Bridging the Continental divide: neo-Latin and its cultural role in Jacobean Scotland, as seen in the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (1637)

Melville contributed five prefatory poems to George Buchanan's Rerum Scoticarum historia, auctore Georgio Buchanano Scoto (Edinburgh, 1582), and helped Buchanan to complete revisions to the text and see it through the press. He even dissuaded the printer, Alexander Arbuthnett, from withdrawing from the project over his fears that the comments on Mary's adulterous relationship with David Riccio were treasonous (see Mason and Smith, pp. xlii-xlv). Three of Melville's epigrams are reproduced in the DPS (this poem and the two that form d2_MelA_034). This poem emphasises the value of the Historia as an example of the 'mirror for princes' genre, advice manuals which were intended to serve as a source of advice and encouragement to royalty (in this case to the young King James VI), while the other two show Melville's high regard for Buchanan's literary abilities. Interestingly, the two poems left out of the DPS both praise the Historia's stark portrayal of examples of tyranny through the ages among the Scottish kings (they begin 'Qui Regi pia iura, et legum frena Tyranno' and 'Si Regi placuisse est discipluisse Tyranno'), perhaps suggesting a conscious effort on the part of the editors to avoid any association with Buchanan's radical views of tyrannicide and elective monarchy, while still showcasing poems that praised his immense talents as a writer. Metre: elegiac couplets.