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

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Sylva V: to the most gentle Elizabeth, Queen of England, France, and Ireland

1 The sharp-witted company of poets pay attention to other rulers, when mother Lucina first brought them out into the light of day, or pleasant Hymen placed them on the marriage bed, or the Thracian father a thrust them into grim battle, or Mercury buried them with his hands, or unjust fortune directed their life on some other course, so that their all-consuming rage for versifying can be satisfied by an appropriate inspiration, which hardly afterward will find a theme for virtuous poems in the extant life of kings (which is silent and unpraised in idle luxury, or is conspicuous by its grim ventures). But while I unravel the threads of your life, o queen, a different order of things is born for me; you who conquers the dawn with virtue, and the marriage chamber with chasteness, the menaces of war with peace, and fate with an enduring reputation, and who subjects the wandering wheel of fortune to reason. And you contuinue to disregard worn-out fare from hungry poets, until you bring about nothing other than developed reason, and until you derive a fixed course of life. Yet, unless I am tricked by the image of a false truth, Apollo wants for himself the harvest of a more fertile land, from the holy fields of your heart, but he does not have it. For others have put off their allotted fate for a long time,   [p359] and what fruits have they brought forth in sacred poems. Overflowing with virtues you sow these fruits in an everlasting furrow, if you should have time to raise a life from infancy, and you supply these fruits copiously and constantly. For, just as the laws of the Samian teacher b relate that the celestial orbs are spun in constant harmony, c but indeed that the sharpness of tone is not violated by the slightest rumble, or by variance within itself in any place, nor the constant noise by an interposing quiet: so you, while you allow no pause for piety and justice, and with virtue amiss in no place, strive for true glory on an unchangeable course. Whether from whatever starting point your followers' eulogies may conduct a poem for you, or within whatever boundaries the eulogies erect the poem (so expansive does your field show itself), you blunt the poets' sharpness, and you overwhelm their slender boats with your swollen sea. So I do not seek, o queen, to celebrate you thus; indeed the difficult task frightens off he who attempts it. So, wretched, as if Tantalus in the middle of the stream I fear to taste the river with my little lips, lest my inspiration, overcome by so much water, be found wanting. And that burden bears down upon me more dangerously than fiery Etna: d I who repeatedly produce bespoke poems for every occasion, e even from me you alone take away every opportunity for poetry, you who are the fitting object of my every song. Clearly when first the swift report of our misfortune f struck your ears, although I was far away across the wide expanse of the land, they report that you heard with regret (on account of the savage robbers' sin against the gentle Muses) that a fierce mob carried off across the water the chest stocked with my choice literary works. Yet at the same time a letter from our king g came to you (an outstanding boy, who recalls the glory of his ancestors) which bewailed my many misfortunes, and the fury of the brigands. Here is your splendour, your judgements are given out in a sweet voice, and have been fixed in my innermost heart; the whole library has been instructed to be returned to its original master, and to learn its ultimate origin; the task given to the five Lords h to make good my losses lawfully. And now I understand that the returning of the books to me is owed   [p360] to your splendour, queen, to the conscientiousness of your favourites, to the prince's letter, to those who suffered injustices.

64 Let someone else praise your blessed government of your kingdom, where, with the powers of Europe worn down far and wide in war around your blue sea, neither are you contaminated by the savage anger with which kings assail you, nor do you seize the triumphs presented by a facilitating war. Yet while preferring peaceful leisure to grim war, you enrich your kingdoms through the booty of the raging kings without sword and death. Let others wonder at your girdle, undefiled, without destruction, which at least freedom from Dictynna's precept, i and the riches of the kingdom and your beautiful youth should have undone. Even now, a wondrous thing, it is public concern for your health that holds firm (since you are rather condemned to perpetual maidenhood, and cheated of an offspring for your nation), and not any new edicts of a foreign tyrant that distress the people. All, I say, would wonder greatly at these advantages which are contained in your country, yet deprived in far off lands. It is right for me to wonder at this one woman because of her other glories, and to equate your divinity to the gods above in this regard: that having decided that a simple dignity determine the limits to virtue in your kingdom, you oversee everything far and wide. For also, neither through the sword, nor in the tempest of unjust war (wickedness hateful to the gods, and virtue enchanting, which, in common opinion, is the foremost glory for the rulers of the world), by which your land is surrounded endlessly, just like the ocean, you spread yourself out as mother to all nations. And you make your kingdom a great refuge for all the world, so that in war your native shores lie open to fugitives and exiled foreigners, j just like a safe port for battered ships. Just as if they had feasted upon the fruits of the lotus, k they drink in a long-enduring forgetfulness of their fatherland. And after having become used to your just gods and laws, they declare that in exile their kingdoms have been restored to them.

95 Go now, and lie to the exiles' former lands that Astraea has been received into the heavenly kingdom; and that her followers have looked to their own safety, following justice and faith in similar flight. Now, born from the ancient stock of Brutus, a greater virgin than Astraea rules her own Britons in justice and faith, and with more than   [p361] just laws an unknown race; a race she was able to protect for a long time from her own shore, lest so small a kingdom weaken under the weight of such a burden. For she has preferred to seem inconsiderate of her own nation, than to keep off from her port the exiles who have made for the blessed shores of the English, and to turn them back into the point of an unsheathed sword. And thus you erect for yourself a monument to your eternal glory towering above the structures of the Pyramids and the Nymph, and you make a mark of honour loftier than the tomb of Mausolus. l

110 It will always please me to remember your countenance, o queen, which welcomes foreigners and citizens alike, and you dispense the laws with equal weight to both. Subjected to fortune and snatched from a chasm of anguish with you as liberator, I testify that I have learned these things myself. But since it is not a divine right for me to pay back the rewards of so great an undertaking, the great creator of the universe would have looked upon those rewards with kindly eyes, and he will pay back those pious actions with manifold interest. Without doubt while I live my gratitude for this kindness will never disappear, at least while it is permitted me to read all my writings with my eyes, or (if my eyes dim) to muse over parts from the books, nourishment for my mind. You, princess, will remain stored in my ever-mindful heart, you will be my song, you will be inscribed throughout my writings; and whatever writing will be saved with you as liberator, that will not be sold by me for any money. And lest future generations not be able to remember you, this poem will be stamped on the front of my every book: 'live well, book, who was once seized by a band of robbers, but who is now made very happy through your perils; you whom a queen liberator has allowed to have returned safe, a queen who deserves to endure forever in eternal writings.'