Lyndsay, or LINDSAY, SIR DAVID, OF THE MOUNT, one of the best, and long the most popular of the older Scottish poets, was the son of David Lyndsay of Garmynton (now Garleton), in East Lothian, whose grandfather was a son of Sir William Lyndsay of the Byres. The poet is said by Chalmers to have been born at the Mount about the year 1490, but Laing in his recent edition of Lyndsay (1879) notes the absence of evidence on this point, Chalmers having apparently assumed it as a consequence of his supposition that the poet's father was 'David Lyndsay of the Mountht,' while Laing has shown that this was the poet's grandfather. The name of 'Da. Lindesay' occurs in the list of 'incorporated' students in St Salvator's College, St Andrews, for the year 1508 or 1509. It may be that of the poet. We cannot tell when he entered the royal service, but in October 1511 he is found taking part in a play acted before the court of James IV. In the following spring he was appointed 'keeper' or 'usher' of the prince who, when little more than a twelvemonth old, became James V.; and his verses preserve some pleasing traces of the care and affection with which he tended the king's infant years. His wife, Janet Douglas, had long the charge of the royal apparel. In 1524 the court fell under the power of the queen-mother and the Douglasses, and Lyndsay lost his place; but four years afterwards, when the Douglasses were overthrown, Lyndsay was made Lyon King-of-arms, and at the same time received the honour of knighthood. In this capacity he accompanied embassies to the courts of England, France, Spain, and Denmark. He appears to have represented Cupar in the parliaments of 1542 and 1543; and he was present at St Andrews in 1547 when the followers of the reformed faith called Knox to take upon himself the office of a public preacher. He died childless before the summer of 1555.
Two editions of Lyndsay's poems were published in France in 1558; and these editions, with a few pieces added, were republished by Charteris, an Edinburgh bookseller, in 1568. Numerous editions appeared subsequently, indicating the great popularity which Lyndsay long enjoyed. For fully two centuries, indeed, he was what Burns has since become—the poet of the Scottish people. His works were in almost every house, his verses on almost every tongue. Like Burns, he owed part of his popularity no doubt to his complete mastery of the popular speech. But, like Burns, Lyndsay would have been read in whatever language he chose to write. His verses show few marks of the highest poetical power, but their merits otherwise are great. Their fancy is scarcely less genial than their humour, and they are full of good sense, varied learning, and knowledge of the world. They are valuable now, if for nothing else than their vivid pictures of manners and feelings. In the poet's own day they served a political purpose, by preparing the way for the great revolution of the 16th century. It has been said that the verses of Lyndsay did more for the Reformation in Scotland than all the sermons of Knox. Like Burns, Lyndsay shot some of his sharpest shafts at the clergy. The licentiousness that characterises his verse must be attributed in part to the age in which he lived. The earliest and most poetical of his writings is The Dreme; the most ambitious, The Monarchie; the most remarkable in his own day, perhaps, was The Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis; but that which is now read with most pleasure, both for the charm of its subject and for its freedom from the allegorical fashion of the time, is The Historie of Squer Meldrum. A good edition of Lyndsay's works is that of Chalmers (3 vols. Lond. 1806); but in points of detail it is less accurate than that of David Laing (3 vols. 1879). A number of his poems have been edited by J. Small and F. Hall for the Early English Text Society (4 parts, 1865-71); and the Scottish Text Society have undertaken a new edition.