tion of Parliament. He was found guilty, and put in prison in what he calls the " wyndy and richt vnplesant castell and royk of Edinburgh," where he continued for about a year. This harsh step of the duke of Albany seems to have brought about a feeling of sympathy for Douglas. He was at length set at liberty, and, to make some amends, the duke permitted him to be consecrated bishop of
Dunkeld.The marriage of the queen with the earl of Angus proved an unhappy one ; and, in consequence of his ill- treatment of her, the queen separated from her husband and joined with the regent against the Douglases. Angus fled to the borders for a time; and in 1521 his uncle Gavin was deprived of his bishopric. The bishop then took shelter at the court of Henry VIII., but in 1522 he died of the plague at London, in the forty-eighth year of his age. His remains were interred in the Hospital Church of the Savoy.
The works of Bishop Douglas, though not numerous, are important. They consist of (1) The Police of Honour, a poem written in 1501, an allegorical description of many gorgeous cavalcades of famous persons trooping to a magni ficent palace somewhat like Chaucer s Temple of Fame, in the execution of which Douglas has displayed much originality of treatment ; (2) Another allegorical poem called King Hart, or the heart of man, descriptive of the progress of life from youth to age ; (3) A short poem called Conscience; and (4) A Translation of the Æneid of Virgil, with the supplemental book of Maphaeus Vegius. To each book a short prologue is prefixed, of which the one before the 12th,
" Where splendid Douglas paints the blooming May,"
is perhaps the finest effort of his muse.
This Translation of Virgil, by which Douglas is best known, is a work of which Scotland will always be proud, as it was the first metrical translation of a classical author made in Britain, and the precursor of many others. Although it is very diffuse, from the difficulty its author had in adapting the Doric language of his country to the purposes of translation, by the same reason it is a work of considerable philological value in tracing the history of the literary language of Scotland. Although Douglas was the first native writer who applied the name " Scottis " to the language he employed, he has Scotticized many Latin words, and imported many expressions from the French ; while his admiration of Chaucer has induced him to avail himself of some of the grammatical forms used by that poet. Still, his translation, written in the broad and widely spread dialect common at an early period to the north of England and Scotland, will always form one of the most important landmarks in Scottish philology. In concluding it Douglas unfortunately took farewell of poetical composition, and entered the arena of political strife, as the following extract shows:—
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Thus vp my pen and instrumentis full yore On Yirgillis post I fix for evirmore. Xeuir from thens syk inatteris to discryue, My muse sail now be clene contemplatiue And solitar as doitli the byrd in cage. Sen fer by worn is all my chyldis age, And of my dayis nerc passit the half date That nature suld me grantyn, wele I wate ; Thus, sen I feill doun sweyand the ballance, Here I resigne vp younkeris obseruance, And wyil direk my labouris euermoir Vnto the commoun welth and Goddis gloir."[1]
Several early MSS. of Douglas s Translation of Virgil exist. One is preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, copied by his amanuensis, Matthew Geddes, from the bishop s own papers. Two are in the library of the university of Edinburgh, and one in that of the marquis of Bath, at Longleat. Of the printed editions one was issued by William Copland at London in 1553, one was printed by Euddiman at Edinburgh in 1711, and one was presented to the members of the Bannatyne Club in 1839. The Palice of Honour was first printed at London by William Copland, without date, but probably in 1553; and an edition, printed by "Johne Eos for Henrie Charteris," appeared at Edin burgh in 1579, of which only two copies are known to exist. This rare edition was reprinted for the Baunatyne Club. The poems called King Hart and Conscience exist in the Maitland MS. in the Pepysian Library, Cambridge. The works of the bishop were first collected and published at Edinburgh in 1874, under the editorship of Mr John Small, with a life prefixed, and a glossary appended.
American statesman, was born at Brandon, in the State of Vermont, on the 23d April 1813. His father, a physician, died when he was still an infant, and in his youth he had to struggle with poverty. He was apprenticed to a cabinet maker, but his health failed, and he quitted the employment after a year and a half. He next studied for three years at the academy of Canandaigua, giving special attention in the latter part of his course to law. In 1833 he went west to seek his fortune, and settled in Jacksonville, Illinois. Here he supported himself for a few months by acting as an auctioneer s clerk and keeping a school. Called to the bar in March 1834, he quickly obtained a large and lucrative practice, and so early as the following year was elected attorney-general of the State. In December 1835 he was elected a member of the legislature; in 1837 he was appointed registrar of the land office at Springfield, and in December 1840 he became secretary of state of Illinois. He was a judge of the supreme court of Illinois from 1841 till November 1843, when he resigned the office in order tc stand a candidate for Congress in the Democratic interest. In 1837 he had failed to secure his return by a minority of 5 in a total vote of 36,000 ; on this occasion he was successful, being elected by a majority of 400. He took an active share in the Oregon controversy, asserting his unalterable determination not to "yield up one inch " of the Territory to Great Britain, and advocating its occupa tion by a military force. He was also a leading promoter of the measures which resulted in the annexation of Texas and in the Mexican war. Being chairman of the Territorial committee at first in Congress and then in the Senate, to which he was elected in March 1847, it fell to him to in troduce the bills for admitting Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and Oregon into the Union, and for organizing the Territories of Minnesota, Oregon, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, Kansas, and Nebraska. On the keenly dis puted question of the permission of slavery in the Territories, Douglas advocated, if he was not the first to promulgate, what came to be known as the " popular sovereignty doctrine," by which each territory was to be left to decide the matter for itself in the same manner as a State. The bill for organizing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which Douglas reported in January 1854, caused great popular excitement, as it repealed the Missouri compromise, and declared the people of " any State or Territory " " free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the constitution of the United States." There was great indignation throughout the free states ; and Douglas, as the chief promoter of the measure, was hanged or burned in effigy in many places. In 1852, and again in 1856, he was a candidate for the presidency in the National Democratic Convention, and though on both occasions he was unsuccessful, he received strong support. In 1857 he distinguished himself by his vigorous opposition to the admission of Kansas into the Union under the Lecompton constitution, which he maintained to be fraudulent. In the following year he wus engaged in a close and very exciting contest for the senatorship with
Abraham Lincoln, who was the Republican candidate. The
- ↑ 1 Works, vol. iv. p. 233. The last two lines occur in tlie Bl. L, ed. of 1553.
