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

NEW SOURCES OF MONTGOMERIE’S POETRY. 291
plicated in treasonable dealings with France against Elizabeth, and
was forced to leave England for five years. There can be little doubt
that it is to him Montgomerie refers in the opening lines of sonnet
xvii. (see Cranstoun’s edition) :—
“ Adeu, my King, court, cuntry, and my kin:
Aden, suete Duke, vhose father held me deir :
Adeu, companions, Constable and Keir,
Thrie treuar hairts, I trou, sail neuer tuin.”
This is the sonnet in which Montgomerie alludes to his dismissal
from the King’s service, and it could not have been written prior to
the adverse judgment of the Commissary Court on July 13, 1593,1
a year after the publication of the ‘ Diana.’ If Constable had, as Dr
Hoffmann seems to suggest, cribbed one of Montgomerie’s sonnets,
it would appear at any rate to have occasioned no breach in their
friendship !
Attention is drawn in the Introduction to a Scots rendering, found
in the Laing MS. and printed in this volume,2 of a poem by Jasper
Heywood (son of the dramatist), which appears in yet another of the
Elizabethan miscellanies, “The Paradyce of Dainty Devises,” pub¬
lished in 1576. These translations are valuable evidence of the
interest taken at this time by Scotchmen in the lyric collections of
England. In Montgomerie’s case there can be no doubt that
somewhat of his poetic nurture was drawn from this source. The
parallel references given by Dr Brotanek fully establish this. But
other influences, coming both from France and Italy, were affecting
the poets of James VI.’s Court. The older Chaucerian tradition,
which moves so strongly in the period from Henryson to Lyndsay,
is almost entirely displaced by those fresh interests. Possibly there
is an allusion to Montgomerie’s practice in the new style in these
scornful lines of Polwart:—
“ Thy raggit roundaillis, reifand royt,
Sum schorl, sum lang, and out of lyne,
With skabrous collouris, fowsome floyt,
Proceiding from ane pynt of wine.”
Dr Hoffmann and Dr Brotanek are apt to assume too readily an
ignorance on Montgomerie’s part of Italian poetry. The point re¬
quires further investigation. In the translations of Fowler and
Stewart there is at least evidence of first - hand knowledge of
Petrarch and Ariosto among the Court poets; and it is also worthy
of mention that Fowler composed a sequence of seventy-one sonnets
in the manner of Petrarch, to which he gives the characteristically
Italian title, “The Tarantula of Love.”
In one of the new stanzas found in the Tullibardine MS. of the
1 See Appendix B, p. 281.
2 P. 210.