By Wadlyng strete[1] he went but tanying,
Syne come cloun throu the spere of Saturn ald,
Quhilk fader is of all thir sternis cald.
Having searched the sun and planets without success, he directs his course towards the earth, and in his passage is regaled with the music of the spheres. His subsequent adventures are circumstantially but not very poetically detailed. In enumerating the various characters whom he finds in the domains of Pluto, the poet is guilty of a glaring anachronism: here Orpheus finds Julius Caesar, Nero, and even popes and cardinals; and it is likewise to be remarked that the heathen and Christian notions of hell are blended together. But such anachronisms are very frequently to be found in the writers of the middle ages. Mr Warton remarks that Chaucer has been guilty of a very diverting, and what may be termed a double anachronism, by representing Cresseid and two of her female companions as reading the Thebaid of Statius.[2] Like the fables of Henry son, his tale of Orpheus is followed by a long moral; and here he professes to have derived his materials from Boethius and one of his commentators.
The Bludy Serk is an allegorical poem of considerable ingenuity. The poet represents the fair daughter of an ancient and worthy king as having been carried away by a hideous giant, and cast into a dungeon, where she was doomed to linger until some valiant knight should achieve her deliverance. A worthy prince at length appeared as her champion, vanquished the giant, and thrust him into his own loathsome dungeon. Having restored the damsel to her father, he felt that he had received a mortal wound: he requested her to retain his bloody shirt, and to contemplate it whenever a new lover should present himself. It is unnecessary to add that the interpretation of this allegory involves the high mysteries of the Christian faith.
The Abbay Walk is of a solemn character, and is not altogether incapable of impressing the imagination. Its object is to inculcate submission to the various dispensations of Providence, and this theme is managed with some degree of skill. But the most beautiful of Henryson's productions is Robene and Makyne, the earliest specimen of pastoral poetry in the Scottish language. I consider it as superior in many respects to the similar attempts of Spenser and Browne; it is free from the glaring improprieties which sometimes appear in the pastorals of those more recent writers, and it exhibits many genuine strokes of poetical delineation. The shepherd's indifference is indeed too suddenly converted into love; but this is almost the only instance in which the operations of nature are not faithfully represented. The story is skilfully conducted, the sentiments and manners are truly pastoral, and the diction possesses wonderful terseness and suavity.
The Fables of Henryson were reprinted in 1832, for the Bannatyne Club,[3] from the edition of Andrew Hart; of which the only copy known to exist had been recently added to that great repository of Scottish literature, the Advocates' Library.
- ↑ Watling-street is a name given to one of the great Roman ways in Britain. (Horsley's Roman Antiquities of Britain, p. 387. Lond. 1732, fol.) This passage, which to some persons may appear so unintelligible, will be best explained by a quotation from Chaucer's House of Fame, b. ii.
Lo, quod he, caste vp thyne eye,
Se yonder, lo, the Galaxye,
The whiche men clepe the Milky Way,
For it is whyte ; and some perfay
Callen it Watlynge strete. - ↑ In Shakspeare's Troilus and Gressida, says Mr Douce, "Hector quotes Aristotle, Ulysses speaks of the bull-bearing Milo, and Paridarus of a man born in April. Friday and Sunday, and even minced-pies with dates in them, are introduced." (Illustrations of Shakspeare, vol. ii, p. 291.)
- ↑ From the accurate memoir prefixed to this volume, we have, by the kind permission of the
