[2] Included in Dalzell’s _Scotish Poems of the XVIth Century_, Edin. 1801, and reprinted in 1868. The following opening lines afford a specimen of the adaptation of a “prophaine sang”:--
Quho is at my windo? who? who? Goe from my windo; goe, goe: Quha calles there, so like ane stranger? Goe from my windo, goe.
Lord, I am heir, ane wratched mortall That for thy mercie dois crie and call Vnto thee, my Lord Celestiall. See who is at my window, who.
There was in the air, besides, another depressing influence which must not be overlooked.
Simultaneously with the dawn of the Reformation the Scottish language began to decay. The causes of this decay are sufficiently ascertained.[3] For the first forty years of the Reformation movement there was no translation of the Scriptures into the northern dialect. The copies used were obtained from England. Carried everywhere by the popular wave, the English book, as it was called, must by itself have done much to change the tongue of the country. Further, as the Catholic party in Scotland naturally looked for support to the ancient alliance with Catholic France, the adherents of Protestantism were forced into intimate relations and constant communication with Protestant England. In the works of Sir David Lyndsay, the earliest poet of the new period, the influence of this connection is seen taking effect, English forms of words, like _go_, _also_, and _one_, constantly taking the place of the mediæval Scottish. John Knox was a greater innovator than Lyndsay in this respect; and the deterioration went steadily on until, shortly after the close of the century, the _coup de grâce_ was given to the tongue by the transference of James VI. and his court to England. Upon that event Lowland Scottish went out of favour, and practically ceased to be a literary language.[4]
[3] The influences which went to fashion and to disintegrate the speech of the North are very clearly and systematically traced in Dr. J. A. H. Murray’s introduction to his _Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland_, London, 1873.
[4] Dr. Murray in a note (p. 71) upon the dialect of Scottish poets of the modern period remarks, “‘Scots wha hae’ is _fancy_ Scotch--that is, it is merely the English ‘Scots who have,’ spelled as Scotch. Barbour would have written ‘Scottis at hes’; Dunbar or Douglas, ‘Scottis quhilkis hes’; and even Henry Charteris, in the end of the sixteenth century, ‘Scottis quha hes.’”