John Skelton, a satirist of the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, has preserved three Latin hexameters in which a Scottish scholar, George Dundas, at one time a professor at the University of Aberdeen, scoffs at the English in the familiar way, by alluding to their tails. The Englishman himself, after the battle of Flodden, had written against the Scots, with the scurrility which characterized him and which made him obnoxious even to his own countrymen; and it seems probable that Dundas's lines occurred in a poem written as a retort. The only connection between them, however, consists in the repetition of the same idea in a slightly different form; and it is hardly possible to assume that they stood together, and are to be taken as an epigram. It may also be noted that the first of them is almost identical with one that is known to have been current at a much earlier date: "An Englishman's a dog, because we find That, like a dog he bears a tail behind". "Thou English 'tailard', hold thy tail with care, For fear it drop from thee, at unaware." "By reason of their tails, the English race Must bear about a burden of disgrace."[335] In whatever connection the lines may have appeared, they provoked "the noble poet Skelton", as he styles himself, to a reply which has for its heading the statement that, "The most vile Scot, Dundas, alleges that Englishmen have tails". Apostrophizing him as a "shameless, noxious, foul-mouthed, lying Scot", he asks him how he dares utter such a slander. Then, dropping into macaronic verses, he adorns them with such flowers of vituperation as these: This Dundas, This Scottishe as, He rymes and railes That Englishmen have tailes. Skelton Laureat After this rate Defendeth with his pen All Englishmen Agayn Dundas The Scottishe as. Shake thy tayle, Scot, like a cur, For thou beggest at every mannes dur. Tut, Scot, I sey, Go, shake the, dog, hey! Dundas of Galaway With thy versyfyeng rayles How they have tayles.[336] Though recalled, some half a century later, by the insulting piece of by-play which it suggested to Mary Stuart's French courtiers, and at which, as we have already recorded, Hatton and his countrymen waxed so wroth, the "tailard" taunt is not again heard in the story of the old feud between England and Scotland. From the sixteenth century to its final disappearance from use and even from memory, it seems to have remained as exclusively French as it doubtless was in its origin. PART II