Sir Richard Holland, or de Holand, a cleric, and a partisan of the House of Douglas during its encounters with the Crown, and its fall under James II, wrote, to please his patroness, the Countess of Moray, and to flatter the Douglas, "The Buke of the Howlat," the Owl. The poem, in stanzas of thirteen lines, rhyming and alliterative, begins with the usual dream and leads up to a kind of allegorical "Parliament of Fowls". The allegory is entangled, the poet's real desire is to glorify his patrons with their motto,
O Dowglas, O Dowglas,
Tendir and Trewe!
"Trewe" they had been, to Bruce and to Scotland, but they became the allies, against king and country, of Edward IV and Henry VIII, while "tender" the Douglases never were. The most interesting passage describes the voyage of the good Lord James towards the Holy Land, with the heart of Bruce. In Spain he meets the Saracens in battle, and throws among them the Heart, in its jewelled case—
Amang the hethin men the hert hardely he slang,
Said, "Wend on as thou was wont,
Throw the batell in front,
Ay formost in the front,
Thy foes amang."
There fell the Douglas, above the heart of his king, that was rescued by Logan and Lockhart, and brought back to Scotland; a noble feat of chivalry, nobly told. Here Holland "stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet".
It may be said of these Scottish poets that while, in initiative and in models they owe almost all to England, their long and desperate war with that country gives them a martial fire and spirit to which the English poetry of the time furnishes no rival. Laurence Minot does not stir the blood!
Gawain Douglas.
Gawain Douglas was of the family of the Red Douglases, Earls of Angus, who rose on the ruin of the turbulent Black Douglases, of the House of Bruce's good Lord James, when they failed in their alliance with England against the Crown of Scotland. The Red Douglases also rose high, and had their own feud with the Crown and alliance with or servitude to Henry VIII and the Protestant cause. Gawain was a younger son of the Earl of Angus called Bell the Cat, who hanged the artistic favourites of James III. As an old man he was present at Flodden (1513) where James IV died so gallantly, and his grandson, now Earl of Angus, married Dunbar's "Rose," Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV. Gawain himself, born about 1473 or 1474, was educated at St. Andrews University, took orders, and, being of a powerful House, received rapid clerical promotion.
His poems were written in the peaceful and prosperous years of James IV, between 1501 and 1513, the date of Flodden and of the completion of Gawain's translation of the "Æneid" of Virgil. His earlier works "The Palice of Honour" and "King Hart," are merely rhymed allegories after the manner of the unceasing "Roman de la Rose," and have no special interest. What is true about one of these belated last allegories is true of another: they are no longer to be read for mere literary pleasure. In his "Æneid," Douglas introduces original prologues to the books of the "Æneid," rather in the manner of Scott's poetical epistles between the cantos of "Marmion". He describes winter, spring, and summer in Scotland. He criticizes, not unfavourably, the theology of Virgil, whom the Middle Ages regarded, now as a magician (like Ovid among the Italian peasantry to this day), and now as an inspired prophet of the coming of Our Lord. He attacks Caxton for printing a translation of Virgil, not from the original Latin, but from a French version. His criticism of Caxton is full of detail, and severe. He himself is "bound to Virgil's text," and he does not treat it, as a rule, with the licence of Chapman when rendering Homer into English verse; but Gawain remarks, truly, that sometimes of one word he must make three, must occasionally expand in exposition, and add, in colouring.