When Lyndsay was driven from the court by the advent of the Douglases to power, he no doubt felt it as a bitter misfortune and a disappointment of all his highest hopes. But we are greatly mistaken if he did not ere long come to regard it in a very different light. Like most men of genius, he had evidently two sides to his character. On the one side he had a taste for pleasure, sociality, pageantry, and frivolous amusements; and a few years more of these might have deadened his nature to everything else, and converted him into a mere dangler after royalty. But he had also elements of a better kind. He was well educated and accomplished; he had read somewdιat extensively, and was master of most of the knowledge to be had in books at that time. He had seen not a little of the world, both in Scotland and in foreign countries; he was an acute discerner of character, and had both knowledge of and skill in affairs. Now then was just the time for a man like him, arrived at the full maturity of his intellect, to turn all these varied acquisitions to account. Lyndsay therefore, we may infer, retired to his country seat, either at The Mount, or as we fancy more likely to Garleton (that he might be more within call should a change take place in the political situation at Edinburgh), and there, after the first dull pang of disappointment was over, he doubtless found that there was no lack of subjects to engage his best thoughts. One of the great crises in the history of Europe and in the progress of human thought had just arisen. The trumpet of the Reformation had been sounded in Germany, and its reverberation had already been heard in Scotland, where both political and ecclesiastical disorder had nearly reached their worst, and were becoming the source of deep anxiety and desire for redress to all good men. For Lyndsay, therefore, there was something else to do than to brood moodily over his own private griefs. He had to make up his mind on a variety of great public questions, as well perhaps as to settle the great personal question of his own religious faith; and in his earliest work, The Dreme, which seems to have been composed at this time, we have a somewhat vivid picture of the turn his thoughts took.

He represents himself as having spent the long winter night without sleep, “through heavy thought, remembering of divers thingis gone.” On getting up and walking out, he finds the dull winter season, with its bitter blasts and sharp sleety showers, but ill-fitted to console him, and only too much in harmony with his own melancholy. He goes down to the sea-shore, but things are no better there; for the “weltering of the waves” at once associates itself in his mind with “this false warld’s instability.” Thus far, then, his meditations seem to have had a merely personal reference. But by and by, on retiring into a cave near the shore, he falls into a trance, in which his thoughts take a wider range. The miserable state of his country, from misgovernment on the part of its rulers and the vices of both clergy and laity, fills his mind, and, reflecting on the ultimate fate of such men, he finds himself in the twinkling of an eye in hell, where he sees wicked popes, kings, conquerors, princes, and lords temporal, with no end of churchmen, “mansworn merchants,” “unleil laboraris,” craftsmen “out of number,” “hurdaris of gold and common occararis,” all “tormentit with pains intolerable.” Then, leaving this “dolorous dongeon,” he has a passing sight of purgatory, though apparently with some misgiving as to its reality, his significant remark being—

“Sic things to be great clerkis does conclude, Howbeit my hope stands most in Christis Mood."

Proceeding then to the realms of bliss, he sees something of the rewards of good and just rulers and righteous men; and by arid by returning to the earth, and at length looking down upon Scotland, he sees a region both good and fair, its seas abounding in fish, its mountains covered with pasture, the valleys fit for corn, the forests full of game, mines with gold and silver, the people fair, intelligent, strong, and noble-minded,—and yet with all this, the country poor and the inhabitants miserable. What could be the cause? and the answer given is that the realm wants good government, impartial administration of justice, and freedom from war and discord. Viewing the country all over—on the borders

“Betwixt the Merse and Lochmaben, He could not knaw a leil man from a thief.

To show their reif, theft, murther and mischief, And vicious works, it would infest the air.”

In the Highlands it was no better :—

“Unthrift, sweirness, falset, poverty, and strife Put policy in danger of her life.”

And even in the Lowlands, where better things might be expected, it was impossible for a poor man to live by his industry. If he settledin the towns, “singular profet” (by which we understand him to mean the system of monopolies and of close trade corporations, which everywhere prevailed) “gart him soon dislodge.” And if he attempted to get redress to his wrongs there was no help for him anywhere. The spiritual state, plunged in simony, covetousness, pride, ambition, sensuality, and the love of pomp and pleasure, “held him at disdain”; and among the nobility and gentry “liberality and lawté both are lost,” knightly courage is “turnit in brag and boast,” and disorder and civil war have produced a state of things in which “there is nocht else hot ilk man for himself.” The moral of the whole is—“Woe to the land that has ouer young ane king!”—“theresail na Scot have comforting till that I seethe country guided by wisdom of ane gude auld prudent king.” The poet is then awakened by the sound of cannon from a ship of war approaching the coast,—the suggestion, as we imagine, being that the existing state of things can only end in violence and uproar, in tumult and rebellion, most probably in foreign invasion and revolution.

On the whole The Dreme appears the most finished and artistic of Lyndsay’s works. It has a tone of greater seriousness, bears the marks of more care and elaboration in the composition; and, though it has a good deal of the crudeness of a first attempt, we think we can discover an effort at least at a finer proportion and harmony of parts than in any of his subsequent poems. In its subjectmatter it strikes the keynote of almost all that he afterwards wrote. The evils, the wrongs, the misgovernment of his country evidently filled his whole soul with grief, indignation, and the desire for reform; and we almost doubt if there is to be found anywhere except in the old Hebrew prophets a purer or more earnest breathing of the patriotic spirit. Indeed if we may judge from the mottσ prefixed to his Dreme we should almost fancy that he had made them his model :— Prophetias nolite spernere. Omnia autem probate: <puod bonum est tvnete. Lyndsay accordingly is to be judged of less as a poet than as a great political and ecclesiastical reformer. That his works are written in verse is merely incidental. Though not destitute of poetical genius, this was scarcely the special characteristic of his mind. His greatest work, and the only one to which it is necessary here to make further allusion, was his Satire of the Three Estates. It is a drama, and may be said to be in some respects one of the most remarkable that ever was written. The dramatis personae are chiefly allegorical, and under the names of Rex Humanitas, Wantonness, the Vices (Flattery, Falset, and Deceit) in the habit of friars, King Correction, Good Counsel, Temporality, Sensuality, Chastity, Verity, John the Commonweal, <fcc., the most bitter and unsparing exposure is made of the wickedness and corruption of all classes of the community. King, clergy, lords, merchants, craftsmen —no one escapes the severest censure and the most unmitigated ridicule. And yet this extraordinary production was acted on the borough muir of Edinburgh before the king himself, many of the highest nobility and clergy, and an immense crowd of all classes of the people. How the author escaped being torn in pieces by the mob or burnt at the stake by the ruling powers it is difficult to understand. Perhaps the explanation is that each class saw every other brought under the lash equally with itself, and felt consoled for its own shame by enjoying the infliction visited on its neighbours. Very likely too the grotesque wit and the fun with which the serious matter of the play was so largely spiced charmed the audience into good humour, and left them unable to think of vengeance. It may be somewhat confidently inferred too that the dramatist so exactly expressed the public feeling of the time as to the evils and corruption under which the state was rapidly going to destruction that, even when his stinging reproaches most nearly touched themselves, their consciences were smitten and they were compelled to assent to the perfect truth and justness of his rebukes. But be this as it may, there can hardly be a doubt that this most singular drama formed one of the chief means by which the way was paved for the Reformation afterwards carried out by Knox and his coadjutors. One thing is especially remarkable in Lyudsay’s politics both civil and ecclesiastical, that, hopeless and depressing as the condition of the country must have been to a man like him, his opinions never end in mere negations, but are throughout constructive in their character. And yet more thoroughgoing radicalism it would be difficult elsewhere to find. He does not for example scruple to declare that kings who govern ill should be deposed. This, however, was merely a speculative opinion, and it is of more interest to ascertain what his practical suggestions were. Among them we find the following :—that the king should on no account attempt to do anything without the advice of his council and parliament; that John the Commonweal should have a greater voice in parliament, i.e., in our modern phrase, that there should be a considerable extension of the franchise; that (as already mentioned) all close corporatiohs and monopolies should be abolished; that temporal lands should be set in feu to the tenants on condition of their duly rendering the prescribed services to the state, a measure not very dissimilar in principle (if we understand it aright) to that lately introduced into Ireland; that lords should be responsible for thieves who find refuge on their lands, and make restitution to the poor who have been plundered by them; that courts of justice should be established in the remoter parts of the country, such as Elgin and Inverness, in order to avoid the expense attendant on the transference of pleas to the metropolis, and, to provide for their maintenance, the nunneries in that αuarter to be abolished and their revenues sequestrated, the reason given being—

“Thir wanton nuns are na way necessair Till common·weill, nor yet to the glorie Of Christis kirk, thocht they be fat and fair, And als that fragile order feminine Will nocht be missit in Christ’s religion.”

No less stringent and sweeping are his proposals for the reform of the church. The religion of Christ must be purged of all deceit and hypocrisy. The consistorial courts are to have no jurisdiction in matters temporal. No clergyman is to be admitted to office unless duly qualified in learning and piety. Celibacy is to be abolished. Bishops and priests must be compelled to preach regularly and “take better tent to souls under their dominion.” Benefices are not to be purchased either from prince or pope, nor is money to be permitted to go to Rome for bulls and pleas. Pluralities and patronage are to be abolished, residence is to be enforced, and the people are to have a voice in the choice of their spiritual guides. In fact many of Lyndsay’s proposals of reform have quite a modern look, and this perhaps explains in some degree the long-continued popularity of his works among his countrymen, which otherwise it is rather difficult to account for. They have none of the chivalric spirit-stirring power of many of our ancient songs and ballads, none of the tender love and melancholy which form the charm of Burns’s lyrics, none of the joyous abandon of convivial or amorous ditties, and none of the fascination which springs from well-constructed tales or narrative poems, like those of Chaucer or Scott. It is difficult to suppose that even the humour which pervades them, seldom of the most refined kind and often very much the reverse, can have been in any great degree pleasing to readers of a later age than the author’s own. The only explanation, we suspect, is that Lyndsay’s intense and uncompromising love of liberty, his strong sympathy with the poor, his love of justice, his keen hatred of tyranny, wrong, and oppression, and his shrewd common sense easily found a responsive chord in Scottish bosoms. Nor was the interest which his works so long retained among the Scottish peasantry merely of a sentimental kind. For many of the evils against which he directed his severest invectives continued long afterwards to afflict his country, and even when somewhat changed in their aspect still reappeared in analogous forms or character. Prelatic usurpation and cruelty were as rife as ever in the century which succeeded that in which Lyndsay wrote; aristocratic venality and heartlessness have perhaps even yet hardly ceased out of the land; church patronage, always hateful to religious-minded Scotsmen, was hardly abolished before it was reimposed. And then such incidents as the massacre of Glencoe, the union with England, a measure intensely disliked by the great mass of the Scottish people, the infamous treatment of the Darien colonization scheme, the barbarities which followed the two Jacobite rebellions, the deprivation up to 1832 of any true parliamentary representation, and the continuance of close municipal and trade corporations, all tended to keep up a bitter sense of wrong to which Lyndsay’s satires gave point and expression.

The best accessible editions of Lyndsay’s works are those of George Chalmers, in 3 vols., London, 1806, and of David Laing, also in 3 vols., Edinburgh, 1879. These, with the Early English Text Society’s edition, leave little to be desired for the establishment of a correct text, and for purely antiquarian illustration. In Warton’s History of English Poetry, and in Irving’s History of Scottish Poetry, good critical estimates will be found of Lyndsay’s place as a poet. It is possible, however, that something yet remains to be done in order to determine his exact position as a great political and religious reformer, and to illustrate the effect which his works have had in directing popular feeling and opinion in Scotland.