A Scotch divine and poet of some eminence, was the son of Archibald, fifth Earl of Angus, and was born at Brechin in 1474. After receiving a liberal education he entered the church, was made provost of St. Giles’s, and eventually obtained the abbacy of Aberbrothick and the bishopric of Dunkeld. Political dissensions induced him to seek refuge in England, where he was liberally treated by Henry VIII., but he fell a victim to the plague at London, in 1522. He wrote “The Palace of Honour” and other works; but his chief performance is a translation of Virgil’s Æneid, noteworthy as the first translation of a Roman classic into English. It was completed in 1513, but not published till 1553.

  He died at London, having proceeded so far on his journey to Rome, to the great regret of all those good men who admired his virtues. To splendour of birth, and a handsome and dignified person, he united a mind richly stored with the learning of the age, such as it then existed. His temperance and moderation were very remarkable; and living in turbulent times, and surrounded by factions at bitter enmity with each other, such was the general opinion of his honesty and uprightness of mind, that he possessed a high influence with all parties. He left behind him various monuments of his genius and learning of no common merit, written in his native tongue.

  A man learned, wise, and given to all virtue and goodness.

  In his prologues before every book, where he hath his liberty, he showeth a natural and ample vein of poesy, so pure, pleasant, and judicious, that I believe there is none that hath written before or since, but cometh short of him. And in my opinion, there is not such a piece to be found as his prologue to the eighth book, beginning Of drevilling and Dreams, etc., at least in our language.

  Was so far from seeking popularity from English readers, that, in his excuses for his defects of style, he only laments the impossibility of making it purely and exclusively Scotish.

  In his political conduct Douglas supported a party which had been called into existence by the precipitate and imprudent marriage of the queen, and was animated by the selfish and often treacherous policy of the Earl of Angus. In his individual conduct he was pacific, temperate, and forgiving; but his secret correspondence with Henry VIII. and his ministers, instead of commanding the reverence, was probably the great cause of the animosity with which he was treated by his countrymen; nor can he be very consistently held up as a model of primeval purity, whom we find in the next sentence to have been the father of a natural daughter, from whom the house of Foulewood is descended. His genius and learning are unquestionable; his temper was mild and affectionate; and we may hope that his munificence rests on a more certain evidence than his patriotic feelings or political integrity.

  The character of Douglas’s original poetry seems to be that of the middle ages in general,—prolix, though sometimes animated, description of sensible objects.

  Douglas’s “Prologue,” whether we look to its subject, or to its present waning popularity, may well take for its text “all is vanity.” Its merit is not easy to estimate under the disadvantages of an obsolete dialect, bygone idioms, and a reference to a state of life and manners so unlike our own. Many strokes of satire, which at the time may have had a direct and personal application, are now sunk into vapid generalities, or lost from our ignorance of local circumstances. Still enough remains to excuse, if not to justify, the praises that were once lavished on this favourite poem. The crowd of images, and the grotesque combinations, produce almost the same effect on the mind as the noise, and hubbub, and confusion of another vanity-fair upon the ear of Bunyan’s pilgrim. The broken and sketchy style, and the curious idiomatic turns, must, even at the time, have given the work a character of quaintness and oddity; and may have recommended it to many, who otherwise were little likely to pay attention to the lesson it reads them.

  The fire in Douglas’ original verses is occasionally lost in smoke, and the meaning buried in flowery verbiage.

  Nor were his talents less conspicuous than his learning. In all his writings he evinces an excursive fancy, with much of the fervour of genius. His allegorical sketches are efforts of no common ingenuity; but what chiefly renders his works interesting, is the frequent occurrence of those picturesque and characteristic touches which can only be produced by a man capable of accurate observation and original thinking. He exhibits perpetual vestiges of a prolific and even exuberant imagination, and his very faults are those of super-abundance rather than deficiency. In his descriptions, which are often admirable, he occasionally distracts the attention by a multiplicity of objects, nor is he sufficiently careful to represent each new circumstance in a definite and appropriate manner. His style is copious and impetuous, but it cannot be commended for its purity.

  A little later came Gawain Douglas, whose translation of the Æneid is linguistically valuable, and whose introductions to the seventh and twelfth books—the one describing winter and the other May—have been safely praised, they are so hard to read. There is certainly some poetic feeling in them, and the welcome to the sun comes as near enthusiasm as is possible for a ploughman, with a good steady yoke of oxen, who lays over one furrow of verse, and then turns about to lay the next as cleverly alongside it as he can. But it is a wrong done to good taste to hold up this item kind of description any longer as deserving any other credit than that of a good memory. It is a mere bill of parcels, a post-mortem inventory of nature, where imagination is not merely not called for, but would be out of place. Why, a recipe in the cookery-book is as much like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like true word-painting.

  To each book of the “Æneid” he wrote a prologue of his own. And it is chiefly by these that he takes rank among the Scottish poets. Three of them are descriptions of the country in May, in autumn, and in winter. The scenery is altogether Scotch, and the few Chaucerisms that appear seem absurdly out of place in a picture of nature which is as close as if it had been done by Keats in his early time. The colour is superb, the landscape is described with an excessive detail, but it is not composed by any art into a whole. Still it astonishes the reader, and it is only by bringing in the Celtic element of love of nature that we can account for the vast distance between work like this and contemporary work in England such as Skelton’s.

  The work by which Douglas lives, and deserves to live, is his translation of the “Aeneid.” It is a singular fruit of a barren and unlearned time, and, as a romantic rendering of the “Aeneid,” may still be read with pleasure. The two poets whom Douglas most admired of all the motley crowd who pass through “The Palice of Honour” were Virgil and Chaucer. Each of these masters he calls an a per se. He imitated the latter in the manner of his allegorical verse, and he translated the former with complete success. We must not ask the impossible from Douglas,—we must not expect exquisite philological accuracy; but he had the “root of the matter,” an intense delight in Virgil’s music and in Virgil’s narrative, a perfect sympathy with “sweet Dido,” and that keen sense of the human life of Greek, Trojan, and Latin, which enabled him in turn to make them live in Scottish rhyme. If he talks of “the nuns of Bacchus,” and if his Sibyl admonishes Aeneas to “tell his beads,” Douglas is merely using what he thinks the legitimate freedom of the translator.

  As the effort of a youth of twenty-six, “The Palice of Honour” is in some respects a remarkable performance. Its literary execution is of a high order. Douglas already shows himself a master of the art of versification. He has a fine sense of melody and an exhaustless wealth of words. Images rise freely at the summons of his brilliant fancy, but he sees nothing which has not been seen before, or, to put it more exactly, he designs with the same kind of figures and paints with the same kind of colours as his predecessors of the allegorical school. What is chiefly distinctive about the work is not its poetry, but its scholarship. He is the first Scottish poet whose verse breathes the odour of the Renaissance.

  He wears the stiff plate armor of the time.

  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.

  He was a dilettante rather than a genuine poet.

  He was a man of a firm yet frank nature, not without ambition, and—to his misfortune—was involved in the party-feuds of the Scottish nobility, but full of genuine kindliness of feeling; as an ecclesiastic and prelate, a man of sound religious principles, opposed to scholastic cavilling, and faithfully attached to the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith; above all, a devoted servant of the Muses and a zealous promoter of high culture. As a poet he is not one of the first rank; but, among those occupying the second stage, he was one of the most influential. As the translator of Vergil, the sublime painter of nature, the keen observer, the earnest and skilful delineator of life and of the human heart, Douglas will be remembered as long as Scottish literature is able to attract sympathetic admirers.

  “King Hart,” though in the same conventional vein of allegory, exhibits riper powers than Douglas’s earlier work. So vivid, indeed, sometimes become the circumstances and characters that the reader forgets the allegory, and catches fire at the story itself. The narrative is full of action, the personifications are natural and real as life, and the plot has strong human interest, while the allegory is original, consistent throughout, and forcible. In all respects this must be reckoned a greater performance than its more famous sister piece. As the study of the growth and decline of an emotion it will, behind its archaic method, bear comparison with some of the best analytical novel-writing of the present day.

  Gavin Douglas anticipates Spenser, not only in his metrical style, but also in his use of allegory as a method of interpreting nature. As the expectation of the approaching end of the visible world, which had for so many centuries haunted the imagination of men, waned, the desire to realise the nature of the unseen universe also began to disappear, leaving, however, behind it, in minds of a religious temper, a profound sense of the vanity of mortal things. This feeling, blended with the growing habit of moral reflection and the quickened perception of beauty, was fostered by the love which the pioneers of the Renaissance entertained for Virgil, an author whose depth of religious sentiment was only equalled by his profound knowledge of the resources of his art. No poet, not even Dante himself, ever drank more deeply of the spirit of Virgil than Gavin Douglas. Deeply versed in Catholic doctrine, he read into his theological studies the gravity, the melancholy, the sweetness, of his master in poetry. He showed his love for him by turning the “Æneid” for the first time into English ten-syllable rhyming couplets, and even more by the sentiment and style of the original Prologues which he prefixed to each book of his translation. Particularly notable are the Prologues to the sixth and seventh books.

  Went beyond any other poet of the age in his power of rendering a true landscape, in regard to wealth of detail, varied imagery, and singularly spirited execution. This early art, however, has not yet always mastered the sense of proportion or of wholeness: the details of a May scene in the country are here catalogued in words rather than arranged or selected. Hence, and even more from the extreme rudeness or obscurity of the dialect employed, it is difficult to give a fair notion of the poet’s great merit.

  Critics of weight have held up Douglas, on the strength of this “Virgil,” as representing, or at any rate anticipating, the new movement in poetry, that which incorporates the classical and modern tradition, and so as occupying a position at least historically more important than that of his more intensely and poetically gifted contemporary Dunbar. With all due deference, this may well be deemed a mistake. Even in the selection of Ovid and Virgil, Douglas, though he may have been slightly further affected by the classical influence “in the air,” did not go very much further than Chaucer a century and more before him. And in the manner of his work, both original and translated, he is not modern at all. He is with Hawes, even with Lydgate; not with Wyatt and Surrey.

  While he altogether lacks the soaring sublimity of Dunbar, and the artistic finish of Kennedy, he surpasses both in his amatory warmth and his love of his fellows. He is dainty rather than strong, and more quaint and versatile than profound.