A Scottish poet. He wrote “Schoolmaster of Dunfermline,” “Testament of Cresseid” (a sort of sequel to Chaucer’s “Troilus and Cressida”), “Robene and Makyne” (said to be the earliest English pastoral poem), “Fables of Esop” (probably written between 1470 and 1480), etc. The fables include “The Taill of the Uponlandis Mous and the Burges Mous” (“The Country Mouse and the City Mouse”). His collected works were edited by D. Laing (1865).

  For the author of this supplement called the Testament of Creseid, which may passe for the sixt and last booke of this story, I have very sufficiently bin informed by Lr. Tho. Ereskin, late earle of Kelly, and divers aged schollers of the Scottish nation, that it was made and written by one Mr. Robert Henderson, sometimes chiefe schoole-master in Dumfermling, much about the time that Chaucer was first printed and dedicated to King Henry the 8th by Mr. Thiane, which was neere the end of his raigne. This Mr. Henderson wittily observing that Chaucer in his 5th booke had related the death of Troilus, but made no mention what became of Creseid, he learnedly takes upon him in a fine poeticall way to expres the punishment and end due to a false unconstant whore, which commonly terminates in extreme misery.

  Henryson perceived what there was defective in the close of the story of “Troilus and Creseide” as Chaucer has left it…. The Scottish was incapable of rising to the refinements, or conceiving the delicacies of the English poet: though it must be admitted that in the single instance of the state of mind, the half-recognition, half-ignorance, attributed to Troilus in his last encounter with Creseide, there is a felicity of conception impossible to be surpassed. In some respects the younger poet has clearly the advantage over the more ancient. There is in his piece abundance of incident, of imagery and of painting without tediousness, with scarcely one of those lagging, impertinent and unmeaning lines with which the production of Chaucer is so frequently degraded.

  The most beautiful of Henryson’s productions is “Robene and Makyne,” the earliest specimen of pastoral poetry in the Scotish 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 distinguished 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.

  As a poet who wrote in the language of the people, Henryson held a high place. His style was easy and flowing; and, though he did not show great inventive genius or passion, he had a fine perception of the beauties of external nature, and handled the objects around him with remarkable skill, and often presented vivid and touching descriptions.

  His verse is usually well-minted and of full weight. Weak lines are rare in him; he had the instinct of the refrain, and was fond of doing feats in rhythm and rhyme; he is close, compact, and energetic. Again, he does not often let his learning or his imagination run away with him and divert him from his main issue. He subordinates himself to the matter he has in hand; he keeps himself to the point, and never seeks to develop for development’s sake; and so, as it appears to me, he approves himself a true artist. It follows that, as a storyteller, he is seen to great advantage. He narrates with a gaiety, an ease, a rapidity, not to be surpassed in English literature between Chaucer and Burns. That, moreover, he was a born dramatist, there is scarce one of his fables but will prove. It is to be noted that he uses dialogue as a good playwright would use it; it is a means with him not only of explaining a personage but of painting a situation, not only of introducing a moral but of advancing an intrigue. He had withal an abundance of wit, humor, and good sense; he had considered life and his fellow men, nature and religion, the fashions and abuses of his epoch, with the grave, observant amiability of a true poet…. His fables are perhaps the best in the language, and are worthy of consideration and regard even after La Fontaine himself.

  Robert Henryson is the brightest light among the stars that circled in the train of Chaucer…. Henryson was a true poet, and he possessed what we call to-day a feeling for his art in a high degree. His narrative is gay, easy, rapid; his touch light and vivid, and his dramatic power, both in dialogue and construction, is not surpassed by Chaucer. His verse is musical and well weighed; he liked to try his hand at new refrains, strange metres, and unexpected rhymes. His dialect, to the modern eye and ear, is almost incomprehensible, but long study and great love will show him who cares to search that Henryson used it as the old composers used the harpsichord. It is an instrument of narrow compass, yet capable of exquisite harmonies under the hand of a master.

  All Henryson’s writings are designed as lessons in good life, but he joins in his verse the finish of a scholar to kindly wisdom, twinkling with some sparks of humour in a simple homeliness of speech. He follows his time when he is somewhat over-curious of detail in working out his Fables into moral allegories, but in telling them he is not more prolix than a man should be who speaks to the ear, not to the eye, and seeks to recommend old home truths to the body of the people. If as poet he is schoolmaster, we do not tire over his lessons.

  It is easy to trace the influence that this quiet retired life had upon his poetry, to which it has given a peculiar character that we do not find in any of the other early Scottish poets. There is a chastened, contemplative mood, much akin to the quality which it pleased Fletcher and Milton to call melancholy, which runs through most of Henryson’s compositions—the serious, philosophical calm of a member of a quiet community who minded their own simple affairs, and meddled little with the outside world. His humour, of which there is an abundant store in his “Moral Fables,” is of a quiet, cultivated type, dwelling on homely incidents of country life, but with the enjoyment of the scholar who sits apart and watches the play with a kindly but slightly superior amusement, instead of plunging into the thick of the fun as James I. or Dunbar would have done.

  Henryson is abreast of the culture of his time…. He is the first pure lyrist among Scottish poets. His ingenious rhymes and his mastery of pause and cadence, as seen, e.g., in the quatrain of the “Garmond” and the octave of the “Abbey Walk” and “Robene and Makyne,” betoken a correct and disciplined ear. Besides giving special direction to the ballad, Henryson introduced into the language the moral fable and the pastoral.

  First of the greater Scottish makars whose life and work bore no direct relation to the political history of the country, the Dunfermline poet struck on the national lyre certain sweet and quaint new keys which ring yet with an undiminished charm, and preserve for him a unique place among the master-singers of the north.

  He was the first writer of pastoral poetry in these islands. It is no small praise to his “Robene and Makyne” to say that it anticipates “Duncan Gray”—which tells the same tale with the rôles of the lovers reversed—by something like four centuries and a half (?). Not that no pastoral poems of this description were written between the two referred to—not that Henryson’s poem can compare with Burns’s for either melody or dramatic condensation—but there is a freedom and originality of handling in both poems at the same time that the pastoral spirit is maintained, which justifies one in saying that with Henryson, as with Burns, the pastoral lyric was an independent and indigenous growth, rather than the often sickly and always artificial importation which obtained south of the Tweed…. It is only because he wrote so comparatively little that was wholly original that he cannot be ranked along with Dunbar; though even when he imitated others he always added something of his own.

  Besides his fondness for classical themes and his tendency to regard all subjects from a moral point of view, Henryson gives signs of the approach of the Renaissance in his pictorial treatment of allegory. The descriptions of his abstract personages are highly generalised in the manner of the Latin poets, and at the same time show that attention to the effects of pageantry which is so marked a feature in the poetry of Spenser.