hen after his pardon he joins in
the procession and passes to see the glories of the palace--the poem
carries on the literary traditions of the courts of love, as shown
especially in the "Romaunt of the Rose" and "The Hous of Fame." The poem
is dedicated to James IV., not without some lesson in commendation of
virtue and honour. No MS. of the poem is extant. The earliest known
edition (c. 1553) was printed at London by William Copland; an Edinburgh
edition, from the press of Henry Charteris, followed in 1579. From
certain indications in the latter and the evidence of some odd leaves
discovered by David Laing, it has been concluded that there was an
earlier Edinburgh edition, which has been ascribed to Thomas Davidson,
printer, and dated c. 1540.

2. _King Hart_ is another example of the later allegory, and, as such,
of higher literary merit. Its subject is human life told in the allegory
of King Heart in his castle, surrounded by his five servitors (the
senses), Queen Plesance, Foresight and other courtiers. The poem runs to
over 900 lines and is written in eight-lined stanzas. The text is
preserved in the Maitland folio MS. in the Pepysian library, Cambridge.
It is not known to have been printed before 1786, when it appeared in
Pinkerton's _Ancient Scottish Poems_.

3. _Conscience_ is in four seven-lined stanzas. Its subject is the
"conceit" that men first clipped away the "con" from "conscience" and
left "science" and "na mair." Then they lost "sci," and had nothing but
"ens" ("that schrew, Riches and geir").

4. Douglas's longest, last, and in some respects most important work is
his translation of the _Aeneid_, the first version of a great classic
poet in any English dialect. The work includes the thirteenth book by
Mapheus Vegius; and each of the thirteen books is introduced by a
prologue. The subjects and styles of these prologues show great variety:
some appear to be literary exercises with little or no connexion with
the books which they introduce, and were perhaps written earlier and for
other purposes. In the first, or general, prologue, Douglas claims a
higher position for Virgil than for his master Chaucer, and attacks
Caxton for his inadequate rendering of a French translation of the
_Aeneid_. That Douglas undertook this work and that he makes a plea for
more accurate scholarship in the translation have been the basis of a
prevalent notion that he is a Humanist in spirit and the first exponent
of Renaiss