Scottish Text Society publications > Old series > Poems of Alexander Montgomerie

INTRODUCTION.
xlix
Elizabethan stage, presenting its daily round of romantic
comedy, tragedy, and burlesque, must have been enormous
in the way of educating and stimulating among the
people a taste for poetry and imaginative literature in
general ; and hardly less important is it to consider how
this continual mimic presentation of the real passion and
humour of life, touched and blent with the attractive
colours of romance, would invade and help to destroy the
artificialities of coterie verse-making, with its ingenious
ringing of the changes on worn-out sentiments and far¬
fetched fancies. An occasional visit of a London company,
or a court or college masque—even these under the frown
of the Presbyterian fathers—was all that Scotland knew
of these southern delights.
§ 24. The only place indeed where it may be claimed
that a detached interest in literature existed was the
Court, and apparently this interest was strongest there in
the earlier years of James’s personal reign, when Catholic
influence was at its height. The effect upon the young
king of his companionship with Esme Stewart,1 Lord
of Aubigny (later the Duke of Lennox), whose arrival in
1579 as a secret emissary of the Guises opens a new
chapter of Catholic intrigue in Scotland, has been repro¬
bated by Scottish historians, possibly with justice enough ;
but if James’s morals were not improved by this contact
with Aubigny and his retinue from the Court of Henry
III., it is little doubtful that he was introduced to a more
liberal atmosphere in matters literary than would other¬
wise have surrounded him. To the zealous Presbyterian
of those days poetry, when it was not chartered in
1 James laments his death in one of his best poems, “ The Phoenix,” in¬
cluded in the ‘ Essayes of a Prentise.’