Stirling Castle, when Sir David Lyndsay knew it, was a pile of stately buildings and the home of a gay Court. Two-and-a-half centuries later, when Robert Burns visited Stirling, the ancient seat of kings, long deserted by its royal owners, was tumbling fast into ruins. Carried away by anger at the neglected state of the castle, the poet broke out into these lines, which he scratched on the window-pane of an inn at Stirling:
“Here Stuarts once in glory reigned,
And laws for Scotland’s weal ordained;
But now unroofed their palace stands,
Their sceptre’s sway’d by other hands.
The injured Stuart line is gone,
A race outlandish fills their throne—
An idiot race to honour lost:
Who know them best despise them most.”
Burns afterwards felt that his words were too severe, and so, when he returned to Stirling, he broke the inscribed pane of glass. He was too late, however, to prevent the lines from being circulated far and wide.
Burns’s junior contemporary, James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, could not refrain from breaking out into verse in praise of Stirling Castle:
“Old Strevline....
... I love thee more
For the grey relics of thy martial towers,
Thy mouldering palaces and ramparts hoar,
Throned on the granite pile that grimly towers
Memorial of the times, when hostile powers
So often proved thy steadfast patriot worth;
May every honour wait thy future hours,
And glad the children of thy kindred Forth,
I love thy very name, old bulwark of the North.”
After Burns’s visit the buildings did not long remain in the roofless condition which had called forth his bitter ejaculation, for when Dorothy Wordsworth saw the castle sixteen years later—in 1803—the place had been put in order, although it had suffered much disfigurement, and she remarked that the whole building was in good repair. William Wordsworth accompanied his sister to Stirling, and it might have been expected that such a striking object as the castle would have been made the subject of one of the poems which he wrote as memorials of this tour in Scotland. But Wordsworth never could feel the romance of a medieval fortress. Towers and battlements, studded doors and grated windows, spoke to him of only cruelty and oppression. The actions of peasants excited his sympathy, but not the deeds of feudal kings and warriors. He closed his eyes and ears to Stirling’s past, and regarded the rock merely as a favourable view-point. He mentions the castle in “Yarrow Unvisited,” but only as the place whence he had surveyed the windings of the River Forth:
“From Stirling Castle we had seen
The mazy Forth unravelled;
Had trod the banks of Clyde, and Tay,
And with the Tweed had travelled;
And when he came to Clovenford,
Then said my winsome Marrow,
‘Whate’er betide, we’ll turn aside,
And see the Braes of Yarrow.’”
A different type of man from Wordsworth was his friend, Sir Walter Scott. Wordsworth enjoyed tranquillity and contemplation, Scott rejoiced in activity, and would have liked to be a soldier. The feudalism that repelled the Lake Poet attracted the Wizard of the North. An ancient castle reminded Sir Walter of deeds of self-sacrifice and of the joyous days of chivalry, and even in the stories of bloodshed and crime, from which Wordsworth turned in horror, Scott was able to find a strain of poetry and romance.
The plot of The Lady of the Lake is based on James V.’s well-known habit of wandering through his kingdom in disguise. In the poem the monarch calls himself not “The Gudeman o’ Ballengeich,” but “Fitz-James, the Knight of Snowdoun,”