Series 3 > Scottish correspondence of Mary of Lorraine

INTRODUCTION
xxi
only hopeless chaos. It is refreshing to discover that
even contemporaries ‘ plengzeit apon the ortographye ’ of
their letters, and blithely made a scapegoat of the ‘ servant
quha wret thame.’ [No. CCXX.] If ‘ Jakis ’ was a
professional scribe, he was apparently a poor one, but the
fact that servants wrote the letters of their masters has
another interest. It shows the danger of dogmatising
upon the question of education.
The fact that a man does not write does not necessarily
imply that he could not write. Want of inclination and
lack of practice must often have made the art appear a
drudgery. ‘ Madem,’ wrote Methven, ‘ becaus I ma
nocht gudly tak sa greit payn as in tymes past I haif ben
at all tymmis humelle to writ unto your graice the best
I can . . . efter my understanding.’ [No. CXLIX; cf.
No. CLXXIL] If it were a question of substituting
mental toil for bodily service, most Scotsmen would have
preferred to wield the sword rather than the pen in the
service of the Queen. In this respect Huntly and Douglas
are typical of their class. They were not apt to write,
but they could do so when occasion demanded, in times
of special crisis or in matters of intimate secrecy. [Nos.
LXXXVII, CLX, CCLXIII.]
Men of affairs were themselves perfectly conscious of
the deficiency of their ‘ rude dyting.” [No. LXXXVL]
Lennox, for one, is naively apologetic for his ‘ ewel hand ’ :
his scholastic attainments certainly left much to be
desired. [No. LXXVII.] Perhaps he had been inspired
to herculean efforts by the fact that the miscarriage of
previous communications had raised up difficulties for
himself and his confederate. Indeed, so long as men ‘ dar
nocht be plane ’ in their writing for ‘ feir it haippin in
vrang handdis ’ [No. CLI], so long the gentle art of corre¬
spondence could not take root and flourish. It was a
holograph letter that the Queen was begged to ‘ ryf,’ lest