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

In
INTRODUCTION.
of Scottish Court poets ; but it is also not less certain
that they were well acquainted with, and to some extent
affected by, the poetry of “ the refined and gallant school
of Surrey,” and of yet later developments in English
verse. Clear indications of this in the work of Mont¬
gomerie have been traced with painstaking and scholarly
care by Dr Brotanek, to whose monograph the reader may
be referred,1 and also to what is noted in Appendix C.
§ 25. It is also significant in this connection that, as
has already been noted, one of the poems in the Laing
MS. is a Scottish rendering of a piece occurring in ‘The
Paradyce of Dainty Devises.’ In the Drummond MS.
the lyric beginning, “ My fancie feeds vpon the sugred
gall,” hitherto ascribed to Montgomerie, is also, as Dr
Brotanek points out, taken from another of the English
miscellanies, Procter’s ‘ Gorgious Gallery of Gallant In¬
ventions ’ ; and attention has been drawn by Dr Hoffmann
to the appearance in this same manuscript of one of
Henry Constable’s ‘ Diana ’ sonnets. There can be little
doubt, too, that Montgomerie was familiar with the earliest
and most influential of the Elizabethan verse collections
—Tottel’s £ Miscellany.’ An interesting reference to two
of these anthologies, which confirms the view that they
were known by the Scottish poets, occurs in the intro¬
ductory note to one of the unpublished poems of
William Fowler, found among his private papers in the
library of the Society of Scottish Antiquaries. Ad¬
dressing the “ Christian Reader,” in explanation of the
title of one of his poems, which he calls “The Pest,”
he writes as follows : “ Efter the conception and delyverie
of this poesie, I was in a long doubt with myself how to
C
1 Capitel 4, 1 Der Gedankenhalt und die Quellen der einzelnen Dichtungen,’
pp. 84-135.