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xvi
THE PREFACE.
the poem, and the place where the adventure is said to have occurred.
Such is a brief outline of this fable, of the poetical merits of which, there can be but one opinion.[1] Although
- ↑ The following is the opinion of an ingenious writer, already named, with re- gard to Holland's merits as a poet:— "To the character of an original inventor," Mr Thomson says, "the author of the Houlate has but a slender claim; for besides having taken the story of his poem from the fable of the Jackdaw with borrowed feathers, he is indebted to Chaucer's Assemble of Foules, for some of its principal decorations. The catalogue of birds, and the personification of Nature, are, both of them, imitations of Chaucer; but the former is inferior, in every respect, to the characteristic sketches of his master; and the latter is so little suited to the situation in which it stands, as clearly shews it to have been an exotic, transplanted from a much more poetical soil. "Drayton has a poem entitled the Owl; but there is no similarity between it and the Houlate, either in the subject, or the manner of treating it. But the want of propriety in this poem is a blemish still greater than that of originality. Nothing in composition can be more absurd, than the custom of investing birds and beasts with dignities ecclesiastical and civil; and putting dialogues into their mouths, upon moral, religious, or political topics. Perhaps, however, the candid reader may be inclined to think this more excusable in a writer of the fifteenth century, when he recollects that the very same impropriety was committed by the author of the Hind and Panther, almost at the close of the seventeenth. "The adoption of Mr Pinkerton's hypothesis would furnish us with a still more striking coincidence (or rather contrast) between Holland and Dryden. The intention of the former in writing the Houlate, was to depreciate James II. of Scotland: to extoll James II. of England, and recommend his religion, was that of the latter. But the discovery of this allegorical meaning gives no fresh merit to the Scottish poem, as the satire in the one is equally unjust, and equally culpable, with the panegyric in the other."—MS. Critique on the Howlat, p. 16, &c.
