‘At Cross gar cry by open proclamation, Under great pains, that neither he nor she Of haly writ have ony disputation, But letterit men or learnit clerks thereto; For limmer lads and little lasses low Will argue baith with bishops, priests, and frier; To danton this thou has eneuch to do, God give thee grace against this guid new year!’ Mary would probably feel the force of the seventh line of this stanza. With commendable prudence, seeing he was addressing a papist queen, honest Alexander says: ‘With mess nor matins noways will I mell, To judge them justly passes my ingine; They guide nocht ill that governs weel themsel.’ Yet he deems himself at liberty to remark--doubtless suspecting that Mary would not be much displeased--that instead of old idols has now come in another called _Covetice_, under whose auspices, certain persons, while [Sidenote: 1561-2] ‘Singing Sanct David’s psalter on their books,’ are found ‘Rugging and ryving up kirk rents like rooks.’ ‘Protestants,’ he goes on to say, ‘takes the friers’ antetume,[14] Ready receivers, but to render nocht.’ On this Lord Hailes remarks: ‘The reformed clergy expected that the tithes would be applied to charitable uses, to the advancement of learning and the maintenance of the ministry. But the nobility, when they themselves had become the exactors, saw nothing rigorous in the payment of tithes, and derided those _devout imaginations_.’[15] In one verse of his poem, Scott makes pointed allusion to certain prophecies which seemed to assign a brilliant future to Mary: ‘If saws be sooth to shaw thy celsitude, What bairn should brook all Britain by the sea, The prophecy expressly does conclude The French wife of the Bruce’s blood should be: Thou art by line from him the ninth degree, And was King Francis’ perty maik and peer; So by descent the same should spring of thee, By grace of God against this good new year.’ The poet here undoubtedly had in view a prediction which occurs in a rude metrical tract printed at Edinburgh by Robert Waldegrave in 1603, under the title, ‘The Whole Prophesies of Scotland, England, and somepart of France and Denmark, prophesied by mervellous Merling, Beid, Bertlingtoun, Thomas Rymour, Waldhave, &c., all according in one.’[16] These so-called prophecies are unintelligible rhapsodies about lions, dragons, foumarts, conflicts of knights, of armies, and of navies--how there should be fighting on a moor beside a cross, till by the multitude of slain the crow should not find where the cross stood--how the dead shall rise, ‘and that shall be wonder’--how ‘When the man in the moon is most in his might, Then shall Dunbarton turn up that is down, And the mouth of Arran both at one time, And the lord with the lucken hand his life shall he lose--’ and much more of the like kind. [Sidenote: 1561-2.]