot reads a lesson both to the court and to the clergy.