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

  [p376]

A poem of exhortation, to the youth of France on the civil war

1 O youth born amid the wavering tumults of the wars, what are you thinking? What advice are you following while the people rage in a river of kindred blood? Do you thus repeat the madness of your parents, and think that you are compelled to drink down your ancestral vengeful Furies with a libation of milk? a

8See! The madness of the unyielding frame of mind among your parents demands that your character be quickly refined in the blessed arts, beneath the bloom of early youth: more careless for themselves than their offspring, and more mindful of their offspring than themselves, are they who check with an antidote the destruction of the illness assailing their children, and do not lighten the present madness with some hellebore for themselves alone. b

17No, ponder your strength (tender one) and your hands unaccustomed to bitter war, and years unused to hard labour, which the Roman war horn in savage blast demands, even with you far from their camps. But the pliable soil of a capable and budding intellect, and a mind storing up things it has prepared in its mindful fortress, encourages one to explore the very difficult rocks of learning, and to seek out the heights with a firm grasp: and to give service to the sacred name of a harmless Minerva, and nothing to the madness of arms, and nothing to the vigour of your limbs, but instead produce all with the sharp mind of an industrious man.

31With a highly impartial mind, charming youth, consider the soil of your shared nation worn out by unbridled pillage, the rivers stained with purple gore, the fields stagnant with the blood of men, and the corpses in the cities, and such destruction of the sacred churches, and the ruins of houses;   [p377] and consider these things also with a mind wiser than its years: and after you have taken pity on your people and nation who seek your help, and who rely solely upon your direction and fate, may you, as an avenger, pluck their raft from the dreadful-sounding storm, and after it has been removed from the swift open water of war, may you quietly set it, stabilised, in harbour and fix it with anchors. If their ship, dragged under the shipwrecking sea, should succumb, along with the bold passengers, and subject both the people and the homeland to monstrous tempests, do not let yourself, now placed in a watch-tower free from danger (to see it for yourself), be dragged along as sharer in the common ruin by the people. It is right that you alone (young men) provide relief against your slaughter and that of your men: if you subdue hard war with education, and the arms of fighting with the arts c of peace: if you subjugate menace to the Muses, Mars to Minerva, weapons to the toga, cohorts to the choir. Only by this reckoning, o young men so many times blessed, will you save your people and your homeland, and yourself, from falling!

62 Finally, is there anyone who doesn't know how to unite the forces of war beneath the covenant of peace? After an end to the troubles has been brought forth, then does welcome health replace sickness (unless it has been decreed by the Gods that your proud kingdom breaks out in stubborn warfare). But you, stop being bewitched by the unfeeling madness of the present insurrection. And reflect on peace, so that an everlasting grace may be given to you amid the storm, and rest for the kingdom and safety for the people, which from this point on should not be disturbed in any age.

74Now go, please, French youth, born amid the wavering tumults of the wars,   [p378] may you not carry before yourselves the madness of your parents, nor think that you are compelled to drink down your ancestral vengeful Furies with a libation of milk. But if you bear your fathers and yourselves in mind, and the homeland itself, and the succession of future peace, reflect on rest in the middle of wars, on peaceful poetry: poetry, the exceptional honour of peace, poetry, the nourishment of a free mind, poetry, vigilant keeper of works, poetry, a treasure-trove of scanty household gods, and whatever fortune should hold you, poetry with its nurselings will be your faithful companion.