If the King had been older , things might have been better .sx But there were years of turmoil when no man was master and many strove for ( mastery .sx Ten years after Flodden , Surrey so ravage the Border that Wolsey boasted , in a phrase that might be Attila's , " there is left neither house , fortress , village , tree , cattle , corn , nor other succour of man .sx " Cet animal , en effet , etait bien mechant to object to annexation by the Lord's chosen .sx James struggled to manhood , to a torn kingdom , a wrecked palace , a treasury plundered by a regent who stole his father's plate and jewels .sx If he had lived to be more than thirty-one , he might have pulled matters round :sx he lacked neither courage nor intelligence - we owe him , for instance , such things as the first Coastal Survey and he was luckier in his wife .sx If gallant level-headed Marie de Guise , one of the bravest figures in Scots history , and one of the most ungratefully vilified , had been in Margaret Tudot's place after Flodden , or perhaps still more , before Flodden , the course of Scots history might have been different .sx Inter arma especially inter bella civilia silent musae .sx But the partial recovery of James' too short personal reign , the influence , after , of a brilliant QueenDowager bred at the court of Francois 1er , postponed for a while the Gtterdmmerung of Scots letters .sx The tradition , the temper that made them possible , was still there , and until well past the middle of the century Scotland had still a literature of distinction .sx The early part of the reign has not much to show , except the work of David Lindsay , a voluminous and successful writer , of considerable merit , whose posthumous fate , however , is rather disproportionate , merit considered , to that of some of his fellows .sx Later .sx on , there is still some beautiful work from Montgomerie , Alexander Scott , and a number of more ghostly figures , and even after the establishment of the Reformation had staved off a Scots Renaissance to the far side of 1750 , the tradition of Scots literary poetry survived in a thin trickle , in the work of a half-dozen or so of Royalist gentlemen , into the first half of the seventeenth century , though all its practitioners except Montrose ( who as a poet is the least of them ) were born in the sixteenth , and most of them grew up in it .sx The oldest of the post-Flodden men is .sx Sir David Lindsay of the Mount , Lord Lyon King at Arms , .sx who was a courtier of James V's through that monarch's life-time , and lived well into Queen Marie's regency , dying in 1555 .sx He had been a member of James IV's household :sx we know that he acted in a play at Holyrood in 1511 , and was attached to the infant Prince of Scotland , that he had much to do with the many dramatic entertainments of the Court , and that like Dunbar he went on embassies one to Germany to inspect some proposed Queens of Scots and another to Antwerp , renewing treaties of commerce and , again like Dunbar , that he was a sort of semi-official King's Poet ( 38 ) , writing a Deploration of the Death of Queen Magdalene and a little later superintending the " fearsis and plays " at the reception of her successor .sx He had the King's personal favour until James' death , and was Lyon King at Arms from 1529 .sx Like Dunbar he was habitually a satirist , and as such did not lack matter .sx But he is not in the same intellectual class :sx he has nothing that so combines power , vision , and venomous subtlety as The Twa Maryit Wemen .sx His satire is largely of the prevailing looseness of morals , but itself shows a considerable gusto in sculduddery , found frequently , but seldom with such frankness , in the tastes of professed reformers of public morals .sx It is not impossibly his combination of this element with a pungent anti-clericalism that caused his popularity to survive the Reformation .sx He was read and praised for a couple of centuries by men who would certainly have agreed with those who were scandalised by Charles I's affection for Shakespeare ; he was praised , if not read , for most of a couple more :sx only this morning , in fact , I saw him called " a Founder of the Scottish Reformation " by a reverend gentleman who , if he happened to have read Squyer Meldrum or the Induction to the second Thrie Estatis , might possibly have thought the claim , though true , was not altogether tactful .sx From the purely literary point of view his work , though it never reaches the level of Douglas or Dunbar , shows both vigour and considerable talent .sx Though not of Dunbar's quality , it descends in the main from his school , with nothing that anticipates the dolce stil nuovo of Alexander Scott .sx His satiric allegory , The Dreme ( 1528 ) , is rather in the key of Douglas's work of the kind , and tolerably dull , though there is some excellently vigorous winter landscape in its induction , where he walks on the sands in January .sx He wanders through Hell , Purgatory , the Stars , Heaven , Earth , Paradise , and Scotland , the last two of which do not greatly resemble each other .sx It ends with some sensible advice to the King , a recurrent note of Lindsay's , a shrewd and rather commonplace man of the world , but genuinely attached to a master who never forgot how he had played with an harassed and humiliated small boy .sx who had even more than his share of the trials of a normal Stewart minority , that do so much , as in the parallel case of Louis XIV , to explain the Stewart tendency to absolutism .sx The Dreme sets the principal key for Lindsay's work :sx his long Monarchie , written in 1553 , two years before his death , and dedicated to " James our Prince and Protectour and his brother Our Spirituall Gouernour and Prince of Preists in this Nation " ( The Regent , James Hamilton , Earl of Arran and Duke of Chatellerault grandson of Princess Mary and his half-brother John , Archbishop of St Andrews ) is in the same vein , as are some intermediate works a fact which coupled with Lindsay's known favour at court , suggests that both James V and his widow Queen Marie were considerably more tolerant than popular tradition admits .sx The Monarchie , which to his own day , and probably to Lindsay himself , was his principal work , is a very long dialogue , between Experience and a Courtier , on the unhappy state of the world , with a long account of the human race , from Creation to Judgment .sx I find that I have twice used long in describing it , and indeed the modern reader may well be forgiven if he finds himself bogged , for its 6000 lines need some heroism to tackle .sx Heavy as it was , it hit the taste of its day and the next generation :sx it was reprinted at Paris in 1558 , with a delightful woodcut of Lindsay in his herald's tabard over what , from the combination of contemporary bon-net with buskins a la grecque , may be either a classical tunic or a kilt .sx An English version was printed in London in 1566 , and frequently reissued , and a Danish one appeared in 1591 .sx It is just possible that it may have affected the unfortunate Fifth Book of the Faerie Queene , where politics threaten to drown the poetry .sx Between The Dreme and The Monarchie there are several other works , more or less in the same vein .sx The chief early piece early relatively , for Lindsay's literary career does not seem to have begun till his late thirties , though as usual we do not know what is lost is of 1530 , The Complaynt of the Kingis Papyngo ( parrot ) , an outspoken satire of Kirk and State , from the King downwards and inclusive , but directed especially against the religious orders .sx Its prologue , in praise of his brother Scottish poets , recalls the ghostly procession in Dunbar .sx There is a more personal venom in the piece that in his later work plays the same part to The Monarchie as the Papyngo to The Dreme , The Tragedie of the umquhyle Maister Reuerende Fader David be the mercy of God Cardinal and Archbisshope of Sanctandrois .sx It appeared in 1547 , and is a professed imitation of Bochas' tragedies ( Boccaccio's De Casibus ) and a rather clever piece of sarcastic , rather than satiric , mock-heroic a pseudo-tragic monologue in the mouth of the Cardinal's own ghost , who is made to confess his sins in the way of gambling and extravagance and , especially , of stopping the proposed visit of the King to England and refusing to make peace with the latter country unless on terms satisfactory to France :sx Lindsay , like most of his party , was strongly pro-English , and in spite of his affection for his master , he edges rather lightly round Solway Moss , an affair whose blame was not with the Cardinal's party .sx There is a considerable bulk of minor satire , one of the liveliest and best known being one on fashion , Anent Syde Taillis , the enormous sweeping skirts of the early century .sx Outside satire , the sincerity of Lindsay's moral indignations may be gauged from The Historie of Squyer Meldrum , a sort of novel in the key of .sx the Heptameron , but with the Scots preference for verse :sx it is in a rapid competent octosyllabic couplet .sx Meldrum was a real person , though Lindsay's portrait is said to be rather synthetic :sx it is certainly very typical of its age .sx He is drawn as in contemporary phrase grand tueur de dames and a tall man of his hands .sx He serves with the Scots Navy at the sack of Carrickfergus , where he behaves with commendable restraint in a rather embarrassing bonne fortune , and goes on to Picardy , where he dresses down a boastful Englishman , comes home again , via a really excellent sea-fight with a big English galleon , travels , receives bon souper , bon gite , et le reste from a charming widow with rich lands in Strathearn , who is eventually married off while her protector lies wounded , and eventually dies in the odour of sanctity as the respectable Sheriff-depute of Fife .sx It was popular till late in the seventeenth century , an edition of which time has an engaging frontispiece of the Squire in the smartest garments of 1620 , puffing most doggishly at a long pipe .sx It is in fact quite a lively piece of narrative :sx there is no personality , but the action moves , and with one exception , it is the most forward-looking of Lindsay's work , anticipating the Heptameron of eight years later rather than looking back to the romance .sx The other exception is what , from a modern point of view , must be considered as his principal work .sx This is a play , of merit in itself and of great historical interest as almost all that survives of early Scottish vernacular drama .sx Ane Plesand Satire of the Thrie Estaitis in Commendatioun of Vertew and Vituperatioun of Vyce appears from a contemporary description to have been played in the great banqueting-hall at Linlithgow , before James and Marie de Guise , as part of the Twelfth Night revels of 1540 .sx The copy of it in the Bannatyne MS .sx says it was played in 1552 , on the Castle Hill at Cupar , and the earliest printed text , Charteris's , gives it as represented two years later , on the Playfield at Greenside , before Queen Marie again , so that it appears to have been popular .sx As it ante-dates Bale's Kyng Johan by some seven years , it would seem that the secular development of the drama had moved more quickly than in England , probably through the close relation with France , where the secular use of the form had been current ever since Adam de la Halle in the midthirteenth century .sx Lindsay's English contemporary , Heywood , was in fact writing secular interludes , but The Thrie Estaitis is a much more elaborate business , and , seven years before Bale , who is usually described as the first dramatist in English to introduce individuals , it shows the development among its characters of not only personifications of qualities or type-figures ( the Poor Man , the Cobbler , the Cobbler's Wife ) like those of the modern expressionist drama , but individualised representatives of a type , of a kind common in Elizabethan drama and later , down even to the present day , though modern usage , in the last half-century , has generally dropped such label-names as Lindsay's Sandy Solace , Shakespeare's Slender , Sheridan's Joseph Surface , Trollope's Mr Nearthewinde , and even Mr Shaw's Flawner Bannal .sx