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

  [p223]

A plaintive poem to the Parisian Senate

1Even now an unassailed disregard of the ancient laws still roams the land, and even good faith has been violated with respect for neither honesty or justice, so that beneath Helicon itself a hawker of power snatches the Aonian offices a and the esteemed accolades of the French-born Goddesses which are always set aside for virtue; and infamous corruption also snatches them from the field of honours; and the decrees of the Senate and the Roman father lie neglected, and no acclamation exists for the worthy. Thus has corruption ruined the noble arts; and poor honesty is trampled under foot. Now behold upon whom the venerable fathers have bestowed the robe of Socratic honour, so that no one is permitted to be re-elected in the folds of the purple toga, and re-election in offices have been forbidden.  [p224]He affects the oaths with perjured assurance. And having acquired power for himself, he violates every right across the Senate's law and traditions. Neither the venerable decree of the Roman magistracy, nor the commands of this sacred order, nor the laws that the Academy has so often instituted, have moved in any way this man (puffed up, as he is, with the power of his stolen toga) from not despising with a deaf ear the voices of those shouting for the laws to be suspended.

22And we have been moved to fury at this deed, those of us whom, roused out of their native homes, the North-Western wind drove from the North (where Britain, not cut off from the rest of the world, and fertile Ireland, and the Orkneys with its scant darkness in summer, and Thule b not now the last place on earth, are surrounded by the waters of the Ocean), and also those of us whom the Thracian North-East wind (where the Rhine, which must be piled high and wide with its tributary waters, extends itself in its rushing tide, and the Elbe rolls along in clear-blue waters, and the Vistula bathes the Finns, and the Danube falls into the Black Sea) drove to this Athens, and whom the zeal for the Muses and Parisian Delphi under first light rewarded with tribute (though Paris did not forget her own citizens) and enlarged with titles and honours: behold we bewail that a trick has been played on your decrees through a still-present fraud, that civilised laws are stripped, c that faith in the laws are undone, that right is gone, and that the honour of the Senate grows weak after having been subjected to bribery.

39Therefore, you lawmakers, you guardians of right, you senatorial fathers, we impore you, and also you, the nourishing sisters who care for the holy temples of Themis, d return to us, and let an age unfamiliar with wickedness return. Then with bribery finally overcome and put to one side, we pray that fraud may yield to ancient fidelity, and the justice which you gave us may remain immovable with you as its champions.