eye fixed on the scenery and the sky of Scotland. About the middle of
the century, Robert Henryson, a teacher in Dunfermline, wrote.--

"The northin wind had purifyit the air
And sched the misty cloudis fra the sky."[2]

This may lack the magic of Shelley's rhythm, but the feeling for
nature is as genuine as in the later poet's lines:--

"For after the rain when, with never a stain
The pavilion of heaven is bare."[3]

William Dunbar, the greatest poet of this group, who lived in the
last half of the fifteenth century, was a loving student of the nature
that greeted him in his northland. No Italian poet, as he wandered
beside a brook, would have thought of a simile like this:--

"The stones clear as stars in frosty night."[4]

Dunbar takes us with him on a fresh spring morning, where--

"Enamelled was the field with all colours,
The pearly droppes shook in silver showers,"[5]

where we can hear the matin song of the birds hopping among the buds,
while--

"Up rose the lark, the heaven's minstrel fine."[6]

Both Dunbar and Gawain Douglas (1474?-1522), the son of a Scotch
nobleman, had keen eyes for all coloring in sky, leaf, and flower. In
one line Dunbar calls our attention to these varied patches of color
in a Scotch garden: "purple, azure, gold, and gules [red]." In the
verses of Douglas we see the purple streaks of the morning, the
bluish-gray, blood-red, fawn-yellow, golden, and freckled red and
white flowers, and--

"Some watery-hued, as the blue wavy sea."[7]

Outside the pages of Shakespeare, we shall for the next two hundred
years look in vain for so genuine a love of scenery and natural
phenomena as we find in fifteenth-century Scottish poetry. These poets
obtained many of their images of nature at first hand, an achievement
rare in any age.

[Illustration: EARLY TITLE PAGE OF ROBIN HOOD.]

"Songs for Man or Woman, of All Sizes."--When Shakespeare shows us
Autolycus offering such songs at a rustic festival,[8] the great poet
emphasizes the fondness for the ballad which had for a long time been
developing a taste for poetry. While it is difficult to assign exact
dates to the composition of many ballads, we know that they flourished
in the fifteenth century. They were then as much prized as the novel
is now, and like it they had a story to tell. The verse was often
halting, but it succeeded in conveying to the hearer tales of love, of
adventure, and of mystery. These ballads wer