Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Philotus; a comedy / Reprinted from the edition of Robert Charteris. Source: Wellcome Collection.
14/108 page 2
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Philotus; a comedy / Reprinted from the edition of Robert Charteris. Source: Wellcome Collection.
![On evidence equally doubtful, several writers have represented this poet as a Scotish peer.1 The evidence indeed amounts to lit- tle more than this :—the fourth Lord Semple bore the same name, and after the year 1570 the poet changed his signature to Semple. The identity of the name is itself a very slender proof, and requires no particular consideration. In Bannatyne’s MS. he appears as Semple, without the addition of his Christian name ; but if this circumstance is to be admitted as evidence, Dunbar, Henryson, Scott, and various other poets may in the same manner be elevated to the dignity of the peerage. Lord Semple succeeded his grand- father in 1572,2 and the manuscript was written in 1568 : it is evi- dent that at this latter date Robert Semple was not a peer, though we find him here mentioned by his surname. In the Legend of the Bishop of Sanctandrois Lyfe, which, as it mentions Adamson’s journey to London, must have been written so late as the year 1583, the author describes himself by his initials R. S. It is ad- mitted that Lord Semple continued to profess the popish religion ; but the poems of Robert Semple contain the most unequivocal proofs of having been written by a protestant, and the Legend was manifestly written by a zealous presbyterian. According to 1 Sibbald’s Chronicle of Scottish Poetry, vol. iii. p. 397. Preface to Semple’s Sege of the Castel of Edinburgh. [Lond. 1813] 4to. Motherwell’s Essay on the Poets of Renfrewshire (p. xvii.) prefixed to the Harp of Renfrewshire. Paisley, 1819, 12mo.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22006679_0014.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
