There are also various sarcastic allusions to syphilis by the Scottish poets of these early days, amply testifying to the fact of its rapid diffusion both among the followers of the court—who were then the most common objects of poetical satire—and among the community at large. William Dunbar, the flower of the old Scottish poets, was, at the period of the first introduction of syphilis in 1497, in the prime of manhood; and in two or three years afterwards, viz. in 1500, he was attached to James IV. and his court by an annual state pension. In a number of verses addressed to his patroness, Margaret, the Queen of James IV. and the sister of Henry VIII.—verses which appear to us at the present day, and with our existing standards of taste, as utterly degraded and indecent—Dunbar commemorates the communication of the new disease under the name of the “pockis” and the “Spanyie pokis,” to the Queen’s men (as he terms them) during the jollities of Fastern’s e’en, and the reign of the Abbot of Unreason; and he closes his stanzas with an earnest advice to all youths, to “Be ware with that perrelous play That men callis libbing of the Pockis.”[607] The after effects and consequences of the disease he describes as follows:— “Sum that war ryatouss as rammis, Ar now maid tame lyk ony lammis, And settin doun lyk scarye crockis, And hes forsaikin all sic gammis That men call libbing of the Pockis.” “Sum thocht thame selffis stark lyk gyandis, Ar now maid weak lyk willow wandis, With schinnis scharp, and small lyk rockis, And gottin thair bak in bayth thair handis, For ower oft libbing of the Pockis.” Another and later poet of that age, Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, alludes to the occurrence of syphilis at the Christmas feasts in an inferior officer of the court—viz. in John Mackrery, the king’s “fule,” or royal jester, who, according to the poet—like many a poor fool since John’s time—did “In his maist triumphand gloir For his reward get the Grandgoir.”[608] The same author includes this disease elsewhere (p. 147) among the maladies “Quhilk humane nature dois abhor, As in the Gut, Gravel, and Gor.” A metrical translation of Hector Boece’s _History of Scotland_ was made in the earlier half of the sixteenth century, apparently by command of James V. It has been published for the first time, within the last two years, under the authority and direction of the Master of the Rolls. The author of this rhyming _Buik of the Chronicles of Scotland_, William Stewart, when translating Boece’s account of the fatal disease produced in the old mythical Scotch king, Ferquhard, by the bite of a wolf, tells us (vol. ii. p. 313) that the resulting gangrenous wound defied the skill of the leiches, and the fœtor of it, and its discharges were “Moir horribill als that time for till abhor, No canker, fester, gut, or yit Grandgor.”