Thy cristall ene (eyes) minglit with blude I mak,[199]
Thy voice sa cleir unpleasand, hoir, and hace,
Thy lustie lyre (fair skin) ouirspread with spottis blak,
And lumpis haw (livid[200]) appeirand in thy face;
Quhair thow cummis, ilk (each) man sall fle the place;
Thus sall thow go begging fra hous to hous,
With cop and clapper like ane Lazarous.
In this remarkable passage, those more striking symptoms, the swellings, lumps, or livid tubercles on the face, the morbid alteration of the voice and skin, and that turgid and injected appearance of the eye, which Dr. Good has given as one of his characteristic symptoms of the genus elephantiasis, are all tersely, yet accurately described. Indeed, if Sauvages, Swediaur, Cullen, or any of our great nosologists of the last or present century, had been poets, I greatly doubt whether, with all their medical knowledge to boot, they could, in four fettered lines of rhyme, have described the Greek elephantiasis more faithfully and briefly than we have it described in the four first lines that I have just quoted from the Dunfermline schoolmaster of the fifteenth century. Henryson’s account of a leper may not be so poetically beautiful, but it is pathologically much more true than that which the American poet, Willis, has recently given of the disease in his well-known poem of Helon. We shall afterwards find that “the cop and clapper,” alluded to in Henryson’s two last lines, were badges commonly carried by the inmates of the leper hospitals of Scotland.
In passages subsequent to that which I have quoted, Henryson reiterates some of the more prominent symptoms. Thus, the hapless Cresseid afterwards describes what is elsewhere termed “her uglye lipper face, the whilk before was quhite (white) as lilie flour,” as “deformed in the figour;” and again also she describes and laments the characteristic morbid change in the voice: