Scottish Text Society publications > Old series > Poems of Robert Henryson > Volume 1, 1914

XX
INTRODUCTION.
historical zeal remains as the earlier David left it ;
and we must wait patiently, perhaps till the Greek
Kalends — perhaps even till Laing’s own manuscript
collections have been fully explored — for some stray
encounter with forgotten facts.
We can all be agreed on Henryson’s floruit, though
we cannot fix the years of his birth or death, or, indeed,
a single date in his life.1 Dunbar’s reference to him in
his Lament for the Makaris gives us a posterior limit.
“ In Dunfermelyne he has done rovne
With Maister robert henrisoun.”
These words appear first in Chepman & Myllar’s print
of 1508, and may have been written within a year or
two of publication. It is clear therefore that Henry-
son did not survive the first decade of the sixteenth
century. Lyndsay in his Testament and Complaynt of
the Papyngo? printed in 1538, and written about 1530,
gives a list of poets then dead, including Henryson
(Henderson) and Gavin Douglas. The latter in a holo¬
graph note on the Cambridge MS. of his Aeneid, which
must have been made not later than 1522, refers to
Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice? but does not speak
of the poet as deceased. Sir Francis Kinaston, in
a gossipy note (written c. 1640) printed by Francis
Waldron in 1796,4 tells us that Henryson was “very
1 Laing’s identification of the poet with the ‘ venerabilis vir Magister
Robertas Henrisone in Artibus Licentiatus et in Decretis Bachalarius,’ who
was incorporated in the University of Glasgow on 10th Sept. 1462, is mere
conjecture, and not more valid than other suggestions which he summarily
dismisses. In his own words, “the surname was not uncommon in different
parts of Scotland during the fifteenth century” (The Poems and Fables of
Robert Henryson, 1865, pp. xi, xii, and, again, xxxvii).
* Ed. Laing, I. p. 62. 3 Infra, p. 1.
4 See the Appendix (pp. xcv et set?.), “The Kinaston Manuscript.”