The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume II. The End of the Middle Ages.
§ 13. Love Poetry; Tayis Bank
In all these pieces the literary interest yields to the historical and anitquarian: but in the love poems and lyrics it is of more account. Some of these are hardly inferior to the known work of Alexander Scott and others represented in these collecitons; and they may, indeed, prove to be theirs. The love lay Tayis Bank, in the common ballad measure, arranged in eight-lined stanzas, is curiously deliberate in its mixture of the alliterative and aureate styles. The “mansuet Mergrit, this perle polist most quhyt,” who is the object of the poet’s admiration, has been identified with Margaret Drummond, the mistress of James IV before his marriage with Margaret Tudor. The nature-setting, though happy, is conventional; and the poet’s praise of the lady is always ceremonious and distant.