1587. Sep.
Abacuck Bisset’s Rolment of Courtis exists in manuscript in the Advocates’ Library, only a portion of it, containing A Short Form of Process for civil cases, having been printed. It was composed in the old age of the author, after the commencement of the reign of Charles I., and seems to have been designed for immediate publication, as it is prefaced with sundry of those complimentary verses with which authors used to gratify each other in days while as yet reviews were not. One set of these, by Mr Alexander Craig of Rose Craig, and which appears in his Poetical Exercises (Raban, Aberdeen, 1623), is not without some feeling:
1587.
’Twixt was and is how various are the odds!
What one man doth another doth undo;
One consecrates religious works to gods,
Another leaves sad wrecks and ruins new.
This book doth shew that such and such things were,
But would to God that it could say, They are!
‘When I perceive the south, north, east, and west,