In the general scorn and neglect by modern literary scholars of the entire area in English literature between Chaucer and Spenser, few poets have fared so ill as the sixteenth-century Scottish Chaucerian Gavin Douglas. To be sure, his name appears frequently enough in histories of literature, and occasionally in studies of Chaucer, or Surrey, or Henryson, Lindsay, Dunbar. But one suspects that Douglas has less often been carefully and sympathetically read than he has been hustled into a dusty place of honor by conventional encomium, or relegated to the ranks of the inconsiderable on the ground that he is a mere “Chaucerian,” a petty tracer of his master's matchless strokes.