Another and later poet of that age, Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, alludes to the occurrence of syphilis at the Christmas feasts in an inferior officer of the court—viz. in John Mackrery, the king’s “fule,” or royal jester, who, according to the poet—like many a poor fool since John’s time—did
“In his maist triumphand gloir
For his reward get the Grandgoir.”[608]
The same author includes this disease elsewhere (p. 147) among the maladies
“Quhilk humane nature dois abhor,
As in the Gut, Gravel, and Gor.”
A metrical translation of Hector Boece’s History of Scotland was made in the earlier half of the sixteenth century, apparently by command of James V. It has been published for the first time, within the last two years, under the authority and direction of the Master of the Rolls. The author of this rhyming Buik of the Chronicles of Scotland, William Stewart, when translating Boece’s account of the fatal disease produced in the old mythical Scotch king, Ferquhard, by the bite of a wolf, tells us (vol. ii. p. 313) that the resulting gangrenous wound defied the skill of the leiches, and the fœtor of it, and its discharges were
“Moir horribill als that time for till abhor,
No canker, fester, gut, or yit Grandgor.”
In the celebrated old poem of the General Satire of Scotland, attributed by most authorities to Dunbar, and which, from some circumstances adverted to in the course of it, is supposed by Sibbald and Chalmers to have been written in 1504 (seven years after the first introduction of syphilis), the author deplores the extent to which the disease had by that time already spread in Scotland, observing—