Sir Richard Maitland, a poet, lawyer, and statesman, was born in 1496. He was the son of William Maitland of Lethington, and Martha, daughter of George, lord Seaton. Having received the usual university education at the college of St. Andrews, he went to France to study law. On his return to Scotland he was employed in various public offices by James V., and afterwards by the Regent Arran and Mary of Guise. In the year 1551 he was appointed Lord of Session, and soon after he was knighted. In his sixty-fourth year he had the misfortune to lose his sight, but his blindness did not incapacitate him for business. In 1562 he was made lord privy-seal and a member of the privy-council. He continued a Lord of Session during the reign of Queen Mary and the minority of her son James VI. In July, 1584, his great age compelled him to resign his seat on the bench, previous to which time he had relinquished the office of lord privy-seal to his second son John, afterwards Lord Thirlestane, Lord High-chancellor of Scotland. Sir Richard died March 20, 1586.

  The verses of Maitland do not aim at any high degree of poetical excellence; but as they contain the thoughts, serious and gay, of an amiable old man extensively acquainted with the world, they cannot be considered as destitute of interest.

  Sir Richard Maitland was himself a poet, but, what was more fortunate as regards posterity, he preferred the indulging of his poetic faculty in collecting the poems of others, to adding to the number of his own.

  A great calamity overtook Sir Richard at a period of his life which cannot now be precisely fixed. We know, however, that before Mary returned to Scotland he was blind. The loss of sight to a man of his tastes must have been a severe privation; but he bore the affliction with characteristic calmness and cheerfulness. Fortunately it did not incapacitate him for active life,—he continued to occupy his seat on the bench, which he did not definitely resign, as we have seen, till within a year or two of his death…. Sir Richard’s own verses—not as poetry indeed, but as records of the time—are interesting and valuable. They confirm the agreeable impression of his character which we otherwise obtain. The writer was not a man of any exceptional insight or brilliancy; but his sincerity, his shrewdness, his fine sense, his good feeling, his homely honesty and rectitude, are disclosed on every page. The passion of the Reformation does not appear to have touched him.

  No portrait of him is known. Maitland’s chief claim to remembrance is his collection of early Scottish poems, second only in importance to the Bannatyne collection. It is included with other manuscripts in two volumes, which were presented by the Duke of Lauderdale to Samuel Pepys, and are preserved in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Among the amanuenses he employed was his daughter, Margaret Maitland. The collection has never yet been published in altogether complete form; but a large selection from it, including Maitland’s own poems, was published by John Pinkerton, in two vols. 1786, under the title “Ancient Scottish Poems never before in Print,” &c. Maitland’s own poems were reprinted in Sibbald’s “Chronicle of Scottish Poetry,” 1807, vol. iii., and by the Maitland Club in 1830, an appendix being added of selections from the poems of his sons, Sir John Maitland of Thirlestane and Thomas Maitland, from the Drummond MS. in the university of Edinburgh. The poems of Sir Richard Maitland are of special interest from their bearing on the events, customs, and peculiarities of his time. Although manifesting small poetic ardour, they are characterised by grace, force, and picturesqueness of expression, by shrewd knowledge of the world, and by a gentle cynicism. Among the best known is his “Satire on Town Ladies,” in which the “newfangledness of geir” is amusingly exposed.