xliv
may well have been selected with an eye to the King's tastes. The King's Scottish favorites were men of culture. Lennox, the earliest, was a courtier of polish and address. The Maitlands, father and sons, were possessed of literary talents rare enough in the Scotland of that day. Sir James, the Chancellor, "had intellect," writes Mr. Lang, "which [to the nobles] was intolerable."[1] The Master of Gray was a Latin poet and friend of Sidney. Even Arran, whom the King liked though he did not trust, was a scholar and man of parts, though a rascal. "Avec du grec," wrote Hunsdon, "on ne peut gâter rien."[2]
The King's time in these years, according to Colville, was divided between hunting and poetry, "in one or both of which he commonly spendeth the day." 3 One can imagine far less profitable occupations in rainy weather and on winter nights around the fire. James, it is true, was not much of a poet, nor could he have been if he had had friends who were more capable of leading the way, but he had at least the quick and fertile mind of a good talker. At his meals, writes Walton later, there were "deep discourses" and "friendly disputes." 4 Sir John Harington pleased him as "a merry blade," but also for his fund of "learned discourse." 5 When James left Scotland in the hands of the Presbyterian clergy, the beginnings of the new poetry were soon lost in the concentration of interest in a sincere but unlovely religion, and verse was left for recluses such as Drummond or Scotsmen in the English court. The throne of the latter country might have been ascended, on the death of Glorianna, by a monarch less auspicious for literature than James I. And if, as Dr. McCrie has somewhere suggested, a proper fate would have been to force the King to live by his sonnets, he would have fared very badly in seventeenth-century Scotland.
Letters, Bann. Club, p. 316.
Life of Donne, ed. 1901, p. 207. Nugæ Antiquæ, ed. Park, p. 391.
