Part 7 (1/2)

The objection raised to claiming Barclay as a Scotsman, founded on the ground that he nowhere mentions his nationality, though it was a common practice of authors in his time to do so, especially when they wrote out of their own country, appeared to me, though ingenious and pertinent, to be of so little real weight, as to be dismissed in a parenthesis. Its importance, however, may easily be overrated, and it may therefore be well to point out that, apart from the possibility that this omission on his part was the result of accident or indifference, there is also the probability that it was dictated by a wise discretion. To be a Scotsman was not in the days of Henry VIII., as it has been in later and more auspicious times, a pa.s.sport to confidence and popularity, either at the court or among the people of England. Barclay's fate having led him, and probably his nearest relatives also, across that Border which no Scotsman ever recrosses, to live and labour among a people by no means friendly to his country, it would have been a folly which so sensible a man as he was not likely to commit to have displayed the red rag of his nationality before his easily excited neighbours, upon whose friendliness his comfort and success depended. The farther argument of the Biographia Brittannica, that ”it is pretty extraordinary that Barclay himself, in his several addresses to his patrons, should never take notice of his being a stranger, which would have made their kindness to him the more remarkable,” is sufficiently disposed of by the succeeding statement, that the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Kent, Barclay's princ.i.p.al patrons, ”are known to have been the fiercest enemies of the Scots.” Surely a man who was English in everything but his birth could not be expected to openly blazon his Scottish nativity, without adequate occasion for so doing, in the very face of his country's chiefest enemies, who were at the same time his own best friends. His caution in this respect, indeed, may be regarded as an additional proof of his Scottish origin.

[2] BARCLAY'S VOCABULARY

Some of the words, stated in popular fas.h.i.+on to be Scotch--they are of course of Saxon origin--the usage of which by Barclay is adduced as an evidence of his nationality, are also to be found in Chaucer, but that does not invalidate the argument as stated. The employment of so many words of northern usage must form at least a strong corroborative argument in favour of northern origin.

[3] THE CASTLE OF LABOUR

It ought to be stated that the modesty of the young author prevented him from affixing his name to his first production, The Castle of Labour. Both editions are anonymous. Bale, Pits, Wood, &c., all include it in the list of his works without remark.

[4] BULLEYN'S DIALOGUE

A notice of the history of this once popular Dialogue, its ever recurring disappearance, and ever recurring ”discovery” by some fortunate antiquary, would form an interesting chapter in a new ”History of the transmission of ancient books to modern times.” Its chances of preservation and record were unusually favourable. It must have been disseminated over the length and breadth of the land in its day, having run through four editions in little more than a dozen years. Maunsell's Catalogue (1595) records the edition of 1578. Antony Wood (1721), and Bishop Tanner (1748) both duly give it a place in their notices of the productions of its author, without any special remark. But the Biographia Brittanica (1748) in a long article upon Bulleyn, in which his various works are noticed in great detail, introduces the Dialogue as ”_this long neglected and unknown treatise_,” and gives an elaborate account of it extending to about five columns of small print. The now famous pa.s.sage, descriptive of the early poets, is quoted at length, and special notice of its bearing on Barclay's nationality taken, the writer (Oldys) announcing that the dispute must now be settled in favour of Scotland, ”Seeing our author (Bulleyn), a contemporary who lived in, and long upon the borders of Scotland, says, as above, he was born in that kingdom: and as much indeed might have been in great measure gathered from an attentive perusal of this poet himself.”

The next biographer of Bulleyn, Aikin (Biog. Memoirs of Medicine, 1780), makes no discovery, but contents himself with giving a brief account of the Dialogue (in 1 pages), in which the description of Chaucer, &c., is duly noticed. Three years later, in spite of this, and the appearance of a second edition of the Biographia Brittanica (1778), another really learned and able antiquary, Waldron, in his edition of Jonson's Sad Shepherd (1783), comes forth triumphantly announcing his discovery of the Dialogue as that of a hitherto totally unknown treasure; and in an appendix favours the curious with a series of extracts from it, extending to more than thirty pages, prefacing them thus: ”Having, among the various Mysteries and Moralities, whether original impressions, reprinted, or described only by those writers who have given any account of these Embrios of the English Drama, _never met with or read of any other copy of the Dialogue, or Morality, by Bulleyn, than the one_, [which I have used], an account of and some extracts from it may not be unpleasing.” The pa.s.sage regarding the poets is of course given _ad longum_.

The next notice of the Dialogue occurs in Herbert's Ames (1786), where two editions, 1564 and 1578, are entered. Dibdin (1819), in addition, notices the edition of 1573. In the biographical accounts of Bulleyn in Hutchinson's Biographia Medica (1799), Aikin's General Biog. Dict. (1801), and its successor, Chalmers's Biog. Dict. (1812), due mention is preserved of the Dialogue in enumerating the works of its author. Sir Walter Scott alludes to it in the Introduction to the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) as a ”mystery,” but his only knowledge of it is evidently derived from Waldron. Chalmers's Life of Lindsay (Poetical Works, 1806) has also kept it prominently before a considerable cla.s.s of inquirers, as he gives that part of the description of the poets relating to Lindsay a conspicuous place, with the following note: ”Owing to the very obliging temper of Mr Waldron I have been permitted to see that _rare book_ of Dr Bulleyn, with the second edition of 1569, which is remarkably different from the first in 1564.” To this use of it by Chalmers we owe the references to it in Lord Lindsay's Lives of the Lindsays, i. 261 (1849), Seton's Scottish Heraldry, 480 (1863), and Notes and Queries, 3rd s., iv. 164 (1863). It was also probably Chalmers that drew the attention of the writer of the Memoir of Barclay in the Lives of the Scottish Poets (1822), to the possibility of there being also in the Dialogue notice of that poet. At any rate, he quotes the description of the early poets, showing in his preliminary remarks considerable familiarity with Bulleyn's history, pointing out the probability of his having known Barclay at Ely, and arguing that whether or not, ”from living in the same neighbourhood he had an opportunity of knowing better than any contemporary whose evidence on the subject is extant, to what country Barclay was, by all about him, reputed to belong.”

He precedes his quotations thus: ”As the whole pa.s.sage possesses considerable elegance, and has been so _universally overlooked_ by the critics, the transcription of it here will not probably be deemed out of place.” No mention is made of the t.i.tle of the book from which the ”Allegorical Description of the Early English Poets” is taken; hence it is impossible to say whether the quoter made use of a copy of the Dialogue, or of Waldron's Notes. The spelling is modernised.

In various well-known bibliographical publications the existence of this fugitive Dialogue is carefully registered, and its t.i.tle, at least, made known to all inquirers,--in Watt's Bibliotheca Britt. (1824), in Lowndes'

Bibliog. Manual (1834), and in Atkinson's Medical Bibliog. (1834); and by the published Catalogues of the British Museum (1813), the Douce Collection (1840), and the Bodleian Library (1843), it is made known that there are copies of it preserved in these great collections. In Warton's Hist. of Eng. Poetry (ed. 1840), it is also recorded by Park, in his notes to the chapter on Gower, in which he refers to Bulleyn's visionary description of that poet. Cooper's Athenae Cantabrigienses, art. Bulleyn (1858), also carefully notes the Dialogue and its editions. And in 1865 Collier's well-known Bibliographical Account of Early English Literature again gives an account (two pages long) of the much neglected production, in which the pa.s.sage relating to the poets is once more extracted in full, with the preliminary remarks as quoted at p. xxvii. _supra_, but without the usual announcement that the work has. .h.i.therto been unknown.

But in 1873, by the very last man from whom we might have expected it (F.

J. Furnivall, the Atlas on whose shoulders all our projects for the preservation of our early literature rest, in Notes and Queries, 4th s., xii. 161), we are again introduced to this ever disappearing, ever reappearing Dialogue as a fresh find in early English literature: ”Few things are pleasanter in reading old books than to come on a pa.s.sage of praise of our old poets, showing that in Tudor days men cared for the 'makers' of former days as we do still. To Mr David Laing's kindness I owe the introduction to the following quotation from a rare tract, where one wouldn't have expected to find such a pa.s.sage,” and then follows once more the whole pa.s.sage so often quoted for the first time. Dr Rimbault, in an interesting note in a succeeding number of Notes and Queries (p. 234), is the first one acquainted with the Dialogue to state that ”this amusing old work is perfectly well known, and has often been quoted from.” So henceforth we may presume that this interesting and long-fertile field of discovery may be regarded as finally worked out.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

A

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CATALOGUE

OF

BARCLAY'S WORKS.

CONTENTS.

I. THE CASTELL OF LABOURE.

II. THE SHYP OF FOLYS.

III. THE EGLOGES.

IV. THE INTRODUCTORY.

V. THE MYRROUR OF GOOD MANERS.

VI. CRONYCLE COMPLYED BY SAl.u.s.t.

VII. FIGURE OF OUR MOTHER HOLY CHURCH.

VIII. THE LYFE OF SAYNT GEORGE.

IX. THE LYFE OF SAYNTE THOMAS.

X. HAYTHON'S CRONYCLE.