****** "In the reign of James IV. and V., the fine arts, as they awakened in other countries, made some progress in Scotland also. Architecture and music were encouraged by both of those accomplished sovereigns; and poetry above all, seems to have been highly valued at the Scottish court. The King of Scotland, who, in point of power, seems to have been little more than the first baron of his kingdom, held a free and merry court, in which poetry and satire seem to have had unlimited range, even where their shafts glanced on royalty itself. The consequence of this general encouragement was the production of much poetry of various kinds, and concerning various persons, which the narrow exertions of the Scottish press could not convey to the public, or which, if printed at all, existed only in limited editions, which soon sunk to the rarity of manuscripts. There was therefore an ample mine out of which Bannntyne made his compilation, with the intention, doubtless, of putting the Lays of the Makers out of the reach of oblivion, by subjecting the collection to the press. But the bloody wars of Queen Mary's time[1] made that no period for literary adventure; and the tendency of the subsequent age to polemical discussion, discouraged lighter and gayer studies. There is, therefore, little doubt, that had Bannatyne lived later than he did, or had he been a man of less taste in selecting his materials, a great proportion of the poetry contained in his volume must have been lost to posterity; and, if the stock of northern literature had been diminished only by the loss of such of Dunbar's pieces as Bannatyne's Manuscript contains, the damage to posterity would have been infinite."
The pestilence which caused Bannatyne to go into retirement, commenced at Edinburgh upon the 8th of September, 1568, being introduced by a merchant of the name of Dalgleish. We have, however, no evidence to prove that Bannatyne resided at this time in the capital. We know, from his own information, that he wrote his manuscript during the subsequent months of October, November, and December; which might almost seem to imply that he had lived in some other town, to which the pestilence only extended at the end of the month in which it appeared in Edinburgh. Leaving this in uncertainty, it is not perhaps too much to suppose that he might have adopted this means of spending his time of seclusion, from the fictitious example held out by Boccacio, who represents the tales of his Decameron as having been told for mutual amusement, by a company of persons who had retired to the country to escape the plague. A person so eminently acquainted with the poetry of his own country, might well be familiar with the kindred work of that illustrious Italian.
The few remaining facts of George Bannatyne's life, which have been gathered up by the industry of Sir Walter Scott, may be briefly related. In 1572, he was provided with a tenement in the town of Leith, by a gift from his father. This would seem to imply that he was henceforward, at least, engaged in business, and resided either in Edinburgh or at its neighbouring port. It was not, however, till the 27th of October, 1587, that, being then in his forty-third year, he was admitted in due and competent form to the privileges of a merchant and guild-brother of the city of Edinburgh. "We have no means of knowing what branch of traffic George Bannatyne chiefly exercised; it is probable that, as usual in a Scottish burgh, his commerce was general and miscellaneous. We
- ↑ The accomplished writer should rather have said, the minority of James VI., whose reign had commenced before the manuscript was written.
pages in the careful and intricate style of caligraphy then practised, appears a sufficient task in itself for three months, without supposing that any part of the time was spent in collecting manuscripts. And hence we see the greater reason for supposing that a large part of the attention of George Bannatyne before his twenty-third year was devoted to Scottish poetry.
