Of several poets who owe the preservation of their works and memory entirely to the writer of the Bannatyne Manuscript, the chief is Alexander Scot. Pinkerton termed him the Anacreon of old Scottish poetry, and placed him at the head of the ancient minor poets of his country—a judgment in which succeeding critics have uniformly agreed.

As with many other of these ancient singers, almost nothing is certainly known of the facts of Scot’s life, the little information we possess consisting almost wholly of deduction from the poet’s works themselves. Dr. Laing was inclined to set his birth about the year 1520, and quoted a precept of legitimation from the Privy Seal Register of 1549 as possibly concerning him. This precept, if proved to refer to the poet, would declare him a natural son of Alexander Scot, prebendary of the Chapel Royal of Stirling. The presumption, however, is somewhat slight. From the refrain of “The Justing at the Drum” it has been inferred that he resided in the neighbourhood of Dalkeith, near Edinburgh. One of his pieces, in the opinion of Lord Hailes, expresses the “Lament of the Maister of Erskyn,” who was killed at Pinkie-cleugh in 1547, and from this and other allusions it is gathered that Scot began writing at least so early as 1545, while, of course, none of his extant verse can be of later date than 1568, the year in which Bannatyne compiled his MS. The general strain of the poems declares Scot to have been a layman; from the occurrence of several legal terms in his work it has been suggested that he was a jurist; and from expressions such as that in “Ane New Yeir Gift to the Quene Mary,” in which he prays God to give the young ruler grace “to punisch papistis and reproche oppressouris,” it seems clear that he favoured the principles of the Reforming party. On only one point of his personal history, however, entire certainty exists. The colophon of his poem “To luve vnluvit” expressly states that the piece was written “quhen his wyfe left him.” From two of his compositions, “Luve preysis,” and “Vp, helsum hairt,” it might be gathered that his lady was of higher rank than himself, a fact which, if true, might account for his wedded unhappiness. Perhaps he was one of those whose love, too complete and obvious, fails to exact adequate return. This possibility, indeed, he seems to have discovered, as in more than one of his later poems he sorrowfully counsels something of reserve and self-restraint as the best policy of the lover. His experience had also the effect of opening his eyes to the shortcomings of the other sex, and induced him to allude to these in lines of biting satire. A passage in a poem of his contemporary Montgomerie informs us that Scot lived to advanced years. In a sonnet to Robert Hudson, written about the year 1584, the author of “The Cherrie and the Slae” refers to “old Scot” as still alive.

With a few exceptions, the poems of Scot[1216] are all of the amatory kind, and, taken together, form a fairly complete comment on the pains, the pleasures, and the arts of love. His longest composition, the “New Yeir Gift to Quene Mary” sheds much curious light upon the social conditions of 1562; and in “The Justing at the Drum,” an imitation of “Chrystis Kirk on the Grene,” he has followed the initiative of Dunbar and Lyndsay, and in a quaint strain of humour has burlesqued the practice of the tourney. Of the general tenor of his work the lines of Allan Ramsay may be taken as a fair description.

Exhibiting mastery of a surprising variety of stanza forms, his verse possesses an ease and finish unsurpassed in his time. Here and there he flashes out in a terse aphoristic style, as when he gives his views on womankind—

Not less is he at home in paradox:

And for expression of downright democratic sentiment, the author of “A man’s a man for a’ that” might have written the lines—

But, apart from its poetic fascination, a peculiar interest attaches to the work of the man who struck the first distinctly modern note in Scottish poetry. Breaking away from the conventional forms of the old makars, Alexander Scot wrote in a direct, natural fashion, and but for their rich quaintness of expression and their antique language, many of his pieces might almost be the work of a poet of the nineteenth century. The form of his work, its aptness to turn upon some single thought or situation, and its general tendency to direct expression of personal feeling and experience, entitle him to be considered the earliest of the more distinctly lyrical poets of Scotland.

Quod Scott quhen his Wyfe left him.