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

INTRODUCTION.
XC1
It is unnecessary to show how thoroughly Henryson
knew the poems of Chaucer, both in spirit and technique,
or to point out in detail the different ways in which he
worked from his model, whether writing in plain sequel as
in the Testament of Cresseid, or recalling familiar passages,
as in his apologue of Chantecleer and the Fox, or utilizing
the verse-forms and applying with no inferior power the
famous seven-lined stanza to the double purpose of high
tragedy and workaday narrative, or picking out his lines
with turns and words detached from the Canterbury Tales,
The Parlement of Foules, or Troilus and Criseyde. In his
prosodic practice he rarely strays from Chaucer’s path:
perhaps only twice, when he reverts to the older measure
of Robene and Makyne and the Garment of Gud Ladeis,
and to the alliterative stanza of Sum Practysis of Medecyne.
In the last he and his fellow Makars1 find themselves
in the same spirit of burlesque which consumed Chaucer
when he turned to a popular measure for the fun of his
Sir Thop as.
That Henryson was known to the next generation of
Scottish poets may be allowed without denying them the
credit of having taken their own buckets to the ‘spring-
and well’ of English. Some influence may be assumed
when we find early personal references in so many places,
in Dunbar, Douglas, Lyndsay, and others, and when we
have from the first Scottish press, the first Scottish an¬
thologists, and Englishmen like Thynne and Kinaston,
evidence that his fame had passed, not long after his day,
beyond the Abbey precincts of Dunfermline. The hints
of indebtedness are sometimes obscure, but their accumu-
1 Supra, p. Ixxiv.