At the end of his translation Bellenden appended an epistle to the king—one of these sound, if somewhat plain, admonitions which his courtiers apparently did not scruple to address to James the Fifth. It deals boldly with the distinction between a king and a tyrant, and does not hesitate to hold up by way of example the fate which has constantly overtaken the wickedness of princes.
The best edition of Bellenden’s Boece is that edited, with a biographical introduction by Thomas Maitland, Lord Dundrennan, and published at Edinburgh in two volumes, quarto, in 1821. The only edition of the Livy is one by the same editor, printed in 1822 from a manuscript in the Advocates’ Library. The translation extends only to the first five books of the original, though it was Bellenden’s intention to furnish a complete version of his author. The work actually done is characterised, like the translation of Boece, by great fluency and vividness, and a natural happiness of style.
But it is to Bellenden’s work as a poet that the chief consideration is here due. To each of his three translations he prefixed a poetical proheme, or preface, of some length; before the title-page of his Boece appears a quaint “Excusation of the Prentar” which must be attributed to him; and a separate poem of twenty-two stanzas by him, entitled “The Benner of Pietie, concerning the Incarnatioun of our Saluiour Chryst,” forms one of the duplicate articles in the Bannatyne MS., printed by the Hunterian Club, 1878–86.[585] These five compositions represent his entire poetical achievement so far as is known. Though printed each in its due place, as above indicated, they have never been collected in a single volume.[586]
Bellenden’s chief poem is the proheme to the cosmographé prefixed to his translation of Boece. It bears no real relation to the work which it precedes, and is believed to have been written before 1530. Modelled upon the classical allegory of the “Choice of Hercules,” it is addressed to James V., and with great tact seeks to convey a somewhat pertinent moral lesson to that youthful monarch. The original title of the composition is understood to have been “Virtew and Vyce”; and after the poetic fashion of its time the allegory is cast in form of a dream. It describes the wooing of a handsome young prince, whose personality can hardly be mistaken, by two lovely and splendidly attired ladies, Delight and Virtue. With quaint shrewdness the poet contrives to awaken at the proper moment, saving himself the invidious task of describing the prince’s choice.
The proheme to the history is a graver and less poetical production, though bearing a closer relation to the work which follows. The chief object of history, it declares in effect, is to set forth the noble deeds of the past as an example to the present—a task performed with great array of classic information. The most striking passage of the poem is the descant on nobility, which occupies nine out of the twenty-nine stanzas. Some of the lines in this have all the incisiveness of the clearest-cut aphorism.
Somewhat the same theory of history forms the burden of the prologue to Livy. The chief interest of this piece consists, perhaps, as Lord Dundrennan pointed out, in its representation of James V. as a patron of literature. The opening stanzas, however, are not without a certain warlike resonance suited to a prelude of Roman deeds of arms.
Altogether, though not of the era-making order, and though comparatively limited in quantity, the poetry of Bellenden is worthy of more attention than it has hitherto received. In allegoric method and in form of verse it follows the fashion of its day, and it shares that fashion’s faults; but, these drawbacks apart, it is marked by great skill and smoothness of versification, by no small descriptive charm, and by a certain happy vividness of imagery which again and again surprises and delights the reader. One can almost feel the breath of
Notus brim, the wind meridiane,
With wingis donk, and pennis full of rane;
and a seascape rises instantly before the eye at mention of the