That have depainted with your heavenly hand
This garden full of flowers as they stand?
What shall I think, alas! what reverence
Shall I outpour unto your excellence?’”
Another king, James Fifth of the name, was also a poet; he may be called the originator of that satirical humour in verse which afterwards characterized so many Scottish poets, including Robert Burns, the greatest of them all.
WILLIAM DRUMMOND.
After the union of the crowns, and the removal of the Scottish Court to London, in 1603, the old language came to be considered a provincial dialect. William Drummond, of Hawthornden (1585-1649), was the first notable Scottish poet who wrote well in modern English. He was imbued with true literary taste and feeling, and he ranks, as do subsequent Scottish writers, amongst British authors.
The Lowland folk-speech has really changed less from the Old English than the tongue of any other portion of the island; its glossary is very largely a key to Chaucer and Spenser, to Barbour and Andrew Wyntoun. As might have been expected, the folk-speech which is nearest to the English of modern literature is that of the more remote Highlands, as of Inverness and its surroundings. Where the old Gaelic has succumbed to book-learned English, there was no intermediate stage of the older tongue.
That the Scottish tongue is a fitting vehicle for pathos as well as for humour, scores of fine old songs are in evidence. Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral drama of the loves and lives of the Scottish peasantry in the beginning of the last century, is the best lengthy example we have of every-day folk-speech. Burns never hesitated, when it seemed to better suit his verse or his meaning, to introduce modern English words; Ramsay rarely does this. With Burns the Scottish dialect as the expression of high-class poetry, might well have ended; but it yet lingers on, chiefly in humorous songs and descriptions.