^■^^^^^^nH^K^HM^^H 
 
 
 LJL1. 
 
 M OLIPHANT 
 SMEATON 
 
 FAMOUS 
 
 •SCOTS* 
 ♦SERIES'
 
 : 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 JAMES J. MC BRIDE
 
 /, 
 
 *K 
 
 

 
 / /
 
 \ 
 
 WILLIAM 
 DUNBAR
 
 FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES 
 
 The following Volumes are now ready : — 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson. 
 
 ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton. 
 
 HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Lease:. 
 ^ JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes. 
 
 ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun. 
 
 THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie. 
 
 RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless. 
 
 SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson. 
 
 THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden Blaikie. 
 
 JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask. 
 
 TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By Oliphant Smeaton. 
 _- FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond. 
 
 THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir George Douglas. 
 
 NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood. 
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury. 
 „ — KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis A. Barbe\ 
 
 ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart. 
 
 JAMES THOMSON. By William Bayne. 
 
 MUNGO PARK. By T. Banks Maclachlan. 
 
 DAVID HUME. By Professor Calderwood. 
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR: By Oliphant Smeaton.
 
 WILLIAM 
 DUNBAR 
 
 BY 
 OLIPHANT I 
 I SMEATON O 
 
 FAMOUS 
 
 scots: 
 
 SERIE5 
 
 PUBLISHED BV : 
 CHARLES »V*<i» 
 
 scribners sons 
 
 Ki&T NEW YORK
 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The present Life of Dunbar is an attempt to place before 
 the reader in a popular form the facts in the life of one of 
 Scotland's greatest sons, who has by no means received the 
 attention either his genius or his achievements merited. 
 Being a popular sketch, therefore, in a popular series, I 
 have purposely avoided, as far as possible, the discussion 
 of recondite controversial topics, and the introduction of 
 dry disquisitions on obscure points of diction or on matters 
 which possess an interest merely antiquarian. I have also 
 slightly modernised the archaic spelling of the extracts I 
 have had occasion to quote, so that the general reader 
 might be able to follow without difficulty the sense of the 
 text. 
 
 Besides Sheriff Mackay, to whom I have confessed my 
 obligations elsewhere, I must return thanks to my friend 
 Dr. A. B. Grosart, whose pricelessly valuable volumes on 
 sixteenth and seventeenth century literature have been 
 of immense service ; also to Mr. W. Keith Leask, M.A., 
 for kindly revising the proofs, and for the suggestion of 
 many valuable emendations. 
 
 OLIPHANT SMEATON. 
 
 Edinburgh, April 1898. 
 
 712529
 
 TO 
 
 SHERIFF .ENEAS J. G. MACKAY 
 
 AND 
 
 DR. J. SCHIPPER 
 
 (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA) 
 
 BY WHOSE LABOURS 
 OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE POETRY OF 
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 
 
 HAS BEEN INCREASED 
 THIS LITTLE VOLUME IS INSCRIBED BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Scotland's Golden Age 9 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 Birth : Parentage and Early Years .... 23 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Life as a Friar : Disgust with Clericalism . . 35 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 Early Years of State Service 43 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 The Epoch of the 'Flyting' 58 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Epoch of the King's Marriage : Dunbar as a 
 
 Courtier in England 68 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Celebration of the Marriage : Dunbar's Epitha- 
 
 lamium 79
 
 8 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 At the brilliant Court of Scotland's ' Merry Mon- 
 arch' 91 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 The Years immediately preceding Flodden . . 101 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 The Dark Days of Flodden no 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 Dunbar as an Allegorist and Satirist . . .124 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 Dunbar as a Love-Poet and Elegist .... 141 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 Dunbar as a Painter of Contemporary Manners — as 
 
 a Didactic or Religious Poet — Conclusion . . 150 
 
 Index 157
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 
 AND HIS TIMES 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Scotland's golden age 
 
 A short, rather rotund figure, a face rudely and stamped 
 with evidences of the love of good cheer; eyes small, 
 beady, and dark, twinkling at times with an ever-present 
 sense of the humorous side of life, then anon blazing with 
 a fierce, contemptuouss corn of meanness, hypocrisy, and 
 injustice ; a tongue as mellifluous in speech as his to whom 
 was given the title ' Golden Mouth,' yet betimes capable 
 of a sardonic sarcasm that burned like an acid where it 
 lighted, — such is the portrait that has come down to us 
 from various sources of that mighty genius, who, though, 
 alas ! all too little known among us of these latter days, 
 has yet been adjudged by many of our most competent 
 English critics to be the peer, if not in a few qualities the 
 superior, of Chaucer and Spenser. 
 
 But William Dunbar, great though he was in his day, 
 was not the only star that gleamed in the Scots literary 
 firmament. The age was favourable to the fostering of 
 literature and art, because a ruler occupied the throne
 
 io FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 whose instincts were all towards culture and refinement. 
 For the first decade of the sixteenth century, and onwards 
 until that fatal September 9, 15 13 saw the defeat and 
 death, on the terrible field of Flodden, of the greatest of 
 the Stuarts, was a veritable ' golden age ' in early Scottish 
 literature. The country, at peace during the long reign 
 of James iv., had been steadily increasing in wealth and 
 civilisation. The King, undoubtedly the ablest adminis- 
 trator of his dynasty, to whom the sobriquet of 'the 
 Merry Monarch ' was much more appropriately applicable 
 than to his descendant Charles 11., was at the height 
 of his popularity. The country was prosperous, and its 
 prosperity exercised a reflex influence on the intellectual 
 character of the people. From Inverness to the Tweed, 
 Scotland lay at its ruler's feet, in a measure never equalled 
 during the reign of any of his predecessors. The High- 
 lands and the Islands also were overawed by the martial 
 attitude of him who, if first in joust and sword-play and 
 in all the manly sports of the period, yet could strike 
 swiftly and strongly when need arose. 
 
 Never had the Scottish Court been so brilliant as during 
 his reign. The nobles, attracted from their gloomy castles 
 and peels to the capital — the haughty Earls of Angus and 
 of Mar, the Earls Crawford, Morton, Argyle, Athole, 
 Lennox, Errol, and Caithness, the Lords Elphinstone, 
 Forbes, Ross, Sinclair, and Maxwell — they with their fair 
 dames, along with many other lords and gentlemen, main- 
 tained a style almost regal in its magnificence, and caused 
 the Scottish Court to rank as one of the most brilliant in 
 Europe during that period.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR n 
 
 The King himself also was a man with but few peers 
 among his royal brethren of the age. While fully capable 
 of maintaining all the dignity of his position when occasion 
 demanded, he loved to escape from the formality of the 
 Court, and, like his son after him, to wander in disguise 
 throughout his kingdom, learning, as did Haroun Alra- 
 schid, the habits and customs of his humblest subjects, 
 and becoming familiar with their grievances. 
 
 Scottish trade was quadrupled during his reign, when, 
 as Pitscottie tells us, ' there was great plenty for man and 
 beast.' He it was also who first created a fleet to guard 
 his country's commerce and fisheries. Hill Burton in his 
 picturesque survey of the reign, says : ' King James took 
 a deep personal interest in the progress of a shipping force, 
 and felt great delight in visiting the shipping-yards, and 
 encouraging inventions and projects in shipbuilding.' Sir 
 Andrew Wood of Largo, and Sir Andrew Barton, in the 
 Yellow Caravel and the Great Michael, were notable sea- 
 captains in his reign, while the Scottish flag was respected 
 in all waters. 
 
 The influence of the Renaissance, however, had ex- 
 tended north of the Tweed. The bonds of clerical 
 intolerance and quibbling scholasticism had been burst. 
 The treasures of Greece and of Rome (or, at least, their 
 influence), which the industry of the great Oxford scholars, 
 Grocyn, Linacre, Colet, and with them Erasmus, was un- 
 locking for Englishmen, after the downfall of Constanti- 
 nople scattered Byzantine illuminati over Europe, had 
 been brought north to the three existing Scottish Univer- 
 sities — St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. Nay, there
 
 iz FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 is even a tradition, according to the late Professor Morley, 
 that the great Erasmus himself had paid a visit to the 
 Court of this munificent patron of learning. 
 
 But of all the boons James iv. conferred on his country, 
 the greatest undoubtedly was the encouragement he ex- 
 tended to Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar, burgesses 
 of Edinburgh, who first introduced printing into Scotland. 
 The monarch granted them a patent to exercise their art. 
 The wonder excited by the new art was intense. By the 
 common people, nay, even by many of the more ignorant 
 parochial clergy, the invention was characterised as simply 
 a device of the Evil One to do away with the production 
 of books within the sacred seclusion of the monastic 
 Scriptoria. One parish priest in Fife is reported to have 
 warned his flock never to open these printed books, 
 otherwise the evil spirits that were residing in each letter 
 of the volume would take possession of them. Not only, 
 however, did James give Chepman and Myllar this patent, 
 but he bought up the books as they were issued from the 
 press, and bestowed on the printers many a goodly gift in 
 money to keep the types a-moving. Thus the benefits of 
 the new learning were diffused among the people of Scot- 
 land just at the auspicious moment when their minds were 
 ready for the reception of the seeds of culture. 
 
 At the Court of the fourth James, where all learning 
 was so nobly patronised, no branch of literature was more 
 warmly encouraged than poetry. The sunshine of the 
 royal countenance and approval fostered the genius of a 
 crowd of singers in whom the poetic inspiration was 
 genuinely present. No Court gathering at Holyrood,
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 13 
 
 Linlithgow, Perth, or Dunfermline was esteemed complete 
 unless some one of the poets most in repute had com- 
 posed an ode to be sung by the King's minstrels. The 
 ruffling gallants in slashed doublets and crimson hose, 
 with their gold chains and jewelled hunting-horns, to whom 
 the embellishment of their person was the sole aim in life, 
 had to give place in the esteem of the ' Merry Monarch ' 
 to the humble ' Makar,' whose quaintly sweet songs were 
 the delight of himself and the fair ladies of his Court. 
 Those were the golden days of Scotland's prosperity, when 
 bluff King Hal and merry King Jamie were attached to 
 one another by ties of friendship as real as they seemed 
 enduring. Alas, that 'a woman's gage of love,' and she 
 'a false fair of France,' should have had power to shatter 
 prospects so promising ! 
 
 But while the century was yet young, and immediately 
 subsequent to his marriage with Margaret of England in 
 1502, all was peaceful and prosperous. Then it was that 
 at each courtly function four notable figures might have 
 been observed, each concentrating upon himself a degree 
 of attention only bestowed otherwise upon the King and 
 the more important nobles of the realm. Yonder is the 
 eldest of the quartette, a man of noble presence, but on 
 whom the burden of a mighty weight of years lies heavily. 
 Though attired in semi-clerical garb, his long silvery beard 
 and flowing hoary locks proclaim that he is attached to 
 the strict rule of none of the leading Orders in Scotland. 
 But in good sooth the simple black robe of the scholar at 
 the Court of James iv. will win him more regard than a 
 canon's cope or the bishop's rochet. 'That is Robert
 
 i 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Henryson, 1 preceptor in the Benedictine convent at Dun- 
 fermline,' whispers one in the crowd, and we know that in 
 spirit we stand beside the father of Scottish pastoral poetry 
 who in Robene and Makyne produced a piece wherein we 
 breathe the natural atmosphere of woodland life, free 
 from all the extravagances of impossible shepherds and 
 shepherdesses. Who has not that glorious opening stanza 
 in his mind, beginning 
 
 ' Robene sat on a good green hill 
 Keeping ane flok of se [sheep],' etc. ?— 
 
 a passage which smacks so thoroughly of 
 
 1 Flora and the country green, 
 Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth.' 
 
 Born in or near Dunfermline, Henryson appears to have 
 spent all his days as a schoolmaster in his native town, 
 and died at a patriarchal old age within sight and sound 
 of the bells he had listened to in childhood. To great 
 skill in versification and imaginative wealth, he unites a 
 power of vigorous and incisive thinking surpassed by none 
 of his contemporaries. His Testament of Faire Creseide, 
 the Abbaye Walk, the Bhidy Serk, and the Garment of 
 Glide Ladyis are poems of a very high order of excellence, 
 which deserve to be much better known than at present 
 they are. While he cannot rival Dunbar in the vigour 
 and picturesqueness of his poetic vocabulary, or Gavin 
 Douglas in keenness of spiritual vision, he equals either 
 
 1 The general consensus of opinion places Henryson's death in the year 
 1498 ; a few authorities are inclined to think he lived until 1503. I have 
 here adopted the latter hypothesis merely for the sake of being able to 
 group the four great poets of the reign conveniently together at an 
 imaginary Court function.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 15 
 
 in the almost photographic fidelity of those reproductions 
 of the life of the period wherewith his poems are replete. 
 
 In the immediate company of the King and his youthful 
 Queen, whom he is endeavouring to amuse with some 
 brilliant sallies of wit that keep his auditors in a simmer 
 of merriment, is a short, rotund, ruddy-visaged man, whose 
 dress is so rich and unclerical that, were it not for 'his 
 shaveling pate,' we would set him down as 'ane lord of 
 hie degre.' This second laureate of the Court is reciting 
 the stanzas of a poem he has composed on ' Ane Daunce 
 in the Quene's Chaulmer,' which tickles the risible faculties 
 of the two royal personages so persistently that at length 
 James is obliged to cry, ' Hold ye, William Dunbar j by 'r 
 Ladye, but I '11 have to get ye some fat benefice in the 
 country to save our sides.' From which remark we glean 
 the fact that the jolly priest is none other than the great 
 author of The Golden Targe, The Merle and the Night- 
 ingale, The Thistle and the Rose, and the terrible Flyting 
 between Dunbar and Kemiedy. 
 
 But who is that tall, gaunt individual who watches 
 Dunbar's efforts to amuse the King and Queen with a 
 sort of sorrowful pity, as though he were grieved to behold 
 the greatest genius of the Northland condescending to 
 play the fool? Attired in the simple black robe of the 
 scholar, with a skull-cap covering his head where the 
 grizzled locks have yielded to the scythe of Time, he 
 seems one with whom the years have dealt hardly. 
 Presently attention is directed towards him by Dunbar 
 appealing to him as 'gude Maister Walter Kennedy,' to 
 settle some playful dispute between the 'Merry Monarch'
 
 1 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 and his ' Laureate,' as James was wont to style the author 
 of The Golden Targe. From the reference we recognise 
 the fact that the arbiter selected is no other than Dunbar's 
 great poetic rival and lifelong friend, with whom he carried 
 on a sportive metrical warfare akin to the jeu parti of 
 early Provencal poetry, or to that war in verse between 
 the two great Italian poets, Luigi Pulci and Matteo Franco. 
 As in the case of the Florentine rivals so in the Scottish, 
 the ' Flyting,' though carried on with great apparent bitter- 
 ness, caused no diminution in the friendship existing 
 between Kennedy and Dunbar. 
 
 Had the opposite been true, the latter in his solemn 
 Lament for the Makars would scarcely have written of his 
 antagonist, then lying sick apparently unto death — 
 
 ' Gude Maister Walter Kennedy 
 In point of deid lies verily, 
 Great ruth it were that so suld be, 
 Timor mortis conturbat me.' 
 
 Walter Kennedy, who ranks only second to Dunbar as 
 one of Scotland's greatest poets, was the sixth son of 
 Lord Kennedy of Cassillis and Dunure, in Ayrshire. Born 
 about the same time as his friend and rival, and educated 
 for the Church, he was appointed Provost of Maybole, 
 the patronage of which collegiate church was in the hands 
 of his own family, who had founded it. He cannot have 
 held this preferment long, probably it was only a temporary 
 appointment, for when he wrote the Flyting he was 
 deputy-clerk of Carrick, which, as Paterson states, he 
 held under his brother David, Earl of Cassillis. In 1510 
 he is mentioned in a deed as Vicar of Douglas. In the
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 17 
 
 following year he held some appointment in connection 
 with the College of Glasgow, and acquired the property 
 of Glentig. In his worldly circumstances he seems to 
 have been as prosperous and comfortable as Dunbar was 
 unhappy. 
 
 As a poet one of Kennedy's chief excellences is his 
 unrivalled power of word-painting, for which he is warmly 
 eulogised by Sir David Lyndsay in the prologue to the 
 Complaynt of the Papyngo — 
 
 ' For quho can now the workis countrafait 
 Of Kennedie with termes aureait ? ' 
 
 And the same author affords a very apt testimony to the 
 estimation wherein Kennedy was held in his day by the 
 following lines — 
 
 ' Get he into the courte auctoritie, 
 He will precell Quintyn and Kennedie.' 
 
 Alas ! with the exception of his share in the Flyting, 
 his religious poem The Passion of Christ, his Invective 
 against Mouththankkss, and his Prais of Aige, all his 
 works have perished, although we learn from contemporary 
 testimony he was quite as voluminous an author as Dunbar. 
 That he was high in favour with James iv. and his Queen, 
 and was moreover regarded as one of the representative 
 poets of the age, is manifest from many existing evidences. 
 His brother -poet Gavin Douglas ranked him above 
 Dunbar, but the critical estimate of the hot-headed 
 Bishop of Dunkeld is scarcely to be accepted save cum 
 grano salis, seeing that the author of the Thistle and the 
 Rose and he were at times not on very friendly terms. So 
 
 B
 
 18 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 much so was this the case that Dunbar makes no mention 
 of Gavin amongst the ' Makars ' of his time. But the man 
 of whom the gifted Bishop of Dunkeld could write in his 
 Palice of Honotir as ' Greit Kennedie' must have left the 
 impress of his genius on the age in a very marked degree 
 to have deserved such a distinguishing adjective. 
 
 Though he did not possess the many-sided mind so 
 characteristic of Dunbar, though he was undoubtedly 
 inferior to the latter in that masculine vigour of the un- 
 derstanding and in sheer fertility of imagination, Kennedy 
 was incomparably a greater artist than his friend and 
 rival. Relatively speaking, he occupied the position of 
 Pope to Dryden in the hierarchy of genius. ' The Prais 
 oj Aige gives a favourable idea of Kennedy as a versifier,' 
 says Lord Hailes ; ' his lines are more polished than those 
 of any of his contemporaries.' As a satirist he was 
 inferior to Dunbar in piquancy, aptness of allusion, and 
 mordant vitriolic sarcasm. But his views of life were more 
 genial and more instinct with cheery bonhomie. While 
 Dunbar resembled Juvenal, Kennedy rather owned Horace 
 as master. Hence he was more of a humorist than a wit. 
 In pathos also he exhibits a tenderer and more genuinely 
 sympathetic touch than his friend, although he never reached 
 the high-water mark of The Lament for the Makars. 
 
 But who is he that comes yonder, attended by quite a 
 retinue of friends? — a young man of a singularly hand- 
 some exterior, which his plain clerical garb cannot conceal. 
 At once he becomes the cynosure of neighbouring eyes. 
 The Queen greets him with marked favour, and he replies 
 to her remarks with courtly grace. The buzz of the
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 19 
 
 whispering crowd conveys the intelligence. The new- 
 comer is Gavin Douglas, in the future to become Bishop 
 of Dunkeld, but as yet only Rector of Prestonkirk and 
 Provost of the Collegiate Church of St. Giles. As a scion 
 of the all but princely House of Douglas, however, and the 
 author of a poem still circulating in manuscript, called 
 The Palice of Honour, he was nattered and caressed by 
 all the leading courtiers of the time. Born in 1474, the 
 third son of the great Earl of Angus, ' Archibald Bell-the- 
 Cat,' young Gavin graduated in St. Andrews, then went 
 abroad to study at Paris. On returning he commenced 
 work as a priest, and having dedicated his poem to 
 the King, was appointed by him Provost of St. Giles. 
 After Flodden his troubles began. The marriage of his 
 nephew with the widowed Queen blew into flame the 
 jealousy of all the remaining Scots nobility against the 
 Douglases. On Gavin a share of their malice fell. A 
 vacancy occurred in the Archbishopric of St. Andrews, 
 and the Queen appointed the poet to the primacy, very 
 justly reasoning that his learning, his piety, and his 
 surpassing genius rendered him a suitable occupant of the 
 supreme See. But others disputed his claim, and even 
 expelled him from the town of St. Andrews. With rare 
 moderation in that turbulent age the youthful prelate 
 retired from the contest. Nay, even when he was nomi- 
 nated to the See of Dunkeld, he only obtained possession 
 of it after having suffered imprisonment for having 
 obtained Bulls of Confirmation from Rome. On Albany's 
 return to the regency of the kingdom in 152 1, he at 
 once set himself to reduce the overgrown power of the
 
 20 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Douglases. All the members of that noble family had to 
 seek safety in flight. The Bishop of Dunkeld repaired to 
 England. His high reputation as a poet and a scholar 
 had, however, preceded him, and he experienced from 
 Henry vm. a most flattering reception. Assigned a 
 liberal pension by the English monarch, and a palace in 
 the Savoy as his residence, Gavin Douglas devoted him- 
 self earnestly to literature. He made the acquaintance of 
 Polydore Vergil, who was then engaged on his History 
 of England. To the historian t the Bishop proved of great 
 assistance in correcting many of his ideas regarding North 
 Britain. Vossius and Bale even go the length of stating 
 he wrote a History of Scotland in connection with Polydore 
 Vergil's. But of this no trace can be found. If it ever 
 existed, it probably shared the fate of all mss. intrusted to 
 that historian. While thus enjoying his learned leisure he 
 was cut off by fever in 1522, in the forty-eighth year of 
 his age. 
 
 The fame of Gavin Douglas as a poet rests on his fine 
 poem The Palice of Honour. Written when he was but 
 a young man, it has all the fire and warm, sensuous glow of 
 youth, united to a piety as rare as it was humble. In Gavin 
 Douglas, more than in any of his contemporaries, we see 
 the love of external nature predominating. His fancy 
 revels in a prodigious wealth of images drawn from the 
 scenes amidst which he lived. He was the poet of the 
 country, as Dunbar was the bard of the town. As Dr. 
 Irving remarks in his Lives of the Scottish Poets, 'his 
 writings present us with constant evidences of a prolific 
 and exuberant imagination ; and his very faults are those
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 21 
 
 of superabundance rather than deficiency. The beauties 
 of external nature he seems to have surveyed with the eyes 
 of a poet ; the various aspects of human life with those of 
 a philosopher.' While he altogether lacks the soaring 
 sublimity of Dunbar, and the artistic finish of Kennedy, 
 he surpasses both in his amatory warmth and his love of 
 his fellows. He is dainty rather than strong, and more 
 quaint and versatile than profound. His King Hart and 
 his Palice of Honour will long be read for their pleasing 
 pictures of rural scenery and country life, but we look in 
 vain in them for the mighty, robust strength of Dunbar 
 or the polished excellence of 'gude Maister Kennedy.' 
 During the reign of James iv. the poet was probably the 
 most popular singer of the four, but that was less due to 
 his gifts of genius than to his graces of person and of 
 manner, his strong, unbending integrity, and his unfeigned 
 piety. 
 
 His liberal-mindedness and toleration is worthy of all 
 praise, and stands out with brilliant lustre in an age when 
 it was as rare as the phoenix. His remark regarding the 
 burning of heretics, though it commends itself to modern 
 ideas, undoubtedly was the cause of much of the clerical 
 hostility wherewith he was pursued even to his dying day. 
 ' Marry,' said he, ' where is the use of tainting our swete 
 aire with the roasting of heretics, when they will be 
 roasting in hell-fire soon enough to satisfy the most 
 impatient of us?' The remark, also, to Beaton, Arch- 
 bishop of Glasgow, when Gavin Douglas appealed to that 
 prelate to stay the adherents of the Earl of Arran from 
 attempting to apprehend the Earl of Angus, shows him to
 
 2 2 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 have possessed a keen sense of humour. Beaton protested 
 his inability to influence Arran, as he was ignorant of his 
 designs, and thereupon proceeded to strengthen his asser- 
 tion with an oath. Striking his right hand against his 
 breast, he cried : ' Upon my conscience, my Lord Bishop of 
 Dunkeld, I can do nothing.' Immediately thereafter the 
 jingling sound which followed this action disclosed the 
 fact to Douglas that Beaton wore a coat of mail beneath 
 his clerical habit. 'Methinks, my Lord,' retorted the 
 other dryly, ' your conscience is in a parlous case, for I 
 perceive it clatters.' 
 
 The translation which he made into English verse of 
 several of the books of Vergil's sEneid is a testimony to his 
 merits at once as a scholar and a poet. For faithful 
 reproduction of the original he is superior to Dryden, 
 though, of course, he lacks the stately diction of the 
 author of Absalom and Achitophel. 
 
 Such, then, were the four great Court singers of the last 
 decade of the reign of James iv. of Scotland. The names 
 of others occur, such as those mentioned in the Lament for 
 the Makars and elsewhere, but they are little more than 
 empty ' shadows cast on the background of Time.' 
 Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, as a poet, belongs to 
 the succeeding reign. The four named above were beyond 
 all question the 'singers' who, in the reign of 'Merry 
 King Jamie,' cast such lustre on the Scottish Court that 
 in England the saying passed current that the Muses 
 had deserted the fields of ' Mirry Ingelonde' and taken 
 up their abode amid the heath-clad mountains of 'Snell 
 Scotland.'
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 BIRTH : PARENTAGE AND EARLY YEARS 
 
 The precise date of William Dunbar's birth is wrapped 
 in uncertainty. However, in the ancient registers of the 
 University of St. Andrews, in the year 1477, we note 
 the entry of the name of William Dunbar among the 
 Determinantes of St. Salvator's College. As an academic 
 degree, this corresponded to our Bachelorship of Arts, 
 and students were not eligible for it until the third year of 
 their studies at College. 1 This fact, therefore, establishes 
 the exact time when he entered College as 1475, an d as 
 Schipper adroitly notes it is unlikely in those days he 
 would do so before his fifteenth or sixteenth year, we 
 therefore reach the date 1460 as the approximate year at 
 least of his birth. 2 
 
 Of his parentage and family the same uncertainty must 
 be affirmed. Though the name of Dunbar and of that 
 frowning fortress which of old crowned the beetling cliff 
 looking seaward towards 'the May,' have been familiar 
 enough in Scots history, the latter for that magnificent 
 
 1 David Laing's Life of Dunbar. 
 
 2 William Dunbar : Sein Leben und seine gcdichte, von Dr. J. Schipper, 
 Professor der Englischen Philologie an dcr Universitdt in Wien. Berlin, 
 1884. 
 
 23
 
 24 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 defence of it by ' Black Agnes,' Countess of Dunbar and 
 March, still the difficulty is to connect our poet directly 
 with the family. That he was a distant kinsman is beyond 
 a doubt, for in the Flyting between Dunbar and Kennedy 
 the latter speaks of his poetical antagonist's ' forebears,' or 
 ancestors, as belonging to ' Cospatrick's clan,' which had at 
 an earlier day 'brought Scotland into confusion' by joining 
 themselves to the English faction in the long wars between 
 the two kingdoms. He likewise deduces, in the most 
 direct terms, as Laing points out, the poet's descent from 
 the attainted Earls of March, while he as expressly denies 
 his connection with the branch of the family created Earls 
 of Moray, or with the Dunbars of Westfield, the male 
 descendants of the last Earl of Moray. 
 
 From the poet's own testimony it is known that he was a 
 native of East Lothian, his father being a younger son of 
 Sir Patrick Dunbar of Beil, who was one of the hostages 
 for the ransom of King James i. in 1426. From a charter 
 now in the muniment chest of the Earl of Rosebery, and 
 dated August 10th, 1440, we note that one of his sons was 
 named William. This Laing considers to have been either 
 the father or the uncle of the poet. From a chance 
 reference in an old Latin deed contained in the Chart 
 Book of the Priory of St Andrews} which I stumbled upon 
 when investigating another point, I am inclined to think 
 that his father's name was also William, and that he held 
 some lay office in connection with the famous 'Lamp 
 of Lothian,' otherwise the Franciscan Monastery of 
 Haddington. That Dunbar was born in the vicinity of 
 
 1 Liber Cartarum Prioratus Saudi Andree in Scotia.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 25 
 
 some magnificent ecclesiastical establishment is, I think, 
 rendered strongly probable from those lines — 
 
 ' I was in youth on nurse's knee 
 " Dandely, bischop, dandely," 
 And when that age now does me greif 
 Ane simple Vicar I can not be. 
 Excess of thought does me mischief.' 
 
 His prospects owing to his family connections were so 
 golden that they seemed to betoken in the future nothing 
 less than a bishopric. Now, in order to achieve this he 
 must have had family associations with some religious 
 establishment so near as to suggest the allusion. His 
 unmistakable references to his ' Lothian extraction,' to 
 localities in East Lothian, as well as Kennedy's sarcastic 
 remarks in the Flyting, all go to render the hypothesis at 
 least probable that the district around Haddington was the 
 spot where Dunbar first saw the light. 
 
 Furthermore, from the internal evidence furnished by his 
 poems I am inclined to think that, after receiving the 
 rudiments of education at Haddington, he was sent to 
 Edinburgh before proceeding to St. Andrews. The Fran- 
 ciscans, otherwise the Mendicant or Grey Friars, had a 
 famous establishment in the capital, viz. the Monastery of 
 the Observantines, situate on the ground now occupied by 
 Greyfriars Churchyard. Thither Dunbar would naturally 
 be sent from the sister Monastery in Haddington, to be 
 further trained in the higher branches of letters. The 
 School of the Observantines in Edinburgh was justly cele- 
 brated at a time when good teachers were scarce. 
 
 The character of a lad's education in those days, and
 
 26 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 more particularly of a lad destined for the clerical pro- 
 fession, and coming moreover of an ancient and honour- 
 able family, was by no means so meagre as we are apt to 
 suppose. The course is detailed for us by both Buchanan 
 and Knox, whose prejudices would certainly not run in the 
 direction of undue praise. The Schools of the Francis- 
 cans, Dominicans, and Benedictines were regarded as true 
 nurseries of learning. Latin was thoroughly taught, as also 
 the rudiments of Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, 
 Geometry, Astronomy, Music, and Theology — to which was 
 added French. While the curriculum in question was but 
 an expansion of the subjects embraced in the Trivium and 
 Quadriviiim of the Middle Ages, there can be no question 
 that the system was thorough when it could produce such 
 polymaths as Buchanan, Andrew Melville, and my own 
 ancestor, Thomas Smeaton, Principal of Glasgow Uni- 
 versity in 1580. 
 
 Dunbar appears to have made good use of his early 
 opportunities. There are certain subjects only to be ac- 
 quired by that steady drudgery for which youth alone is the 
 season when it can be undertaken. Dunbar, in after life, 
 by the accuracy of his scholarship, and the solid massive- 
 ness of his general knowledge, offered the best proof that 
 could be afforded of his early industry. Unfortunately of 
 his school life we have no details. In the school of the 
 Observantines there was one peerless Latinist, John Leyrva, 
 a Lombard, whose personality has been but a shadowy one 
 until recent discoveries have proved that the supposed 
 coterie of great Franciscan scholars in the Edinburgh of the 
 fifteenth century was in reality but the different designations
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 27 
 
 of this one brilliant genius. That Dunbar was one of 
 Leyrva's pupils is more than probable, particularly as the 
 latter, when he returned to Italy, mentioned in one of his 
 sonnets a Gulielmus Donbar as being ' carissimus dis- 
 cipidusque amicus? 
 
 From the School of the Observantines William Dunbar 
 would carry away more of secular than of sacred learning. 
 In his case, as in that of many others, the mistake was 
 committed of attempting to force the square block into 
 the round hole. A nature full of warm human affections, 
 incapable, in his earlier years at least, of finding interest 
 and solace in topics purely spiritual — intensely human, in 
 fact, and relishing with a sort of fierce defiance all the 
 pleasures of life which, as a Churchman, he should have 
 abjured; a lusciously sensuous temperament, fond of 
 everything that appealed to the innate sense of artistic 
 beauty within — costly clothing, elegant furnishings, beauti- 
 ful women, splendidly ornate architecture, and an ecclesi- 
 astical ritual as superbly spectacular in its appeals to the 
 eye and ear as it was superlatively destitute of any element 
 capable of touching the heart : — such was the youthful 
 William Dunbar. Had his desires been consulted in the 
 choice of vocation, in place of becoming a shaveling ' ready 
 all men to beguile,' l despite all his supposed family interest, 
 he would have elected to be a belted knight gaily tilting in 
 the jousting lists for a smile from some fair Queen of 
 Beauty, or joining in some headlong raid across the Border 
 to perpetuate the hereditary feud between the two nations. 
 Dunbar never should have been a churchman, and unless 
 
 1 Visitation of St. Francis, line 45.
 
 28 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 one realises this prime fact, the key to his character is 
 lacking. 
 
 Our next authentic landmark in the life of our great 
 Scots poet is associated with his residence at St. Andrews. 
 The boy would naturally pass from Grammar School to 
 College. At that time, in Scotland, there were only two 
 Universities x capable of affording anything approaching 
 advanced intellectual training to the numbers of brilliant 
 young Scotsmen who were already becoming infected with 
 the mental activity of the period — the faintly eddying back- 
 wash of that Renaissance tide of culture which, as we have 
 already noted, reached England through Colet, Grocyn, 
 and Linacre, and was yet to influence Scotland in greater 
 measure in days to come. 
 
 But in 1475, when William Dunbar is supposed to have 
 entered the University of St. Andrews, the latter had been 
 nominally in existence for sixty-four years — 141 1 being the 
 date of its foundation by Bishop Wardlaw of that diocese, 
 with the express consent embodied in a Bull of Pope 
 Benedict xm. In Dunbar's day, one only of the three 
 Colleges afterwards comprising it was in existence, viz. 
 St. Salvator's, founded in 1458 by that 'father of Scots 
 letters,' Bishop Kennedy. For seventeen years the 
 academic machinery had been in operation, and from con- 
 temporary testimony we learn had been working satis- 
 factorily. When Dunbar entered among the Bq/ans, or 
 first-year's students, the teaching staff of the College was 
 distributed through three faculties, viz. Arts, Theology, 
 and Canon Law. The Professors, or Regents, as they 
 
 1 Aberdeen was not yet founded.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 29 
 
 were termed, were not set apart for the teaching of any 
 specific subject. They carried their students on through- 
 out all the three years of their academic residence, in- 
 structing them in each one of the subjects falling within 
 the curriculum. These, however, were the days when 
 it was still possible for a man to master the entire 
 gamut of the arts and sciences, and pose as a full- 
 blown polymath. Buchanan, Andrew Melville, the Sca- 
 ligers, Erasmus, the Admirable Crichton, and others, were 
 men who actually had mastered the whole round of letters. 
 That we are in absolute ignorance both as to the names 
 of our poet's preceptors during those years of intellectual 
 germination, also that we know next to nothing positively 
 of the books read by our keen-witted 'child of the Muses,' 
 is deeply to be regretted. Only by analogy can we shadow 
 forth the course pursued. It is well known that, in his 
 Buke of Discipline, Knox, while eradicating what he 
 considered to be the errors of Romanism, was content to 
 leave the Colleges very much as he found them, in which 
 state they remained until reorganised by Principals Andrew 
 Melville and Thomas Smeaton about 1579-80. James 
 Melville alludes to this matter in his Diary, 1 and to the 
 anxiety of his uncle and Smeaton for the acceptance of 
 the new constitution of the Colleges. M'Crie in his Life 
 of Melville also indicates that the latter had found the 
 Universities in their pre-Reformation state, 2 and the new 
 Constitution 3 expressly states that the reform was intended 
 
 1 Autobiography and Diary of fames Melville ; Wodrow Society Pub- 
 lications. 
 
 2 Life of Andrew Melville, by Thomas M'Crie, D.D. 
 
 3 Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, vol. iii. pp. 178-182.
 
 30 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 to expel the Papistical remnants which still clung to the 
 academic system of St. Andrews. 
 
 This being so, the account which John Knox gives in 
 the Buke of Discipline 1 of the ' course ' followed in the 
 ' Universitie of Sanctandrois ' may be accepted as showing 
 very closely, albeit after a lapse of eighty years, what was 
 the ' academic custom ' or curriculum in the oldest of the 
 Scots seats of learning. Let us cite the entire passage 
 from Knox, remembering that the course of study in the 
 first and second Colleges were unitedly analogous to the 
 curriculum in Dunbar's days : ' In the first Universitie 
 and principall whiche is Sanctandrois, thair be thre Col- 
 ledgeis. And in the first Colledge, quhilk is the entre of 
 the Universitie, there be four classes or seigeis ; the first 
 to the new Suppostis, shalbe onlie Dialectique; the next 
 only Mathematique, the thrid of Phisick only, the fourt 
 of Medicyne. And in the second Colledge twa classes or 
 seigeis; the first in Morall Philosophic, the Secound in the 
 Lawis. . . . Item, in the first College and in the first classe 
 shall be ane Reidar of Dialectique, wha shall accom- 
 plische his course hereof in one yeare. In the Mathe- 
 matique which is the second classe, shalbe ane Reidar 
 who shall compleit his course of Arithmetique, Geometrie, 
 Cosmographie, and Astrologie in ane yeare. In the third 
 classe, shalbe ane Reidar of Naturall Philosophic, who 
 shall compleit his course in a year. And wha efter ther 
 thre yearis by tryell and Examinatioun shall be fund 
 sufficiently instructit in thir aforesaid Sciences, shallbe 
 
 1 Knox's Buke of Discipline, MS. 1566, Wodrow Society Publications, 
 Section iii., 'The Ercctioun of Universiteis. '
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 31 
 
 Laureat and Graduat in Philosophic Item in the Secound 
 Colledge, in the first classe, one Reidar onlie in the 
 Ethicques, (Economicques, and Politiques, who shall com- 
 pleit his course in the space of one yeare.' 
 
 From these extracts we gain an idea what the University 
 must have been in Dunbar's days, and what the course 
 of study to which he would be required to subject 
 himself. 
 
 The authentic facts of our poet's academic years are, 
 however, of the meagrest description. These have been 
 already recorded, viz. that under the date 1477 among 
 the Determinantes or Bachelors of Arts of St. Salvator's 
 College appears the name Guliehnus Donbar; 1 while in 
 1479 it again occurs amongst those that have taken the 
 degree of Master of Arts. On this point Laing aptly 
 remarks : ' He is uniformly styled Maister William 
 Dunbar, this designation till a late period being exclu- 
 sively appropriated to persons who had taken that degree 
 at some University.' 2 
 
 That the standard of education at St. Andrews during the 
 years of Dunbar's residence was regarded as high by com- 
 petent extramural judges is proved by a curious side-light, 
 whose assistance we obtain from a rare tract to which 
 it is expedient to call attention. Jaspar Laet de Borch- 
 loen, the author of De Eclipsi Solis Anni M.cccc.xci, cur- 
 rentis, Octava die Mali Pronostiatm, dedicated it to William 
 Schevez, Archbishop of St. Andrews from 1477 to 1497. 
 He praises the latter for his vast researches in the fields 
 
 1 Acta Facultatis Artium S. Andreae. 
 - Memoirs of William Dunbar.
 
 32 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 of sacred literature and pontifical law, and then adds a 
 warm eulogy upon him for his unwearied efforts to advance 
 the cause of learning and science in the University. Here 
 was one individual at least with whom Dunbar must have 
 had some relations, both pleasant and profitable, and I 
 have little doubt that the poet placed on record his 
 obligations to the great prelate in those two pieces, The 
 Manner of Passing to Confession and The Table of 
 Confession, where the soaring genius of Dunbar rises to 
 an altitude of true sublimity only paralleled by the great 
 Satanic soliloquies in Milton. 
 
 I have always entertained the opinion that after gradu- 
 ating at St. Andrews in 1479 Dunbar visited the Univer- 
 sities of Oxford and Paris. His exquisite little poem on 
 'Learning Vain without Guid Lyfe' is stated in the 
 colophon to be written at Oxinfurde. The whole 'atmo- 
 sphere ' of the piece, moreover, is academically didactic — 
 
 ' To speak of science, craft, or sapience, 
 Of virtue, moral cunnying, or doctrine ; 
 Of Jure, of wisdom, or intelligence ; 
 Of every study, lear, or discipline ; 
 All is but tint, or ready for to tyne : 
 The curious probation logicall ; 
 The eloquence of ornate rhetoric ; 
 The natural Science philosophical ; 
 The dirk appearance of Astronomie ; 
 The Theologis sermoun, the fables of Poetrie : 
 Without Guid Lyfe all in the self does dee.' 
 
 Besides, the poem as a whole is evidently suggested by 
 the custom of public disputation, which was so marked 
 a feature in English University life, and which the poet 
 would like to see introduced into the Scots academic
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 33 
 
 system. This, to my mind, is the meaning of the third 
 stanza, beginning — 
 
 'Wherefore, ye Clerks greatest of Constance, 
 To us be mirrors in your governance,' 
 
 and the point is interesting as explaining what hitherto 
 has been a puzzle to students of the poet — the purity of 
 his Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. 1 Furthermore with regard 
 to his studying at the University of Paris, although to 
 Laing belongs the credit of having thrown out the tenta- 
 tive suggestion that the poet studied at Paris, 2 no definite 
 settlement of the question could be arrived at until, after 
 careful inspection of the registers of the old University of 
 Paris, the name of ' Gul Donbere ' was discovered, which 
 I have little doubt refers to the poet. This fact would 
 seem to indicate that Dunbar resided in Paris in 1480-81, 
 or during parts thereof. At any rate a reasonable ex- 
 planation has now been formulated 01 Dunbar's intimate 
 knowledge of French — so intimate indeed as to warrant 
 his appointment as Secretary and Interpreter to the various 
 embassies despatched by James iv. to the French Court 
 to promote his manifold matrimonial schemes. Dunbar, 
 both at Oxford and Paris, had been patiently laying the 
 foundations of that broad catholic culture which was to 
 render him, before many years were over, the most accom- 
 plished scholar of that brilliant band which circled round 
 the fourth James at Holyrood or at Falkland. 
 
 All this period of Dunbar's life, however, has simply 
 to be pieced together by a sort of hypothetical literary 
 synthesis resulting from the comparison of probabilities. 
 
 1 Cf. Schipper and Laing. - Cf. Laing, Memoirs, p. 10. 
 
 C
 
 34 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 After some time, profitably enough spent, doubtless, at 
 Oxford and Paris, he probably returned to Edinburgh and 
 resumed his theological studies in the Schools of the 
 Observantine Franciscans. At least we gather as much 
 from his poems l when he relates that he, as a friar of that 
 Order, 
 
 ' into every lusty toun and place, 
 Of all England from Berwick to Calais, 
 I have into thy habit made good cheer.' 
 
 But, as is well known by every good Catholic, the Fran- 
 ciscans declined to allow any one to become a preaching 
 friar who had not been trained in their own schools in 
 theology. That Dunbar was a member of that Order we 
 learn from his own express testimony. We also know 
 that he was trained in theology in Edinburgh, as is implied 
 by one of the passages in the Flyti?ig? Only one con- 
 clusion is, therefore, left : that our great national poet was 
 trained in theology in the Schools of the Observantines. 
 
 1 The Visitation of St. Francis. 
 
 2 Flyting between Dicnbar and Kennedy.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 LIFE AS A FRIAR : DISGUST WITH CLERICALISM 
 
 About the year 1483, when Dunbar must have reached his 
 twenty-third year, the battle of life for him may be said to 
 have commenced. He had received a careful scholastic 
 and academic education, he had enjoyed the special 
 privilege of a sound theological training by that Order of 
 Friars which more than any of the others was distinguished 
 by learning, piety, and good works. Now had come that 
 Rubicon of life which by all of us must sooner or later be 
 crossed — the choice of a profession. In Dunbar's case 
 probably there was but little room for choice. To a 
 younger son of the house of Biel the cowl was the only 
 alternative to the sword. The other learned professions 
 did not then exist in Scotland. Not until the 27th May 
 1532 was the Scots College of Justice instituted by 
 James v. in the old Tolbooth — an historic scene which, as is 
 well known, forms the subject of the magnificent window in 
 the present Parliament House, Edinburgh. Accordingly, 
 the Bar did not afford any scope for his great talents. Nor 
 was Medicine in a condition very much better. A doctor 
 in nine cases out of ten was identified with the ignorant 
 quacks who called themselves 'barber surgeons.' Those 
 
 35
 
 36 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 who belonged to a higher grade had all to study either at 
 
 Paris or 
 
 ' In Padua, far beyond the sea.' 
 
 That of course entailed an expense and hardship the former 
 of which Dunbar's family was unable to face, while from the 
 latter his own hedonistic pleasure-loving nature decidedly 
 shrank. Than the Church, therefore, there was no alternative 
 for Dunbar. From an early age indeed he appears to have 
 practically resigned himself to the inevitable. In more than 
 one of his poems he somewhat sadly recalls his boyhood's 
 dreams, when a life on the tented field, and amid the clash 
 of martial weapons, presented prospects to him of the most 
 alluring kind. But with years came the realisation of that 
 crushing fact, sooner or later to be learned by us all in 
 the hard school of experience, that our individual desires 
 obtain gratification in almost exactly inverse proportion to 
 their intensity. To the wishes of his family he probably 
 bowed, and prepared to enter that stately and magnificent 
 organisation, which, with all its corruptions and short- 
 comings, as a civilising agency in the diffusion of culture 
 and intellectual light has done so much. 1 
 
 To the youthful Dunbar, approaching the priesthood of 
 the great Hierarchy in question, there must have been 
 many solemn and soul-hallowing thoughts. That Rome at 
 her best has produced some of the very noblest men that 
 have adorned the bead-roll of the world's fame cannot be 
 questioned. An Augustine, a Bede, an Alcuin, a Bernard 
 of Clairvaux, and a Bernard of Cluny, a Thomas a Kempis, 
 and others, must have been greatly good as well as grandly 
 
 1 Newman, Apologia pro sua Vita.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 37 
 
 great. Young Dunbar doubtless felt all the impressive 
 influence of these mighty personalities, stirring up within 
 him the desire to imitate, where he could not emulate. 
 What noble-hearted young man at the outset of life has 
 not felt the same ? We ought not to be the ' dumb, driven 
 cattle ' of circumstances, but live in the glorious light of 
 hopeful opportunities, making each circumstance a carrier 
 to bear us onward to something higher. Not as machines 
 or as automata, but as reason-crowned mortals capable of 
 influencing Destiny as much as Destiny influences us — 
 such is the attitude of mind of any man who has risen to 
 eminence by breaking the chains binding him to precedent, 
 and such was Dunbar's mental attitude when he wrote 
 those inspired religious poems of his upon The Nativity 
 and Passion of Christ, and one or two others. I like to 
 think that our great poet wrote at least some of these 
 between his twenty-fourth and thirtieth years. Of youth 
 and immaturity they exhibit some signs, but all the rich, 
 warm glow of early enthusiasm, before contact with the 
 world had chilled it with the frost of sarcasm and the icy 
 breath of indifference, is there present, united to that 
 sensuously splendid picturesqueness of description, in 
 which particular the early poems of Dunbar are still 
 peerless in English literature. Only a young man 
 addressing the young would suddenly break into this 
 apostrophe at the close of a lofty and sublime piece of 
 poetic rhetoric — 
 
 ' I red thee, man, while thou art stark and young, 
 With pith and strength into thy yearis grene, 
 While thou art able baith in mind and tongue,
 
 38 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Repent thee, man, and keep thy conscience clean ; 
 
 To bide till age has mony perils seen : 
 
 Small merit is for sinis for to irk, 
 
 When thou are auld and may na wrongis work.' ' 
 
 It is like the personal application of a rousing evangelical 
 sermon. 
 
 To the priesthood, therefore, Dunbar advanced, imbued 
 with lofty sentiments regarding the dignity and holiness of 
 the office, and the opportunities for doing good which the 
 position of a ' preaching friar ' afforded him. The poetry 
 we believe to have been his earliest, viz. one or two of his 
 religious pieces, are filled with expressions how deeply he 
 felt his own unfitness for the holy office. In The Table of 
 Confession we obtain a glimpse of his self-abasement even 
 after we have discounted the strong stock terms wherewith 
 the rubric enjoins that the duty should be performed. 
 Dunbar in youth was undoubtedly a deeply religious man. 
 Alas that the scenes he witnessed within the pale of the 
 Roman Catholic Church of the fifteenth century should 
 have undermined his piety ! 
 
 After he donned the habit of a preaching friar, Dunbar 
 states 2 that he made good cheer in every flourishing 
 town in England between Berwick and Calais : in it, also, 
 he ascended the pulpit at Dernton and Canterbury ; nay, 
 even crossed the sea at Dover and instructed the inhabi- 
 tants of Picardy. It is doubtless to this period of Dunbar's 
 
 1 The Manner of Passing to Confession. My idea is that Dunbar, with 
 regard to many of his religious pieces, re-wrote in age what he had roughly 
 drafted in youth. The differences existing between various versions of the 
 same poem leave no other explanation open. 
 
 2 Visitation of St. Francis.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 39 
 
 life that we must refer the allusion contained in Kennedy's 
 portion of the Flyting, wherein he taunts Dunbar with his 
 pilgrimage as a pardoner begging in all the churches from 
 Ettrick Forest to Dumfries. 
 
 ' From Ettrick Forest furthward to Dumfries, 
 Thou beggit with ane pardon in all kirks, 
 Collops, curds, meal, groats, grice 1 and geese, 
 And under night whiles thou stole staigs 2 and stirks 3 
 Because that Scotland of that begging irks 
 Thou shap'st in France to be a knight of the field, 
 Thou hast thy clam shells, 4 and thy burdoun 5 keild 6 
 Unhonest ways all, wolroun, that thou works. 7 
 
 The deceptions practised by the friars on the poor and 
 ignorant, as well as the mournful difference between his 
 ideal of the priesthood and the reality, led him after some 
 years' experience of it to long to leave it. During his service 
 in it he had picked up a shrewd, worldly wisdom, a keen 
 knowledge of life and manners, and a wide experience in 
 dealing with his fellow-men. In after years this knowledge 
 was to prove invaluable to him. There can be no doubt, 
 however, that the immediate effect of his years of clerical 
 labour was a distinct lowering of his lofty religious ideals. 
 He saw that, though in the past an exalted piety had been 
 the passport to promotion in the Romish Church, the 
 period for that had gone by. He noted that the attitude 
 of mind which paid at that moment was a sort of easy-going 
 Epicureanism — neither looking too deep into the distinctive 
 
 1 Pigs. 2 Young horses. 3 Young bullocks. 
 
 4 Clam shells employed by pilgrims to place in their hats, as denoting 
 they had been to Palestine. — Marmion I. xxiii. 
 
 8 Burdoun, pilgrim's staff. « Keild, marked with ruddle. 
 
 7 From the Flyting between Dunbar and Kennedy.
 
 4 o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 bearing of doctrines upon life, nor setting up too high a 
 standard of piety as the rule whereby to try his fellows. 
 The Romish Church was tottering to her fall both in 
 England and Scotland. Her clergy were timorous and 
 weak, recognising that they no longer maintained that hold 
 on the minds of the people which in past centuries had 
 been their tower of strength, yet determined not to alter an 
 iota of their faith or practice to win them back. 1 The 
 people must come to them, not they go to the people. 
 James iv. was too liberal-minded a sovereign to be a slavish 
 supporter of the clergy. The consequence of this attitude 
 of secular eclecticism, similar to that manifested by 
 Lorenzo de Medici in Florence, 2 was a weakening of the 
 temporal as well as the spiritual power of the Church. As 
 Burton remarks, the discussion between the Papal Court 
 and the Estates of the Kingdom of Scotland, with reference 
 to the pretensions of the former to distribute all ecclesias- 
 tical patronage in the country, began in the reign of James iv. 
 and speedily developed into a bitter quarrel. 3 The angry 
 Statutes passed by the States again and again are sufficient 
 proof how complete was the undermining of the Church's 
 influence that had gone on. To estimate the power of the 
 Romish Church in Scotland by the severity of the measures 
 taken by theGovernment against Lollardry and the Reformed 
 beliefs is no fair criterion. The bitterest enemies of Rome 
 among the nobles, men who openly professed their con- 
 tempt for all forms of worship, at once sided with the faith 
 
 1 Early Scottish History and Literature, by J. M. Ross, chap. iv. 
 p. 123. 
 
 2 Sismondi, History of the Italian Republics. 
 
 * Hill Burton, History 0/ Scotland, vol. iii. p. 40.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 41 
 
 by law established, when they had to choose between 
 a fresh system they knew not of, and the doctrines con- 
 secrated to them by centuries of service. To esteem the 
 Romish Church the stronger, because she was able at the 
 outset to crush the Reformed doctrines, is to misunderstand 
 the whole situation. The irreligious nobility sided with Rome, 
 because the priesthood of the ancient faith winked compla- 
 cently at the vices of the great, provided the winking meant 
 fat tithes and the protection of the baron's arm in times 
 of unrest. For the Reformed faith inculcated an austerity 
 of life and morals, even on the laity, compared with which 
 many of the religious Orders were luxurious and sybaritic. 
 Not until the tempting bait of the Romish Church lands 
 was thrown into the scale did the Scots baronage come 
 to the conclusion that Catholicism was really very unscrip- 
 tural indeed. As Henry iv. considered the crown of France 
 worth a mass, so the Scots nobles thought the acquisition 
 of the Church lands was worth, at least, the trouble of 
 emulating in an ethical sense Sir John Falstaff's recipe to 
 'purge and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman 
 should do.' 
 
 The consciousness therefore that the Church had for 
 ever lost its hold on the heart of the people induced 
 Dunbar to reconsider his resolution to live and die a 
 Churchman. 1 How long he remained a priest is not very 
 clear, but the period cannot have been less than five years 
 — from 1483 to 1488, — for, as we shall see later, he was 
 employed on the King's business in 1489-90. Only natural 
 
 1 Vide Poems on Dunbar's Dream, The Devil's Inquest, The Birth 
 of Antichrist, for indications of his past dissatisfaction.
 
 42 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 was it that his action in turning his back on his brethren 
 of the Observantine Franciscans should have blown into 
 flame that slumbering jealousy wherewith Dunbar was ever 
 regarded by the Order whose habit he had elected to wear. 
 Again and again in his poems references occur to the 
 hatred wherewith he was pursued by the whole Scots 
 Franciscan Order, both Observantines and Conventuals. 1 
 As they were the only Order the worldly-minded King 
 patronised — owing to the fact, as he said, that their vow 
 of poverty precluded them from expecting much from 
 him, 2 this may have accounted for his Majesty's reluct- 
 ance to promote Dunbar to a benefice. The point in 
 question, however, will be discussed hereafter. Dunbar 
 must have adopted the dress of the secular clergy some 
 time in 1488. It was many years before he again donned 
 the purely clerical robes. 
 
 1 Cf. the persecution of George Buchanan by the Franciscans. — Life of 
 Buchanan, under years 1537-1550; also Besant's Rabelais, pp. 16-44. 
 
 2 History of Scotland from 1436 to 1565, by Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 EARLY YEARS OF STATE SERVICE 
 
 To that period in Dunbar's life when he entered the 
 personal service of James iv. we have now come. He 
 was in his thirtieth year, and was rapidly approaching 
 that golden prime of the maturity of his powers — a prime 
 that was to be so glorious. During his clerical career he 
 had doubtless made many friends, both at Court and in 
 the Edinburgh of that day. Dunbar's cheerful bonhomie, 
 his knowledge of men and manners, his manifold experi- 
 ences during his years of travel, his genial wit and humour 
 as well as his sunny, unconcealed Epicureanism and enjoy- 
 ment of life, all combined to render him one of the most 
 charming of companions, as he was one of the most faith- 
 ful of friends. The young King, then only sixteen, had 
 ascended the Scots throne in the June of the same year 
 in which our poet put off the clerical dress. In view of 
 subsequent events, I have always maintained that there 
 was a connection between the two occurrences. 
 
 The closing years of the third James's reign were gloom- 
 beset and disturbed. The partiality he had exhibited for 
 unworthy favourites, and the dislike to the society of the 
 nobles of his Court, which characterised his later years, 
 culminated finally in that civil war in which the King met 
 
 43
 
 44 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 with his death. But the influence on Scotland of this 
 unrest was simply ruinous. 1 'There is evidence that 
 agriculture languished, and that grain had to be imported 
 from England ; nor can we wonder at this when we 
 remember the horrible and widespread devastations of 
 the century.' 2 
 
 The accession of James iv. was therefore hailed on all 
 sides as being the commencement of a new era of peace, 
 plenty, and prosperity. Men's minds were weary of an- 
 archy. They longed for tranquillity. Only the strong 
 arm of a capable monarch was needed to lay Scotland at 
 his feet in a manner never before witnessed in the history 
 of the country, because he would receive the support of 
 all sections of the community. That strong monarch was 
 found in James iv., but the supreme success of his rule 
 was due as much to the change coming over the temper 
 of the people as to the vigorous rule of the sovereign. 
 
 James iv. was far older than his years. As Drummond 
 of Hawthornden says, 3 'The King in the strength and 
 vigour of his youth, remembering that to live in idleness 
 was to live to be contemned by the world, by change of 
 objects to expel his present sadness, and to enable him- 
 self for wars when they should burst forth, gave himself 
 to recreations and games, and with a decent pomp enter- 
 tained all knightly exercises, keeping an open and magni- 
 ficent Court.' To such a youth a man like William 
 
 1 Pinkerton, History of Scotland, vol. i. b. viii. ; Burton, History of Scot- 
 land, vol. iii. p. 191. 
 
 2 Scottish History and Literature, chap. iv. pp. 119-121. 
 
 3 History of the Five fameses, by W. Drummond of Hawthornden, 
 p. 66.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 45 
 
 Dunbar would prove irresistibly attractive. The very 
 qualities wherewith Dunbar had been endowed bv Heaven 
 in measure so bountiful were those in which the Scots 
 • Merry Monarch ' was conspicuously lacking. Unlike his 
 great-grandfather, whose Kingis Qithair has a distinct 
 note of originality amid acknowledged obligations to 'my 
 maisters dear, Gower and Chaucere,' unlike his son also, of 
 whose authorship of Christ's Kirk on the Green and Peblis 
 to the Play there seems little reason to doubt, James iv. 
 had not a spark of that imaginative afflatus which viewed 
 all things through the spectacles of idealism and romance. 
 
 But even at seventeen, as Maitland remarks, 1 James's 
 strength lay in knowing by a sort of intuitive divination 
 whom he could trust. The council of nobles and clergy, 
 formed as a sort of consultative body of advisers for the 
 young King, were many of them bitterly opposed to each 
 other. But the faith shown by the youthful monarch in 
 their loyalty to himself and the country acted as a sort 
 of subtle coalescent to so many antagonistic elements. 
 His very helplessness in youth was his strength. But 
 within two years he had felt his feet. The council was 
 gradually dispensed with, and James governed alone through 
 his Parliament. 
 
 The same instinct led him to select William Dunbar 
 as his confidential ' King's Messenger.' Why the fact 
 never occurred to David Laing or Dr. Schipper, when 
 compiling their exhaustive Lives of the poet, is a cir- 
 cumstance which to me is inexplicable. The matter is 
 so unmistakable and so apparent that the wonder is that 
 1 History of Scotland, by William Maitland, F.R.S.
 
 46 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 any other explanation of the facts should have suggested 
 itself. 
 
 My contention is that William Dunbar, after the death 
 of the unfortunate James m. — than whom never has the 
 character of monarch been more cruelly misread — con- 
 sidered that now, if ever, Scotland was to experience the 
 prosperity for which men's minds were longing. His own 
 fortunes in the tottering Romish Church were far from 
 being promising. His family influence probably was 
 exhausted. To play his last card then for his individual 
 advancement, circumstances demanded that, as a secular 
 cleric, and that alone, he should be introduced to the 
 young monarch. 
 
 Who the good Samaritan was that brought Dunbar 
 directly under the notice of his young King we have only 
 traditionary hints whereon to base our hypothesis. Let 
 us give them for what they are worth. Robert Blackadder, 
 Bishop of Glasgow, over the elevation of whose See to 
 archiepiscopal rank there was a quarrel so bitter between 
 him and Schevez, Archbishop of St. Andrews, 1 had always 
 been a firm friend to Dunbar. He knew and valued the 
 genius of the young priest, and there is a strong presump- 
 tion in favour of the theory that he was the individual to 
 whom we are indebted for introducing Dunbar to the 
 Court of King James. The prelate was a man of liberal 
 culture and wide sympathies, a correspondent with some 
 of the leading Italian prelates, and with Lorenzo de Medici, 2 
 regarding the influence of the new learning on the inter- 
 
 1 Burton, vol. iii. p. 41 ; also Burns, Calendar of State Papers in Venice. 
 
 2 Loci Communes Petri Martyris Vermilii Florentini.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 47 
 
 pretation of Scripture, a true patriot and a loyal adviser of 
 his sovereign as a member of the adjutory council. His 
 life was exemplary amid an ecclesiastical hierarchy corrupt 
 to the core, and, like Bishop Kennedy of St. Andrews in 
 the previous reign, he was content to sacrifice his own 
 comfort and prosperity to preserve the stability of the 
 State. The Bishop, for he was not yet Archbishop, 
 observing how easily the youthful monarch was led astray 
 by immoral companions, is reported to have thrown 
 Dunbar into the society of the King designedly, in the 
 hope that he might exercise a restraining influence on the 
 youthful ruler's headstrong sensuality. There is extant in 
 the private collection of the late Due d'Aumale at Chantilly 
 — by the will of the latter now the property of the French 
 Academy 1 — a letter of Blackadder's to the Bishop of 
 Beauvais, wherein, after describing the excellences of the 
 young King, he expresses regret over his glaring sensuality, 
 but adds that he had placed a young man, a secular priest, 
 among the royal attendants, from whose influence he 
 expected much. The name of the young man was 
 ' Gulidmus Dunbar, a scholar, and also an excellent poet.' 2 
 Such then was the means whereby Dunbar was brought 
 into contact with the monarch. From collateral evidence 
 we glean the fact that the introduction must have taken 
 place about January 1490. Previously to that date our 
 poet must have made that lengthened sojourn in the 
 Bishop's house of which the latter speaks on many 
 occasions — a sojourn which enabled the keen-witted pre- 
 
 1 Cf. Century Magazine, September 1897, article by Pierre de Coubertin 
 on ' Royalists and Republicans.' 
 
 2 D'Aumale Collection.
 
 48 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 late to gauge the calibre of the man in whom he was 
 
 interesting himself, and to appraise him as ' without his 
 
 marrow in our aige.' 
 
 There is some difficulty in precisely identifying the 
 
 special services upon which Dunbar was employed by 
 
 James iv. That the latter did employ him, and withal 
 
 extensively, as soon as he discovered how implicitly he 
 
 could trust him, is evident from Dunbar's own words. 
 
 He states that he had travelled on the business of his 
 
 master, not only through 
 
 ' France, England, Ireland, Almanie, 1 
 But also Italy and Spain.' 
 
 That the period through which he had been so engaged 
 was a lengthy one is manifest from the poems wherein 
 Dunbar refers to the appointment of the French doctor 
 and quack Damian to the Abbacy of Tungland. The latter 
 seduced the monarch into the unprofitable pursuit after 
 the ' Philosopher's Stone,' Quinta Essentia, and alchemy 
 generally, for which he was liberally rewarded by his dupe. 
 We shall have more to say of him anon ; in the meantime 
 let it be sufficient to remark that the date of his arrival 
 at Court was early in 1501, and that two or three years 
 after he was gratified with a benefice. 2 Dunbar contrasts 
 this treatment with that meted out to himself, who received 
 nothing, though he had been such a faithful servant to 
 the King. 
 
 There is a mournful pathos in the lines — 
 
 ' Therefore, O Prince, maist honourable, 
 Be in this matter merciable : 3 
 
 1 Almanie = Germany. 2 The Fenyeit Friar of Tungland. 3 Merciful
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 49 
 
 And to thy old servants have an ee, 
 That lang have trusted unto thee : 
 If I be one of them mysel, 
 Thorough all regions has tein hard tell, 1 
 Of which my writing witness bears, 
 And yet thy danger aye me dares : 
 But after danger cometh grace, 
 As hath been heard in mony a place.' 
 
 From 1490 to 1500 Dunbar was seldom left unemployed. 
 As Laing says, ' It is well known that James iv. maintained 
 a constant and friendly intercourse with the Courts of 
 France, Flanders, Spain, Denmark, and other countries, 
 and that such international relations were carried on by 
 the mission of heralds, envoys, and merchants, as well as 
 in the more solemn way of embassies to foreign Courts, 
 including that of England. The most probable conjecture 
 is that Dunbar was employed in the course of these 
 embassies, as it was usual on such occasions to appoint 
 "ane clerk," for it must be considered that the literary 
 attainments of the clergy, who were almost the only class 
 of men who then received anything like a liberal educa- 
 tion, eminently recommended them for service in foreign 
 negotiations. In the safe-conduct granted to such em- 
 bassies when passing through England to go beyond seas, 
 as well as to the English Court, the names only of the 
 two or three leading persons are mentioned, with a specified 
 number of attendants and horses in their train.' 2 
 
 I have quoted the above passage in order to give Laing's 
 position, which, however, I esteem to be a mistaken one. 3 
 My view of the relations existing between Dunbar and 
 
 1 Has suffered hardship. 2 Laing's Dunbar. 
 
 3 Cf. Rymer's Foedera and Rotuli Scotiae ; Pinkerton's History, vol. ii. ; 
 Tytler, vol. iv. 
 
 D
 
 5 o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 James iv. is that the poet was the monarch's confidential 
 agent. In his earlier years James was obliged to be 
 guided in everything by his adjutory council. Gradually, 
 as Maitland shows, with infinite tact he emancipated 
 himself from their tutelage without offending one of them. 1 
 But this course of action demanded that he should have 
 some one in his confidence who was content to be his 
 instrument. I think that any unbiassed mind which reads 
 the following poems by Dunbar : Dunbar's Dirge to the 
 King at Stirling, New Years Gift to the King, Welcome to 
 the Lord Treasurer, To the King (' Sir, at this Feast,' etc.), 
 To the King (' Of Benefice, Sir,' etc.), Dunbar's Complaint 
 to the King, must admit that only a man on the closest 
 terms of familiarity with his sovereign could have written 
 them. Even after discounting the fact that the relations 
 between royalty and the subject were very different in 
 Scotland from what was the custom in France and England, 
 still the matter remains inexplicable on any other hypo- 
 thesis than that of friendly terms of familiarity. The man 
 who could address his monarch in such terms as these — 
 
 ' I grant my service is but light ; 
 Therefore of mercy, not of right, 
 I ask you, Sir, no man to grief. 
 None may remede my malady, 
 So well as you, Sir, verily ; 
 For with a benefice ye may preif 
 And if I mend not hastely : 
 Excess of thought does me mischief: ' 2 
 
 — must have had a hold on him that was none of the 
 slightest. Dunbar was a proud man. He realised that 
 
 1 Maitland's History of Scotland. 2 To the King.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 51 
 
 his master was also one upon whom obligations would be 
 always binding were they once contracted. There were 
 many other courtiers whose claims for recognition were 
 also great, but not so outstanding as his. To impress 
 them on the King at sundry times and seasons was the 
 custom of the period, even as Chaucer addressed his well- 
 known lines To his Purse. His contemporaries' appeals are 
 lost, Dunbar's are preserved to earn for him the reputation 
 of an importunate beggar, when in all probability his proud 
 nature would be the least insistent of all in recalling his 
 services to remembrance. 
 
 Dunbar, as ' King's Messenger,' would have many 
 delicate missions to fulfil — of an amatory as well as of a 
 political character. The King was a confirmed gallant, 
 and on more than one occasion there is a strong suspicion 
 that he made love by proxy. He was deeply attached to 
 a daughter of Lord Drummond, and was determined to 
 marry her despite all the remonstrances of his council. 
 Kings in their minority, however, may 'propose,' but 
 adjutory councils dispose. How they effected it is not 
 known. Only one fact has come to light, that the other 
 nobles dreaded any such renewed aggrandisement of the 
 Drummond family as had been the case when Robert in. 
 married Annabella, daughter of Sir John Drummond of 
 Stobhall. 1 There is no doubt that Lady Margaret 
 Drummond was the King's mistress, and strong presump- 
 tion exists that the affaire de cccur was promoted, at least 
 in its initial stages, by Dunbar. 2 But when the matter 
 
 1 Drummond of Hawthornden, History of the Five Jameses \ 
 
 2 Burton, vol. iii. p. 81.
 
 52 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 became serious, Lady Margaret and her sister died together 
 at Drummond Castle, so suddenly and in such manner as 
 to convince all that poison had been at work. I have a 
 strong conviction that Dunbar's exquisite poem Of Love 
 Earthly and Divine was directly inspired by the remem- 
 brance of the beautiful Margaret's untimely fate. Only 
 for a reference to the matter have I space in this small 
 volume. Elsewhere I hope to give the arguments leading 
 me to adopt this conclusion. 
 
 But ere long Dunbar was employed on worthier work 
 than acting as go-between for the royal ' lover and his lass.' 
 At the time of the death of King James m. a new alliance 
 was about to be concluded with Denmark. The disturbed 
 state of the kingdom prevented the matter from being 
 then consummated. That consequently led to rather 
 strained relations existing between the two countries. 
 For nearly three years Scotland was not in a position to 
 re-conclude the alliance. But towards the close of the 
 year 1490 the Scots Estates enacted that an embassy 
 consisting of a lord (the Bishop of Aberdeen), a knight 
 (Sir John Ogilvy of Airly), and a clerk should proceed to 
 Denmark, and for their expenses each Estate was ordered 
 to contribute ^"ioo. 1 William Dunbar was undoubtedly 
 the ' clerk ' referred to above. My proof of this assertion 
 is to be discovered in these lines in the famous Flytitig 
 which speak of travelling ' mony hundreth myle ... by 
 Holland, Zealand, Zetland, and Norway coast.' Again 
 and again Dunbar refers to Zealand or Denmark, ex- 
 hibiting an intimate acquaintance with the country only 
 
 1 Black Acts, fol. 85, cap. 23.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 53 
 
 to be attained by a personal visit to it. Had I space I 
 would cite the references. 1 
 
 The next mission of State, wherein, from the internal 
 evidence of his poems, it is almost certain he was employed, 
 was to Rome. Pope Innocent vm. and his successor, 
 Alexander vi., had shown peculiar favour towards Scotland. 
 In the first place they had withdrawn the excommunication 
 pronounced upon the murderers of James m., and in the 
 second, they had acceded to the King's request, and had 
 raised the See of Glasgow to Archiepiscopal rank. In con- 
 sequence of that favourable conjunction of circumstances, 
 the Estates of the Realm considered it only consistent with 
 their dignity to send a splendid embassy to France, to 
 Spain, and finally to Rome. The Earl of Bothwell and 
 the Bishop of Glasgow (who was repairing to Rome to 
 receive the Archiepiscopal pallium) were the heads of the 
 embassy, and in the Black Acts we note that a sum of 
 ^■5000 was allocated for the expenses of the mission. 2 In 
 the Letter Book of St. Mark's Library published in the 
 Calendar of Venetian State Papers? under date 3rd June 
 1495, the intimation is made of the arrival there of certain 
 Scots ambassadors en route for Rome. That Dunbar 
 visited Venice is proved by his references to the city in his 
 poems, and I think this chain of evidence is sufficient to 
 create at least the very strongest presumption, if we cannot 
 
 1 Vide also Calendar of State Papers, and the Flyting, lines 377-384. 
 
 2 In Rymer's Foedera, torn. xii. p. 446, we note tliat Henry VII., on 14th 
 June 1493, granted passports and safe-conducts to the Earls of Bothwell 
 and Morton, the Bishops of Glasgow and Aberdeen, the Lords Glamis 
 and Oliphant, with 100 attendants, to travel through his dominions in 
 order to visit King Charles of France and Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. 
 
 s Vol. i. No. 628.
 
 54 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 go the length of affirming the absolute certainty of it, that 
 Dunbar was a member of the embassy. His friend and 
 patron, Bishop Blackadder, was at the head of the mission, 
 and there is Dunbar's own testimony in the Flyting that he 
 was absent from Scotland in 1493-94, while Kennedy even 
 alludes to the name of the vessel in which, as the Black 
 Acts tell us, the embassy sailed, viz. the Katherine, as 
 being that on which his poetical antagonist had been on 
 board during his journey. I think the argument may 
 fairly be regarded as conclusive. 
 
 From 1 49 1, therefore, until the close of 1495, William 
 Dunbar was ceaselessly travelling abroad in the service of 
 his master. That fact is beyond doubt, whether he was a 
 member of the embassy or alone. 1 But the fact that his 
 name does not appear in the Treasurer's accounts as having 
 debited the expenses of his missions inclines me to the belief 
 that his charges were included in the ^5000 guaranteed by 
 the Scots Parliament to the embassy. To such a mind as 
 Dunbar's, so impressionable and alive to all that savoured 
 of artistic beauty, whether in literature or art, his travels 
 abroad must have been to him as a second education. 
 While in Spain he would be brought in contact with those 
 romances in stone and lime wherewith that country abounds 
 — the Moorish palaces. Than the Alhambra at Granada 
 and the palaces and mosques of Cordova and Alcala de 
 Henares — where resided Cardinal Ximenes, the Maecenas 
 of Spain, probably appointed Archbishop of Toledo 
 
 1 There is an entry in the Treasurer's accounts which, though mentioning 
 no names, seems to point to Dunbar : ' Item till a prest that wrote the 
 instrumentis and oderis letteris, that past with the imbassitouris in France, 
 36s.'
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 55 
 
 ■while the ambassadors were there — nothing exists exactly 
 similar to them either in design or magnificence until we 
 reach the banks of the Ganges. Only the year before 
 their arrival also, there had set sail from the bar of Saltes 
 near Palos, with the Pinta and two other small vessels, that 
 mighty navigator who was to revolutionise the geographical 
 face of the world. In 1493 Columbus and his companions 
 had returned with the intelligence of those wondrous worlds 
 beyond the waste of seas. 1 Probably just when the Scottish 
 embassy was in Spain the whole country would be ringing 
 with the reports of the discovery of that new empire beyond 
 the western main which was to make Ferdinand and Isabella 
 the mightiest rulers of the world of their time. That Dunbar 
 had been deeply impressed with what he saw and heard 
 is evident from his reference to the New World in his poem 
 on The World's Instability, the date of the composition of 
 which cannot be later than 1496. In begging a benefice 
 from his master, he recounts the unworthy persons that 
 had received promotion, adding, with reference to some 
 promise given him — 
 
 ' Unworthy I, among the lave, 
 A kirk does crave, but none can have ; 
 It might have come in shorter while 
 From Calicut or the " New-Fund Isle." ' 
 
 From Spain he would proceed to France, and then to 
 Italy, where the monuments of ' the glory that was Greece ' 
 and ' the grandeur that was Rome ' would look down upon 
 him. Then the renown of Dante, of Boccaccio, of Petrarch, 
 of Giotto, of Brunelleschi, of Donatello, of Perugino and 
 
 1 Prescott, Ferdinand and Isabella,.
 
 56 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci, the magnificence of Lorenzo de Medici, 
 the majestic dignity of Alexander vi., one of the greatest of 
 the Popes, 1 together with that ineffable, inexplicable grace 
 which resides in everything pertaining to Italian art and 
 literature, and which afterwards reaches its efflorescence in 
 Raphael and Tasso, powerfully impressed him. His poems 
 teem with references to that Italian exuberance of beauty, 
 with which no receptive mind can long be brought in 
 contact without becoming fascinated by its witchery. When 
 William Dunbar turned his footsteps homewards along 
 with his companions he was a changed man. He had 
 seen the evils of insularity and of those narrow, bigoted 
 ideas Scotsmen, in those days, too often imbibed through 
 remaining so persistently within the limits of their own 
 country. His poems before and after this memorable 
 epoch of travel are quite distinct in tone from each other. 
 The former could not be mistaken as being the work of a 
 man who had travelled little and was hide-bound by the 
 prejudices of his isolated nation : the latter breathe the 
 free, joyous air of a catholic liberality of sentiment and 
 emancipation from that bigotry which is the bane of true 
 genius. 
 
 From the State Papers 2 we learn that while journeying 
 homewards letters reached Robert Blackadder, Archbishop 
 of Glasgow, requesting him to return to Spain in order to 
 confer with the representatives of Ferdinand and Isabella 
 about a marriage between James and one of the Spanish 
 princesses, although the curious fact is elicited from 
 other sources that the ladies in question were either all 
 
 1 Ranke' 's Lives of the Popes. - Bergenroth's Calendar of State Papers.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 57 
 
 contracted in marriage or were already married. In all 
 this diplomatic dealing glaring bad faith was kept with the 
 Scots King. Blackadder reached Spain late in August 1495, 
 and it is probable that Dunbar accompanied him. At all 
 events, the Archbishop reached home in October of the 
 next year, the other half of the embassy having returned 
 some time previous. 1 Another Scots embassy was de- 
 spatched to Spain from James iv. in November or December 
 1495, in order to strengthen the Archbishop's hands, and, 
 as we note from the Treasurer's accounts, the two missions 
 returned to Scotland together in the autumn of 1496, 
 Dunbar having been absent considerably over four years 
 from his native land. 
 
 1 Mr. Paterson, in his edition of Dunbar, when criticising Laing's state- 
 ment about the return of the embassy, mistakes the return of the Katherine, 
 the vessel which conveyed them to Spain, for the return of the embassy 
 itself. The latter did not return until 1496. The Bull of Pope Alex- 
 ander vi., confirming the foundation of the University of Aberdeen, one 
 of the objects of the mission, is dated Feb. 10, 1495.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE EPOCH OF THE 'FLYTING' 
 
 The closing years of the fifteenth century were in all 
 
 probability spent by Dunbar in Edinburgh as a courtier, 
 
 and as a Court poet. His intellectual vision had been 
 
 widened by travel, and his society was now doubtless 
 
 increasingly acceptable to the King. From many sources 
 
 he had received gratifying proofs of his popularity, and 
 
 doubtless his master did not forget his temporal wants. 
 
 As a courtier, Dunbar boarded at the King's expense, and 
 
 received each year his robe of red velvet fringed with costly 
 
 fur. He was required to be present at every public function, 
 
 and, if it presented scope for poetic treatment, to render 
 
 it into verse. This was the office of a 'King's Makar' or 
 
 laureate. That the work was expected of him, and was not 
 
 merely of a voluntary character, appears from Dunbar's 
 
 almost unknown poem addressed to the monarch, and 
 
 entitled On his Headache, in which he apologises for the 
 
 non-execution of some duty, stating that his 'head did so 
 
 ache yesternight ' that this day to ' make (compose) he did 
 
 not feel able.' A similar complaint was made by Shadwell 
 
 when he was laureate in the reign of James vn. 1 
 
 Dunbar was now in the last years of that extraordinary 
 
 1 Shadwell's Works, To his Headache. 
 58
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 59 
 
 century which had witnessed events so remarkable as the 
 invention of printing, the discovery of America, and also 
 the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco da 
 Gama, 
 
 ' Whose martial fires with prudence close allied 
 Ensured the smiles of fortune on his side,' l 
 
 the Fall of Constantinople with the consequent Revival of 
 Learning, and the overthrow of the Moors in Spain. He 
 was fully conscious how remarkable a century it had been, 
 and his references to it on more than one occasion are 
 characterised by a kind of wondering awe. Surely, he 
 thinks, the end of all things cannot now be far off. As 
 regards himself, the closing decade had among other things 
 been memorable for the humorous passage-at-arms in 
 which he had been engaged with his friend and great 
 poetic rival, Walter Kennedy. Not with ' swords or staves ' 
 was the warfare waged. It took the shape of an inter- 
 change of bitter, satirical lampoons on each other, in which 
 each attempted to vilify and depreciate the other's character 
 as much as possible. The contest was not without pre- 
 cedent, and has not lacked imitators. Luigi Pulci and 
 Matteo Franco in the Florence of Lorenzo de Medici, for 
 the amusement of their readers, loaded each other with the 
 grossest abuse, yet the intimacy of their friendship is said to 
 have continued without interruption. 2 Probably during his 
 Italian travels he had been brought in contact with the 
 
 1 Camoens, Lusiad, b. I. 
 
 2 Life of Lorenzo de Medici, by Roscoe. Dunbar could not have seen 
 Lorenzo personally, as he died in 1492, but probably he saw the other 
 members of the great family, particularly the sons of the great ' mediator 
 of Italy,' Giovann and Piero.
 
 60 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 very individuals themselves, and their example may have 
 suggested to him the course which he afterwards followed. 
 Among many imitations of the Flyting, that of Alexander 
 Montgomerie, author of The Cherrie and the She, and 
 Sir Patrick Hume of Polwart, is the best. The com- 
 mencement of the Flyting, at least, and in all probability 
 the greater part of it, was written during those years when 
 Dunbar was absent from Scotland on the Continent. 
 Indeed, the poet himself says as much in lines 89-96. At 
 present, suffice it to say that the series opens with a letter 
 from Dunbar to Sir John the Ross — a mutual friend of his 
 own and of Kennedy's, — in which he sarcastically alludes 
 to the boastful and self-complimentary style adopted by 
 Kennedy and the well-known poet of the period, Quentin 
 Shaw ] in some conjunct production they had just published. 
 That the piece in question is lost is to be regretted. We 
 then could have noted the passage which excited Dunbar's 
 mock wrath, and seen whether there was therein any reference 
 to Dunbar himself. The latter probably despatched at the 
 same time a letter to his friend Kennedy, proposing to him 
 that they should engage in a 'Flyting' of such a character 
 as that he had recently heard in Florence. From Florence 
 I have always had the idea Dunbar had sent his letter 
 home to Kennedy, enclosing at the same time to Sir John 
 the Ross the 'Challenge' which now forms Part 1. of the 
 Flyting. This, I think, must have occurred in the year 
 1494 or 1495. 
 Sir John the Ross, on receiving a communication so 
 
 1 That the latter is implied, and not an unknown poet of the name of 
 Quentin, is far more likely to be the case.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 61 
 
 extraordinary, would doubtless at once take steps to 
 forward to Kennedy his antagonist's challenge, and also 
 would make the matter as public as possible. As a courtier 
 he would have every facility so to do. In all likelihood, 
 from the numerous copies existing, every Court gallant and 
 every lady fair esteemed it ' the correct thing ' to boast a 
 copy of the Fly ting all to themselves, as the ladies and 
 gentlemen of the Court of George in. were accustomed 
 to carry about a volume of Fanny Burney's Evelina or 
 Cecilia. The King in person would not doubtless be the 
 last to see and ' admire ' the work of him whom, for his 
 sheer genius and keen intellectuality, he had chosen as his 
 confidential messenger. Nay, when Kennedy's reply came, 
 we can fancy how supremely James would enjoy the good 
 hard hitting contained in it. Can we not picture the 
 scene of the ' Merry Monarch,' himself a scholar who, as 
 Don Pedro de Ayala, the Spanish Ambassador, reported 
 to his master, ' spoke the following foreign languages — 
 Latin very well, French, German, Flemish, Italian, and 
 Spanish,' 1 and loved the literatures both of them and his 
 own land, reading aloud the pithy passages to the lords 
 of the Court with ever and anon the quizzical query put, 
 ' How think ye, my lords, our laureate will thole this, or 
 will reply to that other?' while the obsequious courtiers, 
 each hungry to please the royal giver of good things, would 
 fall into affected ecstasies of admiration where his majesty 
 admired, and condemn beyond hope of redemption the 
 places with which he was not so impressed ? Doubtless for 
 many a long day the two initial poems of the Fly ting series 
 
 1 Bergentoth's Simancas Papers, 169. 170.
 
 62 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 would be regarded with wonderment supreme, and men 
 would speculate anxiously as to who would be victor in a 
 contest so novel. 
 
 Many months must probably have elapsed before 
 Kennedy would receive his reply. There can be little 
 doubt, I think, that the third part of the Fly ting— -in 
 other words, Dunbar's second contribution to it — was not 
 published until 1496, or even 1497. The date may 
 perhaps have been slightly later; I do not think it can 
 be assigned to a period any earlier. The balance of the 
 internal evidence points, in my opinion, to its composition 
 subsequent, not prior, to Dunbar's return home. I am 
 aware that in taking this view I am placing myself in 
 opposition to such peerless critics of Dunbar's verse as 
 Dr. Schipper and Sheriff /Eneas Mackay, 1 than the latter of 
 whom few scholars in the kingdom have a more intimate 
 and universal acquaintance with every point relating to 
 early Scots literature. But the significance of Dunbar's 
 and of Kennedy's words, stating that the former was* 
 residing in Scotland, and in Edinburgh, I cannot overlook. 
 In a popular sketch such as the present, however, to enter 
 into all the minutiae of the controversy would be utterly out 
 of place. 
 
 The reply of Dunbar to Kennedy would of course be 
 speedily followed by the final response of the latter to his 
 antagonist, which probably was written early in 1498. The 
 evidence of the poems themselves may be cited to prove 
 the intense interest excited by this ' Battle of the Poets.' 
 
 1 Schipper's William Dunbar: Scin Leben und seine Gedichte ; Poems 
 of William Dunbar, edited for the Scottish Text Society by the late John 
 Small, with Introduction by JE. ]. G. Mackay, LL.D.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 63 
 
 To the popular mind there is something invincibly attrac- 
 tive in watching two intellectual antagonists, in a figurative 
 sense, ' rending and tearing each other.' One still recalls 
 the amazing interest excited more than a couple of decades 
 ago by the famous quarrel, finally fought out in the law- 
 courts, between Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Robert Buchanan. 
 The gladiatorial contest between the great Hector and 
 Achilles of the Court of King James appears to have 
 aroused an attention entirely incommensurate to the 
 importance of the issues at stake. The very fact that the 
 Flyting has been preserved in so many distinct forms in 
 the old mss. is proof of the widespread character of the 
 interest it aroused. The 'publication' of Kennedy's second 
 reply terminated the Flyting. Whether or no, as in the case 
 of Luigi Pulci and Matteo Franco, the clergy interfered 
 and interdicted further correspondence, 1 or whether the 
 good sense of the combatants suggested that they had 
 gone far enough, certain it is that the interchange of poems 
 stopped when each party had contributed two poems to 
 the series. The latter contributions are infinitely more 
 scurrilous and abusive than the first. Every name that 
 ingenuity could suggest as carrying with it the faintest 
 suspicion of a vituperative meaning was hurled to and 
 fro between the antagonists. The incidents of their 
 respective lives, be they as destitute as could be of any 
 flagitious associations, were all perverted for the purpose 
 of holding the individual up to ridicule, or to lay charges of 
 crimes the most absurd and impossible against him. When 
 Dunbar stated that the vessel in which he had been 
 
 1 Roscoe, Life of Lorenzo de Medici.
 
 64 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 travelling had been wrecked, Kennedy instantly replied 
 that he did not wonder at it — 
 
 1 While thou, devil's birth Dunbar, was on the sea, 
 The sauls had sunken through the sin of thee.' 
 
 In using the word 'published' above, it must not be 
 stipposed that as yet it was synonymous with printed. 
 Although there were many books in Scotland at that time, 
 they all came from England or the Continent. No print- 
 ing-press was established in Scotland until 1507, when 
 Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar obtained the King's 
 permission to erect one. The following is the commence- 
 ment of their royal charter granting them a monopoly of 
 the trade : 1 ' James, etc. — To al and sindri our officiaris, 
 lieges, and subdittis, quham it efferis, quhais knawledge 
 thir our lettres salcum, gretting : Wit ye that forsamekill as 
 our lovittis servitouris Walter Chepman and Andro Millar, 
 burgesses of our burgh of Edinburgh, has at our instance 
 and request, for our plesour, the honour and profitt of our 
 Realme and Leigis, taken on them to furnis and bring 
 hame, ane prent, with all stuff belangand tharto, and 
 expert men to use the samyne, for imprenting within our 
 Realme of the bukis of our Lawis, Actis of Parliament, 
 Cronicles, Mess books, and portuus, efter the use of our 
 Realme, with additions and legendis of Scottis Sanctis 
 now gaderit to be ekit thereto and al otheris bukis that 
 salbe seen necessar ... we have granted and promittit 
 to thame that thai sail nocht be hurt nor prevenit tharon 
 be ony utheris to tak copyis of any bukis furth of our 
 
 1 Registrum Seer, Sig., iii. 129.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 65 
 
 Realme to gar imprent the same in utheris countreis, to be 
 brocht and sauld agane within our realm,' etc. 
 
 Prior to the establishment of this press in the Cowgate, 
 there was absolutely no means of getting any work printed 
 unless by sending it to England. The practice then of 
 hand-copying, the process in vogue for so many hundreds 
 of years prior to Faust and Gutenberg's great discovery, 
 lingered on longer in Scotland than in almost any other 
 corner of Europe. Though Chepman established his press 
 in 1507, and for several years put out books from it, the 
 national troubles after Flodden seem to have checked the 
 nascent industry. It was not until 1542 that another 
 printer settled for a time in Scotland, but not until 1580 
 that Vautrollier l and others appear to have finally estab- 
 lished the industry on a permanent basis. 2 
 
 Therefore, when Dunbar and Kennedy were engaged 
 in their wordy warfare, any copies which the King or the 
 courtiers desired had of course to be transcribed from 
 the originals, exchanged by the principals in the Flyting. 
 But as many persons in those days earned their living by 
 making additional copies of volumes which were desired 
 to be retained in duplicate, or in multiple, to prepare a 
 series of copies would be a task of no difficulty to the 
 scribes of the time. 
 
 During the final decade of fhe fifteenth century Dunbar's 
 muse must have been very busy. Notwithstanding the 
 fact that he was travelling all over Europe from the banks 
 
 1 Cf. Calderwood's Historie of the Kirk of Scotland, vol. iv. p. 467 ; 
 also Appendix, vol. viii. p. 283. 
 
 2 Thomas Davidson, printer to James v., and Henry Charteris in 1568, 
 made strenuous efforts to establish the industry, but the time was not ripe. 
 
 E
 
 66 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 of the Tiber to those of the Guadalquivir, from the shores 
 of the Seine to those of ' cauld Norway over the faem,' he 
 was no idler, nor had he ever been one of the gilded 
 youth of the Court who frittered away life on unworthy 
 pleasures. Those ten years from 1490 to 1500 witnessed 
 a mighty advance in Dunbar's intellectual stature, as we 
 shall examine more closely when we reach the closing 
 chapters of our monograph. He began them uttering the 
 feeble note of a conventional singer, such as we trace 
 in his New Year's Gift to the King, The Tod and the 
 Lamb, and The Twa Married Women and the Widow. 
 He ends them with the firm full utterance of a great and 
 imperially strong singer, such as is perceptible in The 
 Ladies' Solicitors at Court, In Fraise of Women, and 
 finally the imperishable piece which James seemed to 
 regard with such favour, Dunbar's Dirge to the King at 
 Stirling} 
 
 Dunbar's experience, like Ulysses', of the 'customs and 
 countries of many men,' enabled him to draw upon an 
 exhaustless fund of illustration and example to render his 
 verse more acceptable to those butterflies of the Court to 
 whom the contemporary allusions in a poem were the sole 
 element of interest. In this respect Dunbar was beyond 
 question the most catholicly cultured of fifteenth-century 
 singers. Nay, even with the exception of Shakespeare and 
 Ben Jonson, he need fear comparison with none of the 
 greater poets of the succeeding century as well. The 
 
 1 I adopt Schipper's chronology (as published in his edition of Dunbar) 
 regarding the approximate dates for the composition of the poems. See 
 also Sheriff Mackay's admirable remarks in the Scottish Text Society's 
 edition of the poems.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 67 
 
 Golden Targe, which was one of the earliest, if not the very 
 earliest, of his youthful works, displays this quality very 
 prominently. It is filled with allusions that would almost 
 infallibly have betrayed the authorship, if through any 
 chance it had been published anonymously. The famous 
 lines beginning 
 
 'O reverend Chaucer, rose of rhetoris all,' 
 
 would be sufficient in themselves to have led any well- 
 informed critic to have decided without hesitation that 
 these stanzas were forged upon the same anvil as The 
 Twa Married Women and the Widow, or the New Year's 
 Gift to the King. The coinage from Dunbar's mint was 
 not stamped like that of any other author. He was his 
 own mint-master, and the phrases he employed are to be 
 found in the poems of no other writer of his time.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 .'<- 
 
 THE EPOCH OF THE KING S MARRIAGE : DUNBAR AS A 
 COURTIER IN ENGLAND 
 
 With the commencement of the sixteenth century we 
 
 reach that period in Dunbar's life when the historic data 
 
 upon which we can proceed in weaving a consecutive 
 
 narrative of his life become more numerous and more 
 
 reliable. There is a reference in one of his poems, 
 
 1 When I was young and into ply, 
 I had been bought in realms by 
 Had I consented to be sauld.' 1 
 
 From this allusion we glean the fact that his skill and 
 resource in discharging his master's behests had been 
 remarked by the Court officials of either England or 
 France, and that he was sounded as to whether he felt 
 inclined to transfer his services. Though Dunbar here 
 utilises the incident to show, if James were slow to reward 
 the poet according to his deserts, that other monarchs had 
 indicated their disposition to make up for the neglect if 
 they had the opportunity, still we may feel assured that the 
 hints were sternly discouraged. A truer patriot than 
 Dunbar did not exist in the Scotland of his day. He was 
 not one of those the fervency of whose patriotism was in 
 exact ratio with the scale of the rewards heaped on them. 
 
 1 The Petition of the Avid Gray Horse Dunbar to the King.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 69 
 
 Perhaps James may have relied too much on the absolute 
 incorruptibility of his laureate's fidelity, and reserved his 
 honours too persistently for those whose patriotism was 
 a variable quantity. 
 
 We have seen that he visited the Courts of France and 
 England in the previous century. That his work had been 
 well done there can be little doubt, and now he was to 
 experience the first official mark of his sovereign's con- 
 fidence and regard. In theTrivy Seal Register, under date 
 August 15th, 1500, 1 stands the following entry: 'A Lettre 
 made to Maister William Dunbar of the gift of ten ti (;£io) 
 of pensioune to be paid to him from our Soverane Lord's 
 Coffers by the Thesaurer (Treasurer) for all the days of his 
 life, or until he be promovit by our Soverane Lord to a 
 benefice of £40 or abone,' etc. 
 
 This yearly pension of ^10 Laing thinks may have 
 been granted in consequence of that very importunate 
 address to the King in which he says, 
 
 ' Sir, yet remember as of before 
 How that my youth is done forlore 
 In your service, with pain and grief, 
 Good conscience cries " Reward therefore." 
 
 I rather incline to think, however, with Schipper, that the 
 above is one of Dunbar's later petitions to King James, as 
 he could hardly say at forty that ' his youth was done 
 forlore' in the King's service. 2 It is certainly more 
 pleasant to believe that the poet's reward was unsought, 
 and came to him as a tribute to his own merit. From the 
 accounts of the Lord High Treasurer I observe that the 
 
 1 Vide I? eg. Seer. Sigill., vol. ii. fol. 9. 
 
 2 Vide Schipper's Poems of William Dunbar, p. 259.
 
 7 o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 pension was regularly paid at Whitsunday and Martinmas, 
 until May 1507, when an alteration was made which shall 
 be chronicled in its place. 
 
 With regard to the amount of the pension Laing very 
 aptly remarks : 'The sum of ten pounds may appear small, 
 and at that time one pound of English money was equal to 
 three pounds ten shillings Scots. But we must be careful 
 not to reckon the value of money in those days by the 
 present standard.' 1 From the estimate of the purchasing- 
 power of Scots money, comparatively with that of France 
 and England, given by Ruddiman, Maitland, and Chalmers, 
 I reckon that Dunbar's pension should have been equal 
 upon an average to about ^35 of our money. But then 
 Dunbar was boarded at the King's expense, and as a 
 courtier he received his robe, so that actually he must 
 have been at very little expense for living. 2 
 
 Besides, from the Treasurer's books the fact is apparent 
 that Dunbar had received many gratuities from the King 
 over and above his pension. In January 1506, and again 
 in the same month of 1507, we read, 'To Master William 
 Dunbar by the king's command because he lacked his gown 
 at Yule, £5'; and in January 151 2, 'Item to Master 
 William Dunbar for his Yule livery six ells and a quarter 
 of Paris black to make him a gown, ^£12, 10s. ; also ^3, 
 2s. 6d. for five quarters of scarlet, being his customary 
 Yule livery ' ; also in the December of the same year ' forty 
 pounds for his Martinmas fee.' All these facts go to prove 
 
 1 Laing's Dunbar. 
 
 * Boece, as Principal of the University of Aberdeen, 'enjoyed a revenue 
 of forty Scottish merks,' about £2, 4s. 6d. (Cf. Johnson's Journey to the 
 Hebrides, and his remarks on the relative value of money. )
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 71 
 
 the following points — that Dunbar had no reason to complain 
 of the King's liberality as yet, and, second, that the poet 
 must have resided continuously at the Court at Holyrood 
 or Falkland, and not, like his great rival Kennedy, ' among 
 the leavis grene' of the country. Like Samuel Johnson 
 towards Fleet Street, William Dunbar considered the High 
 Street and Canongate of Edinburgh the fairest spots on 
 earth. He was a lover of town life, of its luxuries, its amuse- 
 ments, and its gaieties. From the sentiments expressed 
 in his Dirge to the King at Stirling (which must have 
 been written before James's marriage), we can see how 
 rural life palled upon him. 1 He was at one with Maecenas, 
 who thought the 'noise and smoke of happy Rome' to 
 be preferred to Horace's Fons Bandusia and the delights of 
 the Sabine farm ; and to William Dunbar the scenes which 
 he daily witnessed in the busy, dirty, crowded, malodorous 
 streets of the capital, which he pictures so inimitably in 
 his Address to the Merchants of Edinburgh, had a charm 
 infinitely more fascinating than the matin-song of birds, 
 heard in some leafy grove, than the slumber of the summer 
 sunshine on the green Pentland slopes, over which the 
 cloud-shadows flitted like the voiceless spirits of the past ; 
 better even than the multitudinous laughter of the sun- 
 kissed sea, or its sullen rage as it dashed itself in breakers 
 of creamy spume against the iron-bound shores of his 
 native Firth. 
 
 But he was once more to be recalled from his much- 
 loved occupation of 'brieving ballates for the King's 
 
 1 Maitland's History of Scotland; Chalmers's Caledonia; Ruddiman's 
 Diplomata Scotiae.
 
 72 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 plesour,' to undertake the arduous duties of King's 
 messenger. From the Treasurer's books we observe that 
 his pension due at Martinmas or November 1501 was not 
 paid with the others on the 20th December, but was ' payit 
 him aftir he cam furth of Ingland.' The cause was his 
 despatch on 'the marriage mission,' along with the 
 ambassadors who were sent to England in October 1501, 
 and returned in February 1502. This embassy, as I have 
 said, was once more concerned with the question of the 
 royal marriage. His subjects were becoming anxious over 
 the question of the succession to the Crown, for if James 
 died without issue the country would once more be rent 
 by the civil dissensions of the various claimants to the 
 throne. 1 Times and oft they had implored him to marry. 
 As has already been pointed out, negotiations were opened 
 with Ferdinand and Isabella for the hand of one of the 
 Spanish princesses. After keeping him in suspense for 
 some years the insulting offer is alleged to have been 
 mooted of Ferdinand's natural daughter Donna Juana, 2 if 
 her legitimacy could be legally secured by a Papal pro- 
 clamation. James haughtily declined even the suggestion 
 of such a union, and then the question of a matrimonial 
 alliance with England was formally brought up. Not that 
 the monarch was at all anxious to assume the conjugal 
 yoke. Several ladies of high rank were his mistresses, by 
 whom he had two or three illegitimate children. 8 He 
 
 1 Tvtler's History of Scotland ; Burton's History. 
 
 2 Bergenroth's Calendar of State Papers. 
 
 3 Drummond, in his History of the Five Jameses, gives their names- 
 Alexander, afterwards Archbishop of St. Andrews, so much admired by- 
 Erasmus ; Margaret, married to John, Lord Gordon ; James, Earl of 
 Moray ; and Jean, married to Malcolm, Lord Fleming.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 73 
 
 would willingly have allowed matters to rest where they 
 were. But the Estates of the Realm were so persistent in 
 their requests that at length he assented to approach the 
 Court of Henry vn. with regard to the matter. Across 
 the Border the proposal was accorded most gratifying 
 treatment. The whole nation was favourable to the union, 
 in the hope that it would put an end to those centuries of 
 hostility that had brought sorrow and loss to both countries. 
 After the overtures had been received in so favourable a 
 manner, the Scots monarch was invited to send an Embassy 
 to the Court of Henry vn. to arrange the terms of the 
 alliance with the Princess Margaret. 
 
 The ambassadors who are named in the safe-conduct, 
 dated 2nd July 1500, were Robert Blackadder, Archbishop 
 of Glasgow; Patrick Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, High 
 Admiral; Andrew Forman, Apostolical Prothonotary (after- 
 wards Bishop of Moray) ; and Sir Robert Lundy, Treasurer 
 of Scotland, with a retinue of one hundred persons. 1 The 
 royal pair being within the fourth degree of consanguinity, 
 a Papal dispensation had to be obtained, dated at Rome 
 5th August 1500. 2 This fact, and the extreme youth of the 
 Princess Margaret, occasioned some delay, as Laing records. 
 But the negotiations were not interrupted, and under a new 
 safe-conduct, dated 9th May 1501, and carrying with them 
 the contract of marriage, dated 8th October 1501, the same 
 ambassadors named above departed for London. William 
 Dunbar was one of the company. Where Blackadder 
 went he was almost certain to have insisted upon Dunbar 
 being one of his company. 
 
 1 Rotuli Scotiae, vol. ii. p. 542. - Rymer's Foedera.
 
 74 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Dunbar in his poems more than once refers to the 
 Princess's marriage jointure being worthy of James's liberality. 
 The lands assigned her, as Rymer records, 1 were the forest 
 of Ettrick, the manor and fortress of Newark, the county 
 of March, the lordships of Dunbar and Cockburnspath, the 
 lordship and palace of Linlithgow, the lordship and castle 
 of Stirling, the earldom of Menteith, the lordship and 
 castle of Down, and the palace and lordship of Methven — 
 truly a noble wedding settlement. 
 
 Now it may be asked, What evidence have we on record 
 that Dunbar was one of the ambassadorial party? The 
 answer is — Absolutely decisive ! The credit of disinterring 
 this belongs to Laing. Let us in justice to himself permit 
 him to tell it in his own words. 2 According to the Cotton 
 mss., 'the Scottish ambassadors on arriving in London 
 entered at Bishopsgate, and were conveyed through Cornhill 
 and Cheapside to the Lord St. John's without Smithfield, 
 where they were lodged. In the Christmas week they were 
 entertained at dinner by the Lord Mayor, and it was on 
 this occasion that Dunbar recited his verses in praise of 
 the City of London.' 
 
 In folio 199 of the Cotton ms. we read: 'This yere in 
 the Cristmas weke, the Mair had to dyner the Ambasadors 
 of Scotland, whom accompanyed my Lord Chauncelor and 
 other Lords of this realme : where sittying at dyner, one 
 of the said Scottis giving attendaunce upon a Bisshop 
 Ambassador, the which was reported to be a Prothonotary 
 of Scotland, and servant of the said Bisshop, made this 
 
 1 Rymer's Foedera, torn. xiii. p. 62. 
 
 2 Laing's Dunbar, vol. i. p. 272.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 75 
 
 balade folowying.' Then is appended Dunbar's poem 
 which begins — 
 
 '&* 
 
 ' London, thou are of Townes A per se 
 Soveraign of cities semeliest in sight 
 Of high renown riches and royalty 
 Of lordis, barons and many a goodly knight.' 
 
 In this poem Dunbar pays a noble tribute to the 
 splendour of London, which seems to have impressed him 
 deeply. Some of the phrases he employs are testimony 
 of the pleasure he derived from his stay in the English 
 metropolis. ' London, thou art the flour of cities all,' 
 ' Gerarae of all joy, jasper of jocunditie,' 'Empress of 
 towns,' 'Sweet paradise precelling in pleasure,' 'O Town 
 of Towns, patron without compare,' are some of the epithets 
 showered by him on. the London of Henry vn. Great as 
 was his love for the Queen City of the Forth, honesty 
 compelled him to grant that the palm must be assigned to 
 the ' Empress-City of the Thames.' Patriotism did not blind 
 him to the undeniable facts of the world around him, 
 and he obtained his reward for his impartiality. During 
 the Christmas festivities, 'The Rhymer of Scotland,' whose 
 poem on London was the theme of praise universal, and 
 whom we have seen to be beyond doubt Dunbar, received 
 from Henry vn. a gift of jQ6, 13s. 4d. on the 31st 
 December 1501, and on the 7th January 1502 another 
 gratuity of the same amount. 1 The latter present in all 
 probability would be bestowed upon him in consequence 
 of some congratulatory Ode to the Princess Margaret in 
 view of her approaching betrothal to the King of Scots, 
 
 1 Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VII., in Bentley's Excerpta Historica.
 
 76 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Dunbar, while a noble genius, was also the most far-seeing 
 of opportunists. Never was there a chance neglected by 
 him of advancing his own interests. Genius in his eyes 
 was shrewdness tempered by expediency. He saw in this 
 visit his life's chance of distinguishing himself. He had 
 no scruples on the score of delicacy, or hesitation in 
 thrusting himself forward before the poets of the England 
 of the time. Perhaps he entertained that lordly contempt 
 for them which they deserved. Be this as it may, Dunbar 
 left London a man of much greater consequence than 
 when he entered it. Doubtless his firm friend and patron, 
 Archbishop Blackadder, had been duly instrumental in 
 furthering his interests amongst those at the English Court 
 who were in a position to assist the poet. The miserly 
 Henry vn. was not the man to present an unknown poet 
 with gifts so valuable unless he had been specially brought 
 under his notice by some of his leading courtiers. 
 
 Taking all these items of evidence into account, there- 
 fore, it is almost a certainty that William Dunbar was one 
 of that brilliant company which on the 25th of January 
 1502 witnessed, at St. Paul's Cross, London, the ceremony 
 of the formal affiancing of the Princess Margaret to King 
 James. 1 The rite was celebrated with great pomp and 
 solemnity, Patrick, Earl of Bothwell, being the King's 
 proxy on the occasion, and Archbishop Blackadder, 
 Testificator-in-Chief for the kingdom of Scotland. That 
 Dunbar would be near his patron at the ceremony in 
 order that he might see and hear all with a view to 
 preserving a record of it in his verse, may be taken for 
 
 1 Rymer, vol. xii. ; Rotull Scotiae.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 77 
 
 granted. As the princess was very young, only in her 
 thirteenth year, the marriage-contract specially stipulated 
 that her father should not be obliged to send her to 
 Scotland before the 12th September 1503. 1 
 
 Doubtless Dunbar, while in England, wrote many poems 
 on subjects arising out of special circumstances of this 
 visit. That none of these have as yet been discovered, 
 close though the search made for them has been, is a 
 matter occasioning not a little surprise in the minds of 
 Dunbar students. He had every reason to exert his 
 poetical abilities to the utmost when in England, for the 
 recognition he received would be generous in the extreme. 
 Dunbar was at that moment the greatest living English- 
 speaking poet of his epoch. He alone, along with the 
 brilliant group that surrounded the throne of James iv., 
 saved the age from utter sterility, and threw a lustre over 
 the literature of the Northern Kingdom which it was 
 never again to lose. 'South of the Tweed,' as the late 
 Professor Henry Morley remarks, ' in the twenty-four years 
 of Henry vn.'s reign, from 1485 to 1509, the fields of 
 literature lay still bound by the long winter of a Civil 
 War. ... It is evidence of the weakness of our literature 
 under Henry vn., that two foreigners, a Frenchman and 
 an Italian, Bernard Andre and Polydore Vergil, would 
 have been named by the King himself, or by any English- 
 man, if he had then been asked who were the chief 
 writers in England.' 2 Can the fact be wondered at 
 then that William Dunbar, with his brilliant genius and 
 
 1 This, however, was not observed. The Princess reached Scotland in 
 August 1502. — Burton. 
 
 2 English Writers, vol. vii. pp. 56-59.
 
 78 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 surpassing faculty of musical rhythmical composition, must 
 have struck the Londoners as a poet of the most super- 
 lative excellence. 
 
 But an epoch in Dunbar's life is now about to open — 
 the most prolific as well as the most supreme in the history 
 of his genius — an epoch when, as a laureate, he would 
 be presented with a fitting theme for his verse. In July 
 1502 the Princess Margaret set out from her father's 
 palace at Richmond on her journey towards Scotland. 1 
 Escorted as far as Colleweston by the King, he there 
 resigned her to the care of the Earls of Northumberland 
 and Surrey, who, with a magnificent retinue of lords and 
 earls, knights and esquires, conducted her to the meeting- 
 place on the borders of the two countries — Lamberton 
 Kirk, where her husband-elect, with all pomp and splen- 
 dour, was waiting to receive her. In the train of the 
 Scots monarch rode William Dunbar, ready to welcome 
 the Princess with 'ane ballate of gratulation.' 
 
 1 Maitland's History.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 CELEBRATION OF THE MARRIAGE : DUNBAR'S 
 EPITHALAMIUM 
 
 On the 5th August 1502 James iv. met his bride at 
 Lamberton Kirk. On the succeeding day they travelled 
 as far as Dalkeith; on the 7th the King escorted her to 
 the gates of Edinburgh, which they entered amidst the 
 enthusiastic joy of the inhabitants, and every demonstra- 
 tion of welcome. The King went to meet his fair Margaret 
 arrayed magnificently in a jacket of crimson velvet, 
 bordered with cloth of gold. His doublet was of violet 
 satin, his hose of scarlet, his shirt bound with precious 
 stones and pearls, his spurs gilt and long. He mounted 
 the palfrey of the Princess, who sat on pillion behind 
 him, and so moved on to Edinburgh. As they entered 
 the city the houses and windows were hung with tapestry, 
 and were full of lords and ladies, gentlemen and gentle- 
 women, and in the streets was so great a multitude of 
 people that it was a fair thing to see. On the 8th of 
 the same month the marriage ceremony took place in 
 the Abbey of Holyrood, with, says Laing, a degree of 
 solemnity and splendour which perhaps was never equalled 
 in this part of the kingdom. 1 The Scots capital wore its 
 
 1 Arnot's History of Edinburgh; Anderson's Edinburgh. 
 
 79
 
 80 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 festal attire, fountains festooned with flowers flowed with 
 wine in the open street, whole oxen and sheep were 
 roasted in the High Street, every house was draped with 
 'cloth of gold or cramoisie,' every burgess and his wife 
 sported it in new attire. Never was there such a season 
 of rejoicing before or since in the old Scots capital. 
 
 William Dunbar was rejoicing with the others. He 
 was glad that at last the King was honourably married, 
 and that the standing scandal of his relations with several 
 ladies of rank would now be at an end. Dunbar loved 
 his monarch, and the depth of his affection was proved 
 by the fact that he did not scruple to talk pretty straight 
 to him, and to rebuke him sharply when he felt that such 
 a course of action would tend to the King's good. The 
 poet was no censorious hypocrite. His advice was based 
 on sound moral principle, of which an echo would be 
 awakened in every true heart — ay, in that of the King 
 himself, who was very far indeed from being the heartless 
 sensualist he is too often represented. 
 
 But Dunbar's joy would not be complete if it did not 
 express itself through the medium of his beloved art. 
 When the lovely Princess Margaret, escorted by her 
 handsome husband-elect, arrived at Holyrood, she was 
 in all probability received and welcomed by some 
 spectacular enterlainment. My theory is that Dunbar's 
 exquisite little poem, which I cannot refrain from quoting 
 here, formed the central item in a kind of masque. 1 
 
 1 John Young, Somerset Herald, in his interesting Journal of the 
 Princess's progress from England to Scotland, written for Henry Vii.'s 
 own eye, remarks that at the festivities ' Mynstrells of Musicke ' at different 
 times played and sung ballads in the King's and Queen's presence.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 81 
 
 The poem has lived, the masque has perished. The 
 
 ode is inscribed 'To the Princess Margaret on her 
 
 arrival at Holyrood,' and must therefore have been 
 
 presented to her before her marriage on the following 
 
 day. The piece is characterised by all Dunbar's poetic 
 
 force and figurative felicity. It runs as follows : — 
 
 ' Now fair, fairest of every fair, 
 Princess most pleasant and preclare, 
 The lustiest one alyve that bene, 
 Welcome of Scotland to be Quene. 
 
 Young tender plant of pulchritude, 
 Descendyd of Imperyalle blude : 
 Freshe fragrant floure of fayre hede shene, 
 Welcum of Scotland to be Quene. 
 
 Swete, lusty, lnsum lady clere, 
 Most mighty Kinges daughter dere, 
 Borne of a princess most serene, 
 Welcum of Scotland to be Quene ; 
 
 Welcum the Rose bothe red and white, 
 Welcum the flower of our delight : 
 Our Spirit Rejoicing from the splene, 
 Welcum of Scotland to be Quene. 
 
 Welcum of Scotland,' etc. 
 
 But Dunbar was not content with this. In view of the 
 royal marriage, when all others were presenting gifts to the 
 bride and bridegroom, Dunbar came forward with the 
 richest gift of all, that magnificent Epithalamium The 
 Thistle and the Hose, which to this day one reads with 
 delight and admiration. In all likelihood the poem would 
 be placed before the royal pair on their wedding day, or 
 immediately after it, although it had been written some 
 three months previous. To the English visitors the fact 
 would be brought home that on the sterile soil of Scotland 
 
 F
 
 82 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 had been reared a singer whose genius was so soaring that 
 to find his compeer they had to go back to Geoffrey 
 Chaucer. The effect produced by it was electrical. Con- 
 temporary chronicles all mention it, and the poem of that 
 century which has been as frequently as any other found 
 among the larger of the ancient collections, the Bannatyne 
 and other mss., is The Thistle and the Rose. It was the 
 first great national poem which was felt worthy of national 
 attention — for Barbour's Bruce and Blind Harry's Wallace 
 can only be regarded as little better than rhyming chronicles, 
 — and it placed Dunbar at the pinnacle of that reputation 
 from which he was never afterwards to be displaced. 
 
 To the young Queen also the poem would in all pro- 
 bability prove for its author a means of introduction. 
 Even so proud a lady as the daughter of Henry vn. might 
 feel flattered by a tribute so glorious, yet withal so delicate, 
 as that paid in The Thistle and the Rose. That Margaret 
 was afterwards upon terms of the closest intimacy with 
 Dunbar is evident from the testimony of his poems. No 
 man would dare to make mention of the Queen in the 
 manner in which Dunbar did without having good grounds 
 for so doing, least of all the Court poet, the permanence 
 of whose position was dependent solely on the favour 
 wherein he stood with his royal master and his lady. 1 Such 
 compositions as To the Queue — Of James Doig, Keeper 
 of the Queen's Wardrop, Madame your men said they 
 would ride, A Dance in the Queue's Chamber, and other 
 poems, are proof positive of a close intimacy existing 
 between the young girl dragged from her home atmosphere 
 
 1 Cf. Mackay's Life of Dunbar, and Schipper.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 83 
 
 of quiet comfort to stand in the fierce light that beat upon the 
 
 Scots throne, and the large-hearted, joyous-spirited laureate 
 
 of the Court, who, while he could with all the dignity and 
 
 authority of his grey 1 hairs read the monarch, in The 
 
 Thistle and the Rose, a stern lesson about relinquishing, 
 
 now he was married, all unlawful loves — 
 
 1 Hold no other flower in such duty 
 As the fresh Rose of colour red and white, 
 For if thou dost, hurt is thine honesty,' 
 
 yet could so far enter into the giddy gaieties of the Court 
 as to dance a ' dirry dantoun ' in the Queen's chamber — 
 and that so energetically as to lose his slipper in his 
 exertions. No wonder that the lonely girl, to whom all 
 in the Court appeared so strange and so unwonted, clung 
 with an earnestness of affection, unusual in one occupying 
 so exalted a position, to this keenly sympathetic, yet intel- 
 lectually peerless singer of the far North. Margaret doubt- 
 less felt that in this great-souled man there was to be found 
 at once a protector, an adviser, and a friend. We shall yet 
 see that her goodwill was to bear abundant fruit in the 
 days that were to come. For the delicate, unobtrusive 
 kindness he showed the girl-wife he was to reap his reward 
 when his patron and monarch was no more. 
 
 For the next two or three years Dunbar's life was that of 
 a courtier, enjoying to the full the pleasures and the jubi- 
 lations which attended the home-bringing of a Queen to 
 preside over all the pomp and the pageant of the Scottish 
 Court. Contemporary chronicles tell us that for nearly 
 two years the pleasures and the merry-making went on. 
 
 1 That Dunbar had already grown grey in the service of the Court, see 
 the poem The Auld Gray Horse Dioibar.
 
 84 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 James apparently was determined that his young wife 
 should be kept from brooding over the severance of all her 
 early relations, until new links were forged in the chain of 
 life that would bind her to the land of her adoption. In 
 those ' spectacles ' and exhibitions William Dunbar took 
 his full share, and the poems of his which are by general 
 consent attributed to this period are filled with allusions to 
 the splendour and the gaiety of the Court, to the bustle 
 and the business of the crowded capital city, to the con- 
 stant succession of impressive pageants which passed up 
 and down the streets of the romantic town, from Holyrood 
 to the Castle, from the Castle to the Kirk of St. Giles, or 
 the stately pile of Craigmillar. 
 
 Nay, the whole many-sided life of that brilliant time 
 lives for us once more in the undying verse of the great 
 poet. Once more we seem to see the Court of James iv. 
 before us — to behold the King and the gay courtier gallants, 
 accompanied by Queen Margaret, Mrs. Musgrave her Lady 
 of the Bedchamber, and her five Maids of Honour, sweeping 
 away in a glittering cavalcade, on some hawking expedition 
 to the Hunter's Bog, and to Duddingston, or to hunt the red 
 deer in the Forest of Drumsheugh, or across the Borough- 
 muir towards Braid or Pentland. Or, again, we behold the 
 lists set in the tilting-ground at Greenside, while thousands 
 of spectators lining the green slopes of the Calton Hill ob- 
 serve with shouts of pride that no one can excel their own 
 manly monarch in all the knightly sports of the period. 1 
 
 Or we are carried on the wings of imagination, by the 
 magic wand of the poet, into the stately Church of St. Giles, 
 
 1 Letter of Don Pedro de Ayala, Ambassador from Spain to Scotland, in 
 Bergenroth's Simancas State Papers.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 85 
 
 at Easter-tide, when midnight mass is being celebrated at 
 the Pontifical High Altar before the King and Queen. 
 Once more we seem to see the splendour of that shrine, 
 the value of the jewels and the ornaments whereon were 
 reckoned by tens of thousands of pounds— now flashing 
 and gleaming under the glow of numberless candles shed- 
 ding light over the wondrous scene, — now wellnigh con- 
 cealed by the rolling clouds of incense that rise like a 
 holocaust heavenwards. We hear the sweet voices of the 
 choristers rising and falling in cadence, the storm of music 
 that rolls overhead from the great organ, and the sudden 
 hush of the mighty throng of worshippers as the elevation 
 of the Host takes place. 
 
 But not alone the fashionable life at Court or the ornate 
 ecclesiastical ritual finds a place in the verse of this great 
 poetical artist. The High Street and the Canongate of the 
 Edinburgh of the sixteenth century rise again before us in 
 vision as we read. We see the towering tenements with 
 their fronts of polished ashlar, or of timber from the 
 Boroughmuir, and their ' forestairs,' or outside flights of 
 steps, whereon lords and ladies stand to gossip and to flirt 
 after their 12-0'clock dinners. We note also the sign-poles 
 of those merchants apostrophised by Dunbar, 1 whose 
 ' booths ' are in evidence everywhere, clustering like bees 
 round the walls of the collegiate Church of St. Giles. 
 Once more there is brought home to us that vivid picture 
 of city life drawn with such supreme skill and picturesque- 
 ness in his Address to the Merchants of Edinburgh. The 
 very figures seem animate in that bustling crowd which fills 
 
 1 Address to the Merchants.
 
 86 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 the thoroughfares— those thoroughfares down which none 
 could pass without having their nostrils saluted with ' the 
 stink of haddocks and of skate,' and without having their 
 ears deafened by the innumerable street cries, or by the 
 scoldings of carlines flyting and fleeching— those thorough- 
 fares, like that 'stinkand style,' 1 the houses of which 'keep 
 the light from your parish kirk,' and which seem planted 
 in their position for no other reason than to congest the 
 stream of traffic at the least convenient place. 
 
 We are led by our guide down past the High Cross, 
 where gold and silver should have been sold, but where, 
 alas ! we discover only curds and milk, past the ' Butter 
 Tron,' where cluster the butter-wives, with the noisy sellers 
 of 'cockles and wilks,' and those white meal-puddings 
 called 'Jock and Jame.' The headlong merriment and 
 good-humoured horse-play increases the nearer we approach 
 Holyrood. Street minstrels hoarsely bawl out of tune the 
 two airs— their sole repertoire — 'Now the day dawns,' and 
 ' Into June ' ; the apprentices of the tailors, the shoemakers, 
 and ' the other viler crafts,' shouting the excellences of their 
 masters' wares, add to the perpetual Babel ; while the vast 
 army of beggars, of which the burgh is but a nest, molest 
 honest people with their persistent cries for alms, so that 
 ' one may not walk the streets in comfort through the im- 
 portunities of the crooked, the blind, and the lame.' 
 
 Yet cheek by jowl with the beggar in rags passes the 
 haughty noble followed by his armed retainers ; the great 
 ecclesiastic too, in dress as rich as the proudest of the 
 nobility, muttering as he walks meaningless benedicites 
 
 1 The block of buildings afterwards called the Luckenbooth-.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 87 
 
 in response to requests for his blessing ; also the ruffling 
 gallant in slashed doublet and scarlet hose, ogling amor- 
 ously the fair ones who from out their furred hoods flirt as 
 persistently and bewitchingly as their descendants of to- 
 day. Oh, it is a wondrous picture ; so absolutely true to 
 life that we almost think we can see the brilliant scene 
 before us changing and rechanging, arranging and rearrang- 
 ing its elements with kaleidoscopic rapidity. To those 
 grand old streets of the Edinburgh of to-day the associa- 
 tions of four centuries seem to cling. They furnished 
 Ramsay with the materials for his vivid panoramic sketch 
 of the Edina of his day, they furnished Claudero and 
 Robert Fergusson with theirs, and, mightiest of all, the 
 great Wizard of the North himself with his. But as vivid 
 and lifelike as any of these are those pictures of the Edin- 
 burgh of the first decade of the sixteenth century, when 
 Margaret Tudor came north to wed James Stuart, and when 
 the Scots Thistle was intertwined with the English Rose. 
 
 The results accruing from the union in question may 
 not have been all that Dunbar anticipated or foretold. 
 He built his hopes high, and in his visions of the future 
 the two countries were represented as proceeding hand in 
 hand towards a political millennium of peace, progress, and 
 prosperity. But the benefits resulting from the English 
 alliance were not to be wholly nullified even by the per- 
 sistent pigheadedness and perversity of James iv. Though 
 the most harassing and devastating invasions Scotland 
 had ever experienced since the days of Wallace and Bruce 
 were inflicted on the unhappy country by the 'loving 
 brother of "the English Rose"' — invasions in which the
 
 88 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Earl of Hertford literally ' harried the land from Forth to 
 Tweed,' and, with the zeal of Reforming Protestantism, 
 sent the fires of such exquisite specimens of early ecclesi- 
 astical architecture as the Abbeys of Melrose, Dryburgh, 
 Kelso, and Holyrood blazing up to heaven as a testimony 
 of his anti-Papal orthodoxy, 1 still out of evil was to come 
 good, and exactly one hundred years thereafter, on a 
 blustery Saturday night, Sir Robert Carey was to kneel 
 at the bedside of James's great-grandson in the same 
 Holyrood to which the ' Merry Monarch ' brought his 
 English bride — to kneel, I say, and to hail him King of 
 England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, in consequence 
 of his lineal descent from the 'faire Southern Rose,' as 
 Gavin Douglas styled Margaret Tudor. And from the 
 Union of the Crowns has resulted that political Union 
 from which Scotland to-day reaps benefits so incalculable. 2 
 
 From the year 1502 until the terrible day of Flodden 
 Dunbar's life was spent peacefully atCourt 'breiving ballates' 
 for the amusement and delight of the monarch and his Court. 
 But he had now another reader, who, if she could give him 
 nothing else, gave him, like Desdemona, ' a world of sighs, 
 when he did speak of some distressful stroke,' and laughed 
 gleefully at his headlong humour and hilarity. The very fact 
 that he had such an admirer of his genius put him on his 
 mettle. If previous to 1502 Dunbar wrote well, his work 
 subsequent to that date is infinitely better, evincing the 
 presence of a new element in his verse which previously 
 had no place therein. That new element was love. 
 
 To this period must be assigned, amongst others, such 
 
 1 Burton, Tytler, and Mackenzie. 
 
 2 Hume and Smollett's England ; Pitscottie ; Rymer's Foedera*
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 89 
 
 historically important poems as Beauty and the Prisoner, 
 The Visitation of St. Francis, that infinitely humorous 
 autobiographic revelation, The Dream, one of Dunbar's 
 noblest allegorical pieces, and the witty yet biting satire, 
 The Fenyeit Friar of Tung/and, written to expose the ad- 
 venturer, John Damien, who wormed himself into the good 
 graces of the King so effectually as to be appointed Abbot 
 of Tungland in 1504. To this period likewise, I think, we 
 may attribute that little group of didactic poems wherein our 
 poet's power of philosophic reasoning is evinced in a very 
 admirable manner, viz. In Asking Soivld Discretionn be, 
 Discretioun of Givifig, and Discretioun in Taking. In 
 these Dunbar consoles himself on being overlooked, when 
 favours were being lavishly distributed among the courtiers, 
 with the reflection that if his reward does not come now it 
 will reach him on some future occasion. 
 
 Probably as a result of the earnest solicitation of the 
 Queen, Dunbar received a hint that James contemplated 
 presenting him to a benefice at the first favourable oppor- 
 tunity. In that case the necessity was imperative that he 
 should resume his clerical office and dress. Though there 
 may have been some little irritation shown by the monks 
 of the Observantine Monastery of the Grey Friars when 
 their brilliant brother assumed the secular character, his 
 offence was not unforgivably dire in these years of an easy- 
 going, pluralistic absentee clergy, one-half of whom never 
 set eyes on their benefices from year's end to year's end. 1 
 Accordingly Dunbar was duly received back into the Order, 
 
 1 Early Scottish History atid Literature, by J. M. Ross ; Sketches of 
 Early Scottish History, by Cosmo Innes ; John Major's History of 
 Scotland, i.-vi. (1518).
 
 go FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 probably as a brother unattached to any house. The 
 immediate result of this is seen by an entry which occurs 
 in the Treasurer's book : '1504. Item the xvii day of 
 March — To the King's offering at Maister William Dun- 
 bar's first mass vii French Crowns, or £4, 18s. in Scottish 
 money.' From the amount of the monarch's offering we 
 may gauge the extraordinary esteem in which Dunbar 
 was held by the gay monarch. Two crowns were reckoned 
 an excellent 'handsel' of the new priest's position. All 
 the money on such an occasion was handed over to the 
 celebrant, and, if he were popular, as Dunbar undoubtedly 
 was, the sum collected oftentimes attained a large amount. 
 We have no means of ascertaining what it was on the im- 
 portant occasion under notice. If the others present when 
 William Dunbar celebrated mass for the first time — pro- 
 bably in the Abbey of Holyrood, or mayhap, at the instance 
 of generous Gavin Douglas, 1 in the Collegiate Church of 
 St. Giles — took their cue from the King, our impecunious 
 poet, who shortly before had been complaining of the 
 manner in which ' my painful purse so prickles me,' would 
 once in his life at least have had a purse full to overflowing. 
 Alas ! alas ! William Dunbar, like many another rare genius, 
 found his 'painful purse' prickle him many times between 
 the terminal poles of the cradle and the grave. 
 
 But a further mark of the King's favour reached him 
 a year or two afterwards. In 1507 his pension was aug- 
 mented to ^20 per annum — an exceedingly welcome 
 addition to the poet's meagre resources. The Epitha- 
 lamium had received its recompence ! 
 
 1 Gavin Douglas and Dunbar, according to tradition, were friends in 
 earlier years, but quarrelled over some trifling matter.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 AT THE BRILLIANT COURT OF SCOTLAND'S 
 'MERRY MONARCH' 
 
 The last eight years in the reign of James iv. marked the 
 most brilliant epoch in the history of Scotland as an inde- 
 pendent kingdom. Commerce, Literature, Science, the 
 Arts, all flourished in a most remarkable degree, being 
 fostered by the enlightened tastes of the great monarch. 
 As Laing says, 1 'The accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, 
 while they exhibit numberless instances of his prodigality 
 in encouraging and rewarding those who contributed to 
 the King's own personal gratification (pantomimic exhibi- 
 tions, pipers, fiddlers, jesters, and common minstrels, as 
 well as foreign impostors and mere pretenders to science), 
 and present a singular picture of his daily occupations, at 
 the same time show that the monarch was a munificent 
 encourager of the useful arts, and that his liberality dis- 
 played itself in acts of charity and kindness to his 
 domestic servants. He also appears to have expended 
 large sums of money in building or adorning the royal 
 palaces of Holyrood, Linlithgow, Stirling, and Falkland, 
 in the erection of religious foundations, in the prosecution 
 
 1 Laing's Life of Dunbar ; also Schipper and Mackay. 
 
 01
 
 92 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 of maritime enterprises, and in the extension of commerce ; 
 while the internal prosperity of the country was essen- 
 tially promoted by a strict and impartial administration 
 of justice.' 
 
 Until 1509 Dunbar's relations with his sovereign were 
 those of a humble though intimate friend. By the poet, 
 the 'monarch' was never lost sight of in the friend, how- 
 ever free and easy might be the relations on which they 
 stood towards each other. Though he might sport and jest 
 with him the one moment, he was ready the next to read 
 him a stern rebuke if he considered he was doing what 
 was wrong or derogatory to his dignity. In 1509, how- 
 ever, Dunbar's tone begins to change. He saw individual 
 after individual promoted to the enjoyment of a benefice, 
 yet he was always left out in the cold. In vain he appealed 
 to the King in every conceivable way to grant him this, the 
 summit of his desires. No great appointment was it that 
 he coveted. Formerly he had set his mind on being a 
 bishop, in accordance with the predictions of his nurse; 
 but now a church, thatched with heather and situated in 
 some moorland district, would have appeared a paradise 
 to him. Whether, had his humble wishes been granted, 
 he would have remained content in his banishment from 
 the gaieties of Edinburgh and the Court we have the 
 example of Herrick at Dean Prior to warn us against 
 jumping to hasty conclusions. It is amusing to consider 
 with what ingenuity and address he varies the tone of 
 his petitions for preferment. In general, as Schipper says, 
 he appears to base his claims for promotion to a benefice 
 on the magnitude of the services he had rendered, his
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 93 
 
 youth having been spent in the King's employment. 1 ' But 
 whether in the form of a satirical or a pathetic appeal to 
 the King, or simply as a congratulation on the New Year, 
 or whether under some humorous personation, he brought 
 forward his request, still the burden's song was a benefice.' 2 
 Sometimes his indignation is aroused when he conceives 
 himself slighted aud unduly passed over. In one of his 
 ' Addresses to the King,' when many benefices were vacant, 
 he asks, with not a little irritation in his tone, on observing 
 successive preferments heaped on the same parties, whether 
 it is more charity to give drink to him who stands in need 
 of it, or to fill 'a full man till he burst,' while his companion, 
 who by the way is every whit as deserving as he to drink 
 wine, is allowed to die of thirst. As the years flit by, and 
 still he approaches no nearer to the goal of his hopes, a 
 bitter note of complaint and upbraiding begins at times 
 to strike into the stately music of his verse. The nearer 
 we draw to Flodden the bitterer it becomes, until it seems 
 to culminate in the passionate and angry Remonstrance 
 to the King written in 15 10. In this terrible satire — 
 and, of a truth, never was poem before or after ad- 
 dressed to monarch couched in such a strain — what 
 fierce moral indignation we witness ! After reiterating 
 all the flatterers and gold -seekers, adventurers and 
 swindlers, architects and shipbuilders, astrologers and 
 minstrels, coiners and tumblers, that came in for the 
 profuse bounty of the monarch, while he received 
 nothing, he suddenly flashes out into the splendidly 
 
 1 Schipper's William Dunbar: Leien und Gedichte, chap. iii. pp. 
 104-132. 
 - Laing's Dunbar.
 
 94 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 audacious prophecy— verified, however, as thoroughly as 
 Shakespeare's about his verse : — 
 
 'And though that I among the lave, 
 Unworthy be ane place to have, 
 Or in their number to be told, 
 As long in mind my work shall hold 
 As whole in every circumstance, 
 In form, in matter and substance, 
 Without wearing or consumption, 
 Rust, canker, or corruption, 
 As any of their worlds all 
 Suppose that my reward be small. ' 
 
 There is something infinitely pathetic in the spectacle 
 of this soaring genius, when already the shadows of life 
 were lengthening for him, when the frosts of the ' fifties ' 
 were powdering his locks with the snows of impending age, 
 being compelled to stoop to expedients so humiliating and 
 unbecoming. Seemingly he had fully made up his mind 
 either to obtain some satisfaction from the monarch, or to 
 retire to some religious house wherein to end his days. 
 That his efforts were at length in a measure successful is 
 satisfactory to learn. Probably he had imparted to the 
 Queen his intentions, and she had straightway communi- 
 cated the matter to her husband. At all events Dunbar in 
 another poem speaks of the Queen as having been his 
 'advocate, both fair and sweet.' 1 James, with that princely 
 generosity which always characterised him, when he realised 
 that his old favourite was really languishing in poverty, and 
 must needs leave the Court unless some substantial help 
 were given, in 1510, a few days after the date, it may be 
 supposed, of the Remonstrance, ordered his pension to be 
 
 1 To the King — That he were John Thomson's man.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 95 
 
 increased from ^20 to ^80 Scots, a very substantial 
 addition, which placed the bard beyond all apprehension on 
 the score of poverty. But there is no question that, welcome 
 though the increase was, he would have infinitely preferred 
 if it had come in the form of a stipend from a benefice. 
 
 Though Ave are anticipating somewhat the chronological 
 sequence of the events in Dunbar's life, this appears a 
 suitable place to answer once for all the many calumnies 
 that have been cast on the poet's memory through the 
 manifest reluctance of James iv. to appoint Dunbar to an 
 ecclesiastical office. Several writers, and these scholars 
 who ought to have better recognised the significance of 
 outstanding historic facts, have asserted that the cause of 
 this reluctance on the part of the monarch was due to the 
 scandalous immorality of Dunbar's life, to his drunkenness, 
 to his illicit relations with Mrs. Musgrave, the Queen's 
 Lady of the Bedchamber, and finally to the fact that he 
 had several illegitimate children living. One and all of 
 these are unfounded falsehoods. Attention the most 
 cursory to the plain evidence offered by the facts of 
 Dunbar's life would have completely exploded those fairy 
 tales had the retailers of them taken the pains to investi- 
 gate the matter. In the first place, had his life been 
 so scandalous, Dunbar would not have been re-admitted 
 into the Observantine division of the great Order of the 
 Franciscan Monks. Of all the religious organisations they 
 alone in the sixteenth century preserved some regard for the 
 principles of morality and decency. Again, Dunbar would 
 not have been permitted to celebrate his first mass in the 
 presence of the King and Queen — an honour eagerly
 
 96 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 coveted — if his life had been at all scandalous. The same 
 argument applies to his relations with Mrs. Musgrave, 
 although we have every reason to believe that for her 
 Dunbar cherished a deep and lifelong passion after her 
 arrival in Scotland with Margaret in 1503. She had been 
 chosen by Henry vn. as a counsellor and friend for his 
 young daughter, because she was a woman of unimpeach- 
 able virtue and high moral principle. 1 That she would stoop 
 to folly with a priest is so utterly inconceivable that it does 
 not speak much for the perception of the advocates of the 
 theory that they should believe a woman of her standing 
 would throw away all her worldly advantages without some 
 return being forthcoming. Besides, her husband was 
 living, to wit, Sir John Musgrave, whose name occurs 
 frequently with that of his wife in the books of the 
 Treasurer down to 15 13, when on the war breaking out 
 they appear to have returned to England. Besides, the 
 terms in which Dunbar addresses her are not those likely 
 to be employed by a successful suitor for the favours of the 
 lady. Although he styles her ' My Heart's Treasure ' and 
 ' sweet assured foe,' he also characterises her as ' the cruel 
 breaker of my heart in two,' 'the final ender of my life for 
 ever,' adding ' Have mercy, love, have mercy, Lady Bright.' 
 The second last stanza, to my mind, settles the question — 
 
 ' White Dove, where is your sober humbleness ? 
 Sweet gentle Turtle, where is your pity went? 
 Where is your ruth ? the fruit of nobleness, 
 Of womanhood the treasure, and the rent : 
 Vertue is never put out of meek intent, 
 Nor out of gentle heart is fundin pity, 
 Since merciless no noble wight might be.' 
 
 1 Vide Young's Memoirs of the Princess Margaret's Journey.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 97 
 
 By these arguments, I think, the calumnies against 
 Dunbar are completely dissipated. To find a reason for 
 the King's persistent delay in presenting him to a benefice, 
 I think we must look to the great regard cherished by 
 James for the society of his witty laureate. The very 
 thought of parting with him was seemingly displeasing to 
 the monarch. 1 He could not appoint him to one of the 
 metropolitan benefices, as these were all the 'preserves' 
 of the great families, the Douglases, the Hamiltons, the 
 Lennoxes, and others. To confer on him any other 
 preferment would assuredly mean his departure from the 
 Court, and if we can place any reliance on the testimonies 
 of favour already shown to him, that was a contingency to 
 be avoided by the King at all costs. Had Dunbar been 
 an immoral man he would not have been so marked out 
 for special favour as to have his pension increased on 
 two occasions. To my mind the only reason for the 
 reluctance of James to appoint Dunbar to a benefice lay 
 in the fact that he could not bring himself to lack the 
 witty sallies and the bright healthy humour of the brilliant 
 poet. 
 
 We must now turn our steps backward somewhat in 
 order to take note of the publication in printed form of 
 several of our poet's works. Of the establishment of 
 Chepman and Myllar's printing-press in Edinburgh we 
 have already made mention. In 1508, however, among 
 the first books issued from the new press was a volume of 
 poetry containing in all eleven distinct pieces. Five out 
 
 1 Laing's Dunbar, Vide also Sheriff Mackay's excellent work for this 
 whole period of Dunbar's life.
 
 98 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 of the eleven separate publications were poems by William 
 Dunbar, 1 viz. The Golden Targe, The Fly ting of Dunbar 
 and Kennedy, The Ballad of Lord Barnard Stewart, The 
 Twa Maryit Women and the Wedo, The Ballad of Kind 
 Kittock, The Testament of Andrew Kemiedy, and finally 
 The Lament for the Makars. That the poet superintended 
 the passing of these poems of his through the press is more 
 than probable, and the fact must have sent a strange thrill of 
 joy through him when he realised that at last his works were 
 to be distributed throughout the country, nay, throughout 
 all countries, by means of an agency whose power of 
 reproduction was apparently illimitable. His prophecy 
 was assuredly beginning to work out its fulfilment. 
 
 From the testimony of the La?nent for the Makars we 
 learn that Dunbar received a severe warning in 1508 that 
 his health was no longer what it once was. He suffered at 
 that date from a dangerous illness, from the effects of 
 which he did not recover for some time. In consequence 
 he became exceedingly low-spirited, and in his dejection 
 penned that immortal elegy which, had Dunbar written 
 nothing else, would have placed him in the very front rank 
 of British poets. Its pathos is so subtle yet so over- 
 powering, the music of its rhythm so faultless and so 
 fascinating, the tenor of its thought so lofty and inspired, 
 and the effect of its solemn repetend, Timor mortis conturbat 
 me — The fear of death distresses me, so overpowering, that 
 no one can read the poem without experiencing a thrill of 
 awe. ' We see the once gay Dunbar, now advanced in 
 
 1 This volume is now in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh. It was 
 discovered last century in Ayrshire. The printing is very poor, the text 
 literally swarming with errors.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 99 
 
 years, deprived of his joyous companions, and probably 
 
 jostled out of Court by younger and more fashionable 
 
 wits.' 1 The poet feels that the time cannot be far distant 
 
 when the Church's sublime service for the dead, from which 
 
 the recurring burden is taken, would be chanted over him, 
 
 as it had been over so many of his contemporary ' Makars,' 
 
 and he shuddered as he regarded the prospect. The poem 
 
 has a distinct poetic affinity with Thomas de Celano's terrible 
 
 dirge — 
 
 ' Dies irae, dies ilia, 
 Solvet saeclum in favilla,' 
 
 — and it is no despite to the latter sublime composition to 
 be placed side by side with the former. 
 
 From the Lament we obtain a valuable catalogue of 
 those Scots singers who had flourished either prior to 
 Dunbar, or been contemporaries of his earlier years, — 
 Heryot and Andrew of Wyntoun, Maister John Clerke, 
 James Affleck, Holland, Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lee, 
 Sir Gilbert Hay and Blind Harry, Alexander Trail and 
 Patrick Johnstoun, Mersar and Rowl of Aberdeen, Robert 
 Henryson and Sir John the Ross, Quintin Shaw and Walter 
 Kennedy ; but three-fourths of them are destitute entirely 
 of any significance to give them identity or personality. No 
 wonder that Dunbar felt that life was slipping away from 
 him, and that the last great Enemy was ever drawing 
 nearer to him. When so many had been taken, how could 
 he hope to escape ? Sooner or later he would reach the 
 place where that Shadow feared of man sat waiting and 
 watching for him, at whose icy touch the lofty and the 
 
 1 Lord Hailes.
 
 ioo FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 lowly, the prince and the peasant, bow their head 
 obediently and pass within the Silence ! 
 
 Solemn indeed are the closing stanzas of this mighty 
 threnody — worthy to rank beside the noblest elegies the 
 world has yet seen. The pathos becomes well-nigh over- 
 whelming, as after having recounted the departure behind 
 the veil of all those whom he held dear of old, he breaks 
 into the anguished moan of the concluding lines — 
 
 ' Since he has all my brethren tane, 
 He will not let me live alane, 
 By force, I maun his next prey be ; 
 Timor mortis conturbat me. 
 
 Since then for Death remede is none, 
 Best is 't that we for Death dispone, 
 After our death that live may we ; 
 Timor mortis conturbat me.'
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE YEARS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING FLODDEN 
 
 We are now rapidly approaching that great crisis in Scots 
 history whereby the shadow on the dial of time was put 
 back quite half a century. If James iv. had not rushed 
 so rashly on his doom at the fatal field of Flodden by 
 permitting his chivalry and the wiles of the seductive Lady 
 Ford of Wark to induce him to leave his advantageous 
 ground to fight on equal terms on the plain, the history 
 of Scotland might have had to be written from an entirely 
 different standpoint. The death of James iv. ended the 
 Augustan age of the Scottish monarchy. In August 15 13 
 Scotland was still in the enjoyment of all those social, 
 intellectual, and commercial privileges won for her by the 
 genius of her strong-handed monarch and the industry 
 of her sons ; by September the country had been thrown 
 back into that anarchy that was rampant during the long 
 minority of James 11. ' Woe to thee, O land, when thy 
 king is a child ' was never to be more terribly demonstrated 
 than in the minority of James v., when the Douglas 
 ambition reached its height. 1 
 
 All these evils, however, were still in the future, and 
 never did the country seem more peacefully prosperous, 
 
 1 Burton and Maitland. Cf. Pitscottie. 
 
 101
 
 102 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 never was it making more rapid strides along the best lines 
 of progress and development, as it did in the three years 
 immediately preceding Flodden. Henry and James were 
 excellent friends, despite the tiffs they periodically had, 
 and the long centuries of enmity seemed at last at an 
 end, when from Italy there rolled up that thundercloud 
 which was to wreck the peace of Scotland. A few years 
 before Pope Julius n. had seized the territories of Parma 
 and Piacenza in Upper Italy, 1 and added them to the 
 already extensive dominions of the Church. Louis xn., 
 however, had already had his eye upon them. The Pope, 
 afraid of losing them, flattered the young King Henry vm. 
 of England into attacking Louis in France, calculating that 
 the latter having his hands full in France would not think 
 of meddling him in Northern Italy. But Louis and his 
 Queen played the same game on Henry as the Pope had 
 played on him. James iv. was induced by the Queen's 
 gage d'amour ' to ride one day's journey into England ' 
 and strike a blow for 'his lady.' And to please a woman, 
 who was simply using him as a tool, James was ready to 
 risk crown, Queen, and life itself. 
 
 I mention these facts because again and again Dunbar 
 refers to them, not directly, but by implication, in the poems 
 of these later days. He was one of the few who stoutly 
 defended the policy of cultivating good relations with 
 England. 2 During those last years of peace, when the 
 flush of prosperity was at its fairest, when Margaret still 
 swayed her husband's heart, and at the Scots Court none 
 
 1 Ranke's History of the Popes, vol. i. p. 42. 
 
 2 Mackay's Life of Dunbar.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 103 
 
 were more welcome than the ambassadors of England, 
 Dunbar, through his verse, endeavoured as far as possible 
 to incline the scales in favour of the English alliance. 
 Probably this was the secret of his great popularity with the 
 Queen. In the fine poem written the very year of Flodden, 
 No Treasure avails without Gladness, he strongly incul- 
 cates the duty of living at peace with all men — 
 
 ' Follow on peace, flee trouble and debate, 
 With famous folks hold thou thy company : 
 Be charitable and humble in thine estate, 
 For worldly honour lasteth but a cry.' 
 
 But I am once more running ahead of the story of our 
 poet's life. In the year 15 n the Queen had undertaken 
 a pilgrimage to St. Duthac's of Tain — a shrine exceedingly 
 popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 1 On 
 returning she paid a visit to the town of Aberdeen, where 
 she received a reception so splendid that Dunbar, who 
 accompanied her, was ordered to celebrate the proceed- 
 ings in verse as a testimony of Her Majesty's gratitude. 
 The greatest preparations had been made by the towns- 
 people to do honour to the illustrious visitor, and an 
 amusing proclamation still stands in the Burgh Records 
 of the period as having been made by ' the Belman, wha 
 wes ordainit to pass through the hail toune and command 
 and charge all manner of persones that hes any middens 
 upon the forgait before their gates, and doors, to devoid, 
 redd, and cleanse the same betwix this and Sonday, under 
 the pain of xl.s., and also to remove all swine cruiffs from 
 the High Street under the penalty of the swyne being 
 
 1 Mackay's Introduction and Life.
 
 io 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 escheated and a fine of viij.s.' A sum of ^200 was 
 arranged to be raised as a propine or gift to Her Majesty, 
 and commissioners were appointed to grant certain tacks or 
 leases in reversion, and also to let the rights of the fishings 
 belonging to the community for that purpose. Further 
 resolutions were passed for cleaning and adorning the 
 town, hanging the streets with arras and tapestry. 
 Altogether the inhabitants seem to have incurred a degree 
 of expense considerably beyond their means. 1 
 
 Dunbar's poem gives us an admirable picture of the 
 proceedings as viewed by an eye-witness. Never is our 
 poet seen to greater advantage than when describing a 
 pageant such as this. His laudatory apostrophe to the 
 town of Aberdeen is not so well known as it should be — 
 
 ' Blythe Aberdeen, thou beryl of all townis, 
 The lamp of beauty, bounty, and blytheness ; 
 Unto the heaven upheaved thy renown is 
 Of virtue, wisdom, and of worthiness ; 
 High notit is thy name of nobelness 
 Into the coming of our lusty quene, 
 The well of wealth, good cheer and merryness : 
 Be blythe and blissful, burgh of Aberdeen.' 
 
 The procession, as described by Dunbar, was splendid 
 in the extreme. The Queen was met by the magistrates, 
 ' richlie arrayit, as became them to be,' and escorted into 
 the town, four young gentlemen holding a pall of crimson 
 velvet over her, while the thunder of cannon was heard 
 all along the route. Another fair procession met her at 
 the city gate, which led her up to the several masques 
 that were got up to greet her at different parts of the town. 
 
 1 Schipper's Poems of William Dunbar.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 105 
 
 Thus she encountered the Holy Virgin, then the Three 
 Kings of the East offering Gold, Incense, and Myrrh to 
 the infant Christ, after that Adam and Eve expelled from 
 Paradise. Then patriotism received its tribute. Robert 
 Bruce, the national hero of the Scots people, was to be 
 seen as a crowned king in a succeeding masque, followed 
 by all the noble Stuarts who came after him. Then hom- 
 age was paid to the beauty of the Queen by twenty-four 
 beautiful young ladies, all splendidly clothed in green, who 
 came singing and playing on timbrels to meet her, followed 
 by the great barons of the neighbourhood with their ladies. 
 Amid the cheers of the inhabitants of the town Her Majesty 
 was conducted through the streets, all hung with tapestry, 
 while the fountain at the High Cross flowed with wine, to 
 her lodgings, where, as a last surprise, a cup heaped with 
 gold coins was offered to her as a propine. 
 
 Dunbar appears to have enjoyed himself thoroughly during 
 his trip with the Queen. The whole tone of the poem is 
 one of pleasure and delight, and his advice to the Queen, 
 
 'Therefore so long as Queen thou bearest crown, 
 Be thankfull to this burgh of Aberdeen,' 
 
 is dedicated by maxims of sound State policy. She had 
 won popularity ; let her do her best to keep it. 
 
 On returning to Edinburgh Dunbar appears to have 
 discovered that some of his enemies in his absence had 
 been slandering him to his royal master. For a time even 
 there appears to have been a coolness existing between 
 Dunbar and his sovereign. 1 In his poem Hoiv shall I 
 
 1 From his poem Of Men Evill to Please we learn that in consequence 
 of this coolness Dunbar received no Christmas present.
 
 io6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Governe me? he complains bitterly that, do what he liked, 
 
 be he merry or be he sad, attend Court or keep away from 
 
 it, his motives were misunderstood. 
 
 ' If I be seen in Court owre long, 
 Then will they murmur them amang, 
 My friendis are not worth a flee, 
 That I so long without guerdon gang. 
 Lord God, how shall I governe me ? 
 
 If Court reward then purchase I, 
 Then have they malice and envy, 
 And secretly they on me lee, 
 And do me injure privily, 
 Lord God, how shall I govern me ? ' 
 
 Probably the mischief arose out of Dunbar's poem on 
 'Covetyce,' in which he lashed the vices current at Court, 
 by lamenting that the manly amusements in which the 
 courtiers used to excel, and the King pre-eminently so, 
 were all banished from it, and that only card-playing and 
 dicing were fashionable. Schipper suggested, and with 
 reason, that the King's predilection for such amusements 
 increased as he advanced in years. But seemingly the 
 estrangement had not lasted very long, for in his poem 
 Rule of Anis Self, written towards the commencement 
 of 15 1 2, he seems to imply that his relations with the 
 King were as of old. His maxim, 'He ruleth well who 
 well himself can guide,' might be assumed by many an 
 ethical philosopher as summing up the whole of morals 
 from the yvwdi o-eWor of Solon to the Golden Rule, ' Do 
 unto others as thou wouldst they should do unto you.' 
 
 During the year 15 12, also, Dunbar seems to have felt 
 the approach of age coming on him, slowly it might be, 
 but still too surely to be misunderstood. The gaieties of
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 107 
 
 the Court began to pall on him, and with this feeling his 
 desire to be settled in some quiet sphere of religious work 
 grew daily greater. Not by him was the wish cherished 
 to pose as a great ecclesiastic. Rather did he long for 
 some sequestered country nook, even though, as we have 
 noted previously, the church were covered with thatch. 
 In his exquisite poem on 'Content,' he seems to imply 
 that he had now given up all hope of high preferment. 1 
 But he comforts himself with the consideration, from 
 which Bunyan might have borrowed one of his lyrics, 
 ' If we naught climb, we take no fall,' and sets himself to 
 be satisfied with his position and station. He concludes 
 with the pithy epigrammatic maxim, than which Rochefou- 
 cauld himself has nothing more incisive : ' He has enough 
 that is content.' Another poem, whose date is assigned to 
 the end of 151 2 or the commencement of 15 13 is even 
 more significant in revealing how brief man's little life- 
 span was now appearing to the lonely, saddened man. In 
 None may assure in this World he laments his lost youth, 
 and bewails the pains of age which are stealing on him — 
 
 ' Lord, how shall I my days dispone, 
 For lang service reward is none, 
 And short my lyfe may here indure, 
 And lossit is my time bygone. 
 Into this world may none assure.' 
 
 His entreaties to the King to be allowed to retire to some 
 quiet country parish, where he might 'set his saul rycht' 
 with his Maker before the last great summons reached 
 him to join the choir invisible are pathetic in the extreme. 
 No longer does he complain of poverty. The King's 
 
 1 Sehipper's Dunbar.
 
 io8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 bounty had placed him beyond that. His wishes were 
 only to be allowed to fill a niche in the spiritual hierarchy, 
 where he could 'serve God, honour the King, and purge 
 his own soul.' I am inclined to disagree with Schipper's 
 chronology of the famous poem Sir, yet Remember, and 
 to attribute it to the last year of the King's life. From 
 the internal evidence of the piece the reader will observe 
 that it is not so much of poverty that the poet now com- 
 plains, but of the fact that men the most unworthy and 
 unsuitable are preferred to benefices before him. Even 
 Jock the cattleman is able to take his choice of livings, 
 while Dunbar can only say — 
 
 ' And when that age now does me grief 
 Ane simple Vicar I can not be.' 
 
 Therefore, he has taken the neglect so much to heart, he 
 says, that a ' deidly malady ' has seized upon him. Not so 
 much upon merit as upon mercy does he go in claiming 
 his right to preferment, as appears from the stanza pre- 
 viously cited — 
 
 ' None may remede my malady, 
 So well as you, Sir, verily ; 
 For with a benefice ye may prief 
 And if I mend not hastily, 
 Excess of thought does me mischief.' 
 
 Not only does he appeal to the monarch in his own 
 name, but he induces his friends, and especially the Queen, 
 ' that sweet meek rose,' to press his claims upon the King 
 that he might be allowed to retire from Court to a bene- 
 fice. It is only just to suppose that had he lived James 
 would have acceded to the longing desire of his faithful 
 friend and servitour. Though he might resist the appeal
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 109 
 
 as long as possible, and endeavour to satisfy him by in- 
 creasing his pensions, a course which would not entail the 
 poet's departure from the Court, still when he saw that 
 Holyrood no longer had power to charm and please the 
 world-weary man, whose locks were whitening with the 
 snows of age, doubtless he would have advanced Dunbar 
 to the summit of his ambition — a vicarship in some quiet 
 country parish, ' far from the madding crowd.' But, alas ! 
 whatever he may have been contemplating to do when 
 he returned from riding his one day's journey into England 
 was rendered of no avail by the terrible disaster of Flodden. 
 However, as we shall see, there is strong reason to believe 
 that the Queen, when she was regent, carried into effect 
 what it may have been the intention of the monarch to 
 do when he came back in triumph. But the last official 
 mention we have of William Dunbar in the Treasurer's 
 books is on the 14th May 15 13, when he received his 
 usual half-yearly instalment of his pension. This was 
 three months before the King set out for Flodden. The 
 Treasurer's accounts, however, from August 8th, 15 13 
 to June 1 st, 15 1 5, have not been preserved. In those 
 of a subsequent date the name of William Dunbar does 
 not appear.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE DARK DAYS OF FLODDEN 
 
 The first half of the year 15 13 was as prosperous as its 
 predecessors in Scotland. Commerce was flourishing, and 
 Scots vessels were trading to every country open to trade 
 relations. The Scots navy was at this time regarded as 
 the strongest in Europe. Even although Sir Andrew Barton 
 had recently been defeated and slain by the two sons of 
 the Earl of Surrey, Lord Thomas and Sir Edward Howard, 
 in a naval battle in the Downs, Scotland possessed the 
 Great Michael, the largest warship in the world of its day. 
 Walter Chepman was busily engaged printing off all the 
 standard works of the period, which were being circulated 
 amongst the nobility and gentry of the country, whereby 
 intellectual culture was greatly promoted. Into some 
 channel the spiritual sympathies of the nation had to flow. 
 Not into that of religion could the newly awakened zeal 
 of the country discharge itself. The Romish Church was 
 every year becoming further divorced from the great heart 
 of the people. Sunk in sensuality, worldly pride, the most 
 degraded superstition, and an ignorance that was even 
 lower than the common people of the townships of Scot- 
 land, its pretensions to teach or to preach religion were 
 
 ridiculed and mocked. The great ecclesiastics, such as 
 no
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR in 
 
 Blackadder, Archbishop of Glasgow, Forman, Bishop of 
 Moray, and others, were practically temporal lords, though 
 they arrogated to themselves all the privileges of Church- 
 men without considering themselves bound by any of their 
 responsibilities. In consequence, in 15 13, a widespread 
 irreligion was diffusing itself over the country side by side 
 with the advancing culture. Had the superstition of the 
 whole nation been less profound, the result would have 
 been universal atheism. But for once superstition played 
 the part of an angel of light. 
 
 Such was the position of affairs when, to Dunbar's dis- 
 tress, intelligence was brought to Court that England and 
 Spain, instigated by Pope Julius 11. and his successor, the 
 great Leo x., were at war with France. With the keen 
 prevision of a statesman, he could foresee what would 
 follow. France had not extended her coveted citizenship 
 to the Scots nation for nothing. Before many days had 
 passed his apprehensions were verified. Queen Anne of 
 France, wife of Louis xn., sent the Sieur de Martignan 
 with her gage of love, a richly perfumed and jewelled 
 glove, accompanied by a letter in which she styled James 
 'her own peculiar knight,' and entreated him as her chosen 
 champion to march for her sake one day's journey into 
 English territory. 1 
 
 The Court was immediately broken up into two great 
 factions. There was first the English, headed by the 
 Queen, whose own brother was to be the object of her 
 husband's attack. With her sympathised all the older 
 
 1 Pitscottie informs us that the letter was accompanied by a gift of 
 15,000 French crowns — about ^8000.
 
 ii2 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 nobles and barons, who knew and prized the value of 
 peace, and the older clergy, headed by the new Archbishop 
 of Glasgow (Beaton). Of this party William Dunbar, 1 both 
 by policy and inclination, would be a member, the object 
 of their efforts being to preserve peace between Henry vm. 
 and James iv., by dissuading the latter from acceding to 
 the request of the Queen of France. The other side, re- 
 presented by the young Archbishop Stuart of St. Andrews, 2 
 natural son of the King, Forman, Bishop of Moray, 3 
 and most of the younger clergy who were supposed 
 to be secular in their sympathies, strongly advocated 
 the maintenance of the traditional policy — ' no amity with 
 England.' With this party the King was in open agree- 
 ment. His amorous heart had been set on fire by the 
 Queen of France's letter, and he at once issued a pro- 
 clamation to the feudal nobles all over the country, 
 summoning them to meet on the Boroughmuir — the 
 ground now covered by the suburbs of Merchiston and 
 Morningside. 
 
 From the poems written after all the pitiful tragedy of 
 Flodden was over, we can see that Dunbar had done all 
 that man could to deter the monarch from his mad 
 scheme. In the piece addressed to the ' Queen-Dowager ' 
 he alludes with the utmost delicacy, yet with a touching 
 
 1 Cf. Mackay's Introduction, which is here, as elsewhere, of the greatest 
 historic value. 
 
 2 The friend and correspondent of Erasmus. He was only nineteen at 
 this time. 
 
 3 Forman was a candidate for the Archbishopric of Bourges, and was 
 successful. He was favoured by King Louis XII., and the ground on 
 which the latter demanded the support of the Chapter was the signal 
 service Forman had done to France by bringing about the invasion of 
 England by the King of Scots. See Burton's Scot Abroad.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 113 
 
 pathos, to the efforts he had made to persuade the King to 
 
 adopt other courses — 
 
 ' I me commend with all humility, 
 Unto thy beauty blissful and benign, 
 To whom I am and aye shall servant be, 
 With stedfast heart and faithful true meaning, 
 Unto the dead, to whom I maid pleiding. 1 
 And for whose sake I shall my pen address 
 Songis to make for thy recomforting, 
 That thou may live in joy and lustiness.' 
 
 Owing to the powerful combination against it, the cause 
 of the English war was not popular in Scotland. All kinds 
 of persuasions were tried to turn James from his resolu- 
 tion. But in vain. Supernatural portents even were not 
 lacking. Let us hear what Drummond of Hawthornden 
 tells us of the matter : ' After the army had mustered in 
 the Borrowmuir of Edinburgh ' (a field then spacious and 
 delightful by the shades of many stately and aged oaks), 
 ' about the midst of the night there is a proclamation heard 
 at the Mercat Cross of the Town, summonding a great many 
 burgesses, gentlemen, barons, and noblemen to appear 
 within forty days before the tribunal of one "Plotcock." 
 The Provost of the Town, 2 in his Timber Gallery, 
 having heard his own name cited, cried out "That he 
 declined that Judicatory, and appealed to the mercy of God 
 Almighty." But that was not all : " While the King, full of 
 cares and perplexities, in the Church of St. Michael, 
 
 1 ' Withouten depairting,' some editions read. 
 
 2 This is a mistake. Richard Lawson of Highriggs was Provost from 
 1504-8, and we know from Pitscottie (i. 266) that it was to him the incident 
 happened, while the Provost of the year was the Earl of Angus, who 
 accompanied the King to Flodden and perished there. The interim 
 Provost, in the absence of Angus, was Alexander, Lord Home, Great 
 Chamberlain of Scotland. 
 
 II
 
 H4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Linlithgow, heard Evensong (as it then was called), while 
 he was at his devotions, an ancient man came in, his amber- 
 coloured locks hanging down upon his shoulders, his 
 forehead high and inclining to baldness, his garment of 
 azure colour, somewhat long, girded about him with a 
 towel or Table napkin, of a comely and reverend aspect. 
 Having enquired for the King, he intruded himself into the 
 crowd, passing through all till he came to him; with a 
 clownish simplicity, leaning over the Canon's Seat where 
 the King sate, " Sir (said he) I am sent hither to intreat 
 you for a time to delay your Expedition, and to proceed 
 no further in your intended journey: for if you do ye 
 shall not prosper in your Enterprise, nor any of your 
 followers. I am further charged to warn you, if ye be so 
 refractory as to go forward, not to use the acquaintance, 
 company, or counsel of Women, as ye tender your honour, 
 life, and estate." After this warning he withdrew himself 
 back again into the crowd. When service was ended, the 
 King enquired earnestly for him, but he could nowhere be 
 found, neither could any of the bystanders (of whom divers 
 did narrowly observe him, meaning afterwards to have 
 discoursed further with him) feel or perceive how, when, 
 or where he passed from them, having as it were vanished 
 among their hands.' 1 
 
 Drummond adds : ' Nothing was the King moved with 
 these advertisements, thinking them scenick pieces acted 
 by those who hated the French and favoured the English 
 faction, though they were so boldly and to the life per- 
 sonated that they appalled and struck with fear ordinary 
 
 1 Drummond, History of the Five Jameses.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 115 
 
 and vulgar judgments, as Tragi-Comedies of Spirits.' Now 
 I have always had the idea that Dunbar, in some way or 
 other, was connected with this scheme. The last card 
 which the Queen's party could play was to appeal to the 
 superstitious fears of the King. But, alas ! James seemed 
 to penetrate the disguise. Dunbar certainly was privy to 
 some secret of the kind, for the word ' servant ' was a 
 peculiar one to use in the verse we have quoted above 
 from the Ode to the Queen-Dowager. Be this as it may, 
 their efforts were entirely unavailing, and in a few days the 
 great army set forward on its march for the Border. 
 
 For a long time uncertainty prevailed whether Dunbar 
 might not have accompanied his sovereign to the field of 
 Flodden, and fallen with him there, seeing that no mention 
 was thereafter made of him in the Treasurer's books. He 
 had courage and patriotism enough for that, and the theory 
 was mooted that James, being so certain of victory as he 
 was, might have taken Dunbar with him to celebrate the 
 triumph, as Edward 11. , under similar circumstances, 
 brought the poetical Carmelite friar Baston to the battle 
 of Bannockburn. How the whirligig of time would have 
 brought in its revenges if Dunbar, like Baston, had been 
 captured, and been obliged to ransom himself by writing 
 a poem on the victors whose prospective rout he had been 
 brought to witness ! 
 
 But there seems strong presumption in favour of the 
 theory that Dunbar was left behind to comfort the Queen, 
 who had begged to be allowed to accompany her husband 
 to the campaign, hoping, as Drummond and Maitland 
 assert, to be able to influence the Earl of Surrey in favour
 
 n6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 of peace. But the King declined to allow her to accom- 
 pany him. There is no ground for believing, notwith- 
 standing the subsequent moral deterioration of Margaret's 
 nature when she sank into the position of a mere paid 
 English spy, that at this time she was other than genuinely 
 attached to her husband, and feared any danger happening 
 to him. 
 
 Of course we have only the bare records of history to 
 guide us with regard to what took place inside the walls 
 of the capital after the march of the army, and while those 
 who were left behind were awaiting news of the mighty 
 battle that was imminent. All contemporary records 
 describe the tension as terrible. Scarce a house was there, 
 ' gentle or simple,' that had not a member of it away with 
 the King. As the days crept on, and still no word reached 
 the watchers of the issue of the battle, anxiety seems to 
 have given place to anguish. Then, to quote Aytoun's 
 telling lines — 
 
 ' News of battle ! who hath brought it ? 
 News of triumph ? who should bring 
 Tidings from our noble army, 
 Greetings from our gallant King? 
 All last night we watched the beacons, 
 Blazing on the hills afar, 
 Each one bearing as it kindled, 
 Message of the opened war : 
 All night long the northern streamers, 
 Shot across the trembling sky, 
 Fearful lights that never beacon 
 Save where kings and heroes die. ' J 
 
 Doubtless the horror, the misery, and distress which fell 
 on Edinburgh when at last the terrible truth became known 
 
 1 Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 117 
 
 was shared to the full by William Dunbar. It is harder to 
 stand and wait than to buckle on one's armour in the battle 
 of life and to rush into the fray. Though a portentous 
 silence shrouds all the sayings and the doings of that fate- 
 ful time, save what are contained in the barest of annals, 
 one can conceive all the more vividly, because so much is 
 left to the imagination, the keen edge of that passionate 
 pain and mental torture, that invincible longing for the 
 return, be it but for a moment, and be that return pur- 
 chased by periods of the most prolonged physical suffering, 
 of a beloved face on whose lineaments death had set its 
 seal, and whose smile was to lighten the gloom of life for 
 the watcher nevermore — all these feelings, in fine, which 
 afterwards he was to embody in the noble consolatory 
 poem The Merle and the Nightingale, and Of Love 
 Earthly and Divine. Not alone to the stricken Queen 
 would he be called upon to render consolation, in both his 
 spiritual and his secular capacities, — and that he did so is 
 manifest from the Ode to the Queen-Dowager, — but to 
 those other families, of whom there was scarce one but 
 was mourning the loss of father, brother, husband, son, or 
 mayhap of some other near tie, not yet sanctioned by 
 the Church, yet as binding between loving hearts as if 
 sealed by bell, book, and candle. 
 
 It is only in these poems, such as Ane Orisoune, when 
 the Governor passed into France, written on the occasion 
 when the Duke of Albany, who had been appointed 
 Regent of the country in the name of James v., went for 
 a season to the French Court, and there seemed some 
 uncertainty whether he would ever return, that we catch
 
 n8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 a glimpse of what Dunbar really was in the habit of doing 
 with his glorious gift of verse. That a large number of his 
 pieces, and these perhaps his finest, were lost during the 
 miserable confusion of the post-Flodden anarchy is almost 
 certain. Besides acting the part of consoler to those 
 bereaved, he probably did his share in strengthening the 
 hands of the Lord Home, Great Chamberlain of the city, 
 who had been appointed Deputy Provost, in maintaining 
 order and in preventing the citizens lapsing into despair 
 complete, until the full intelligence of the disaster reached 
 them. His poems only give us hints, without any direct 
 statement of what was the specific object of the efforts 
 which we know he was putting forth for the salvation and 
 succour of his stricken country. In all probability he helped 
 by deed as well as by word in the erection of that rampart 
 or city wall which was drawn round the town in the space 
 of a few days, when the news was brought to Edinburgh 
 that the victorious English army was hastening towards 
 the Scots capital. With a feverish energy, men, women, 
 and children, hoary patriarchs on whose head the snows 
 of the seventies lay deep, as well as tender babes scarce 
 permitted to leave their mothers' sides, were one and all 
 eager and ready to take a share in the work. 
 
 There was only one gleam of glory to brighten the 
 universal gloom of the national disaster, and that lay in 
 the fact that the lives of Scotland's bravest and best had 
 gone out in a blaze of splendid courage. All day long, 
 when the battle was already a foregone conclusion, there 
 was no thought of either surrender or retreat in the minds 
 of the Scots nobles. One by one they fell around their
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 119 
 
 King, standing at bay like a wounded lion, doggedly 
 desperate and sternly defiant, until they each one met 
 his fate. To break that ring of steel by any other means 
 than pouring a pitiless hail of cloth-yard arrows into its 
 closely packed mass was more than the Earl of Surrey 
 could effect, while for every Scots life that was extin- 
 guished its English fellow followed it. Only the great 
 superiority in numbers, when the English reserves were 
 brought up, put the matter beyond a doubt, and the fall 
 of darkness alone saved the Scots from utter extinction. 
 As it was, the issue was left undecided, and had there been 
 a general left on the Scots side to draw off the troops that 
 were left in good order, in particular carrying away with 
 them the artillery, Flodden field might have gone down 
 to history as a drawn engagement. But no commander 
 was left. The English occupied the ground on the follow- 
 ing day, found the Scots artillery unguarded, seized it, and 
 of course justly claimed the victory. 1 The Scots forces 
 dribbled away in the night. When morning light dawned 
 the ring of corpses round the King was there — but the 
 living had disappeared. They had wisely retreated across 
 the Border, prepared to make there their last stand in 
 defence of their hearths and homes. But Surrey was too 
 wary a general to attack a foe at bay ; besides, his army 
 was in urgent need of rest. Therefore he slowly retreated 
 homewards. But some days elapsed before this fact was 
 known in Edinburgh. 
 
 The suffering which Dunbar must have passed through 
 during this terrible period has not been recorded in his 
 
 1 Cf. Burton, Maitland, and Mackenzie.
 
 120 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 verse with that fulness which we should look for. 1 This 
 fact causes me to think that we have received only a very 
 small moiety of his work. That he should not have 
 described the horror of the time could only have resulted 
 from two causes — either he must have accompanied the 
 King to Flodden and been one of the tale of dead, com- 
 prising one archbishop, two bishops, two mitred abbots, 
 twelve earls, thirteen peers, five eldest sons of peers, and 
 of gentlemen over three thousand, who were left on the 
 field; or his works must in large part have been lost 
 during the years elapsing between his death and the per- 
 manent establishment of printing in Scotland by Vautrol- 
 lier about 1580. But we have evidence almost absolute 
 that Dunbar was alive in 15 17, when John, Duke of 
 Albany, who in 15 15 had been chosen regent after the 
 widowed Queen's marriage with the Earl of Angus, had 
 found himself compelled, by his inability to restore order to 
 the kingdom, to return to his estates in France. Dunbar, 
 as Schipper says, must have been deeply affected by the 
 distracted state into which the country had been thrown 
 by its party dissensions after the King's untimely death, 
 and he records his feelings in the Orisoune, when the 
 Governor passed into France. 
 
 As soon as practicable after the whole of the sad story 
 had been brought from Flodden, the Scots Estates met 
 and appointed the Queen as temporary regent and guardian 
 to the young Prince James, then about two years of age. 
 This was done in the hope that the fact would incline her 
 brother to be magnanimous and merciful. 2 Such an effect 
 
 1 Paterson's Life and Poems of 1 1 'illiam Dunbar. - Burton and Maitland.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 121 
 
 the appointment to some extent produced, and the war, in 
 the meantime at least, was not renewed. 
 
 The interest to us, however, in the appointment is that 
 Margaret in all likelihood used the power she had to 
 advance the interest of her faithful friend and laureate. 
 When the first poignancy of sorrow was past, when she 
 was urged by every consideration, both public and per- 
 sonal, to come forth from her retirement and place her 
 hand, feeble and wavering though it was, on the helm of 
 state, it is only just to suppose that those who had com- 
 forted her in her sorrow should participate in her advance- 
 ment. Dunbar was assuredly alive at this time. Only 
 his genius could have produced such poems as Love 
 Earthly and Divine and the Orisoune. We are either 
 shut up to that conclusion, or to the alternative that there 
 were two poets living at this period, both of them capable 
 of executing work of a quality so high. The very idea 
 is preposterous. Therefore, I consider that the explana- 
 tion given by Laing, Schipper, and Mackay 1 of the cir- 
 cumstance that Dunbar's name appears no more in the 
 Treasurer's book because he had at length reached the 
 summit of his ambition in his later years — a benefice — to 
 be the only legitimate conclusion deducible from the facts. 
 His pension would then of course stop, as one of the 
 conditions of it when conferred was that on the recipient 
 being appointed to a benefice of ,£100 the pension would 
 cease. I do not see that any conclusion other than this 
 would really meet all the exigencies of the case. 
 
 1 See Laing's Dunbar, Schipper's Lebcn unci Gedichte, and Mackay's 
 
 Introduction.
 
 122 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 After the disaster of Flodden many of the great Church 
 offices were vacant, and remained so for some time. In 
 August 1 5 14, shortly before her marriage with the Earl 
 of Angus, the Queen-Dowager wrote a letter to Pope 
 Leo x. in which she gives a list of all the great benefices 
 in question, and whom she desired to appoint to them. 1 
 The fact that Dunbar's name does not appear there is 
 no argument that he did not receive preferment. Only 
 the greater benefices are named, such as Dunbar could 
 have no hope of receiving, seeing that Gavin Douglas, 
 the relative of the man she was about to marry, had great 
 difficulty in securing the bishopric of Dunkeld, after being 
 disappointed of the abbacy of Aberbrothick (Arbroath). 
 
 At last, then, in his fifty-third or fifty-fourth year, the 
 weary poet seems to find a resting-place in some quiet 
 benefice, where he could write and read and muse all 
 day long without being compelled to torture his brains 
 into song to flatter the vanity of his royal patrons or to 
 amuse the giddy habitues of the Court. Where it was 
 situated, alas ! we know not. In fact, Dunbar's closing years 
 are entirely wrapped in obscurity. In all probability he 
 retired to his benefice, glad to escape from the quarrels of 
 a Court that was every day becoming more divided and 
 anarchic. Possibly he never again visited it. The only 
 subsequent reference to Dunbar occurs in one of Sir David 
 Lindsay's poems, written about the year 1530, viz. The 
 Testament and Co?nplaynt of the Kings Papyngo 2 — 
 
 ' For why the bell of rhetorick bene rung, 
 By Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate aureat, 
 
 1 Epistolae Kegum Scotorum, vol. i. p. 199. 2 In the Prologue, Stanza 11.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 123 
 
 Who dare presume their poems to impugn, 
 
 Whose sweet sentence through Albions been sung? 
 
 Or who can now the workis countrafeit 
 
 Of Kennedy with terme's aureate, 
 
 Or of Dunbar, who language had at large 
 
 As may be seen intil his Golden Targe.' 
 
 From these lines we gather that Dunbar had been dead 
 for some time ; and, as Laing adds, ' from the manner in 
 which Lyndsay laments Bishop Douglas, who died in 1522, 
 it may be inferred that our author's decease was previous 
 to that of the prelate. We cannot greatly err in supposing 
 that he died about the year 1520, when he was about sixty 
 years of age.' 
 
 But if we know not where he died, nor when, nor under 
 what circumstances his last years were spent, if we know 
 not where he lies, and if we cannot repair to his tomb in 
 the fond pilgrimage of sincere admiration, in his poems he 
 has raised a monument to himself, as Horace writes of 
 his own book, perennins aere — more lasting than brass, — a 
 monument which, as the years and the centuries roll by, 
 will be ever increasingly valued by all who revere the pro- 
 ductions of a genius as profound as it was soaring.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 DUNBAR AS AN ALLEGORIST AND SATIRIST 
 
 We have now completed our survey of the life of our 
 great Scots poet. Before closing this little volume, how- 
 ever, I should like to devote a few pages to a critical 
 analysis of his genius and of his works. Along with 
 Robert Burns, Dunbar must undoubtedly be regarded as 
 the greatest imaginative poet Scotland has produced. Sir 
 Walter Scott remarks: 'This darling of the Scottish 
 Muses has been justly raised to a level with Chaucer by 
 every judge of poetry to whom his obsolete language has 
 not rendered him unintelligible ' ; l while George Ellis, 
 an English critic, and therefore not likely to be biassed 
 by patriotic prejudices, goes further, and says, ' William 
 Dunbar, the greatest poet that Scotland has produced,' 2 
 and did space permit quite as decisive testimonies could 
 be cited from Malcolm and David Laing, Warton, Dr. 
 Irving, Mr. Gilchrist, Thomas Campbell, and Mr. Fraser- 
 Tytler. That of Dr. Drake, however, is so eulogistic that 
 I cannot refrain from quoting it. Speaking of Chaucer, 
 he declares 'it is evident that a union of talents of this 
 wide range must necessarily be of rare occurrence : nor 
 
 1 Sir Walter Scott's Memoirs of George Bannatyne ; also History of 
 Scotland. 
 - Ellis's Specimens of the Early English Poems, vol. i. p. 377. 
 124
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 125 
 
 can we wonder that a century should elapse before a poet 
 in any high degree approaching the genius of Chaucer 
 made his appearance in this island. Not indeed until 
 Dunbar arose in the sister kingdom had we another 
 instance of the combination of first-rate abilities for 
 humour and comic painting, with an equally powerful 
 command over the higher regions of fiction and imagina- 
 tion.' 1 
 
 These testimonies, then, are calculated to outweigh that 
 silly criticism of James Russell Lowell 2 — whose mania for 
 saying smart things perpetually led him into errors in 
 fact — when, after praising a few lines on which he had 
 stumbled in The Merle and the Nightingale, he goes on 
 to say : ' But except this lucky poem, I find little else in 
 the serious verses of Dunbar that does not seem to me 
 tedious and pedantic. / dare say a feiv more lines might 
 be found scattered here and there, but I hold it sheer 
 waste of time to hunt after those thin needles of wit buried 
 in unwieldy haystacks of verse. If that be genius, the less 
 we have of it the better.' In pointing out to Mr. Lowell, 
 a year or two before his death, the glaring contradiction 
 contained in these two sentences, that great man, who was 
 nothing if not the most honourable and straightforward 
 of critics, confessed to me that he had only read half a 
 dozen pieces at most of Dunbar's work. Probably Sir 
 Walter Scott's remark would be applicable here, that he 
 is appreciated only by those 'to whom his obsolete lan- 
 guage has not rendered him unintelligible.' 
 
 1 Drake's Mornings in Spring, vol. ii. p. 5. 
 
 - Lowell's Essays on the English Pods, Scott Library Edition, p. 14.
 
 i26 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 If Dunbar — to compare him with a posterior as well as 
 an anterior rival — did not possess Spenser's limpid sweet- 
 ness, his genius was of a stronger, bolder cast than that of 
 the author of the Faerie Queen. If the circle of his flight 
 did not extend so far, he soared into realms of pure ima- 
 gination quite as high as Spenser ever attempted. Were 
 Dunbar's vocabulary as familiar to English readers as that 
 of his rival, the fact would to most be self-evident. 
 
 To those who can enjoy Dunbar without requiring the 
 constant aid of a glossary, he is himself his own exceeding 
 great reward. The many-sidedness of his genius has a ring 
 almost Shakespearian about it. To no other poet has the 
 faculty been given of attaining excellence so supreme 
 in so many diverse kinds of metrical composition. The 
 Golden Targe is an allegory as purely imaginative as 
 the Faerie Queen itself ; The Thistle and the Rose a 
 marriage song worthy to take rank beside Spenser's 
 Epithalamium. In the mock-heroic or Hudibrastic vein, 
 have we not the Joust between the Tailor and the 
 Soutar, The Fenyeit Friar of Tungland, and many others 
 that exhibit a sense of the ludicrous and incongruous, 
 every whit as keen as Butler's? Then in pure satire 
 his Tidings frae the Session, The Devil's Inquest, The 
 Visitation of St. Francis, and many others, to say nothing 
 of his share in the terrible Flyting, are admirable speci- 
 mens of the lash of ridicule applied to contemporary vices 
 and follies. But, over and above all these, the man 
 whose genius could rise to such a soaring flight of imagina- 
 tive sublimity as in the Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, 
 and yet pour forlh on the other hand an elegiac strain of
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 127 
 
 such unfeigned pathos as the Lament for the Makars, 
 must assuredly be held to rank with the very greatest 
 masters of his craft in English literature. 
 
 But to look a little more narrowly into the components 
 of Dunbar's genius, let us consider first the work accom- 
 plished by him in Allegory and Satire. Warton incisively 
 remarks : ' The imagination of Dunbar is not less suited 
 to satirical than sublime allegory, and he is the first poet 
 who has appeared in this way of writing since Piers Plow- 
 man.'' l And Professor Henry Morley, speaking of The 
 Thistle and the Rose, says : ' The bold touch of direct 
 counsel to the King (about honouring the Rose above all 
 other flowers) brings an old form of allegory here into 
 close contact with the life of its own day. In the Golden 
 Targe there is the playful grace of the poet who is the 
 first since Chaucer in whom we recognise again a master 
 in his art. Dunbar was a man of genius, a born poet, 
 with wide range of powers, cultivated mind, and perfect 
 training in the mechanism of verse.' 
 
 Dunbar, like Chaucer, understood the subtle secret of 
 rendering allegory intensely attractive, which ' the moral 
 Gower' and 'Lydgate aureate' did not. If we judge 
 Dunbar's use of allegory by the definition of it given by 
 the rhetoricians, our poet will not be found to exactly 
 conform to the strict letter of the law. Principal Camp- 
 bell asserts allegory to be the picture of something through 
 the agency of something else; 2 while Dr. Blair regards it 
 as continued metaphor, 'as the representation of some one 
 
 1 Walton's History of English Poetry, sue. xxx. p. 505. 
 
 2 Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric.
 
 i28 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 thing by another that resembles it, and is made to stand 
 for it.' 1 In allegorical poetry Dunbar takes a place with 
 his Thistle and the Rose, The Golden Targe, and The 
 Merle and the Nightingale, which is by the side of the 
 very highest masters in European literature. Granted that 
 the machinery of his allegories is still the conventional 
 and hackneyed form of walking out early on a May 
 morning and falling asleep in some cave convenient — 
 such caves seem to have been vastly more plentiful then 
 than now, — where he experiences the visions recorded, 
 being generally awakened by an irruption of the real 
 world into the ideal, such as a salute fired by the cannon 
 of a ship in the bay. The descriptive powers of our poet 
 are of the very highest order. Nature as it is, not as he 
 conceives it should be, is painted on his canvas. His 
 vocabulary is rich and full, though he manifests an exces- 
 sive preference for Latinised forms, such as 'preclare,' 
 ' pulcritude,' 'matutine,' 'armipotent,' 'mellifluate,' which, 
 however, the genius of the language soon rejected. His 
 figures of speech are almost invariably startlingly original, 
 being used moreover with great propriety, and that exqui- 
 site sympathy between the thought that imparts life and 
 the style that receives it. He is greater in pure descrip- 
 tion than any other poet in our language save Thomson. 
 His descriptive pictures are gems in miniature. He never 
 lavishes a superfluous word on any scene. Yet one is 
 conscious how rich exceedingly are his poetic cameos in 
 artistic finish and metrical deftness. Take for example 
 the following allegorical picture of a spring morning, which 
 
 ] Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 129 
 
 is intended to indicate also the fresh active longings of 
 the country at the commencement of a new century, and 
 the feelings with which that brilliant intellectual group 
 which surrounded the throne of the warrior king regarded 
 the prospects of learning and art : — 
 
 ' When March with her varying winds was past, 
 And April had with her silver showers 
 Tane leave of Nature with an orient blast. 
 And lushy May that Mother is of flowers 
 Had made the birdis to begin their hours, 
 Among the tender odours red and white, 
 Whose harmony to hear it was delight : 
 
 In bed at morning, sleeping as I lay, 
 
 Methought Aurora with her crystal een 
 
 In at the window lookit by the day, 
 
 And hailed me with visage pale and green ; 
 
 And on whose hand a lark sang loud, I wene, 
 
 "Awake, lovers, out of your slumbering, 
 
 See how the lusty morning doth upspring." 
 
 Methought fresh May before my bed upstood, 
 In weeds depaint of many a diverse hue, 
 Sober, benign, and full of mansuetude, 
 In bright attire of flowers forgit new, 
 Heavenly of colour, white, red, brown, and blue, 
 Bathed all in dew, and gilt with Phoebus' beams, 
 While she the house illumined by her gleams.' 
 
 May then rebukes the poet for not rising early accord- 
 ing to his invariable custom in the past to celebrate the 
 approach of the spring, especially as the lark has now 
 announced the dawn of day, and his heart in former years 
 had always — 
 
 ' Glad and blissful been 
 Sangis to make under the leavis green.' 
 
 I
 
 T3 o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 May commands him to rise and to perform his annual 
 homage to the flowers, the birds, and the sun. They both 
 enter a delicious garden, filled with the richest colours 
 and odours. The sun suddenly appears in his glory, 
 and is thus described in the luminous language of 
 Dunbar — 
 
 ' The purple sun with tender beamis red, 
 In orient bright as angel did appear, 
 Through golden skyis putting up his head, 
 Whose glorious tresses shone so wondrous clear, 
 That all the world took comfort far and near.' 
 
 This introduction to The Thistle and the Rose will enable 
 my readers to understand the character of the poem. 
 Thereafter Nature, and the beasts, the birds, and the trees, 
 all assemble to do homage to the Rose, the personification 
 of the various inanimate forces of Nature being very 
 skilfully managed. The whole purpose of the piece is to 
 offer a delicate yet lofty compliment to Margaret Tudor, 
 and in his design the poet succeeds admirably. Allegory 
 as a subtle warp is deftly interwoven with the web of 
 fact, and the whole texture of the work is of the most 
 exquisitely felicitous character. 
 
 In The Golden Targe, on the other hand, the design 
 of the poet is to evince the gradual and imperceptible 
 influence of love when indulged beyond the limits of reason. 
 The poet walks out once more at the dawn of a bright 
 May day, and, lulled by the music of the birds and the 
 murmuring of waters, falls asleep on the flower-bed, which 
 he calls 'Flora's mantle.' In a vision he sees a ship 
 approach whose sails were white as ' the blossom upon the
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 131 
 
 spray,' whose masts are of gold, ' bright as the star of day.' 
 She arrives at the shore, and out of her are landed upon 
 the blooming meadows a hundred ladies clad in loose 
 green attire richly ornamented. In this brilliant assemblage 
 the author sees Dame Nature, ' Venus Queen,' Aurora, 
 May, Lady Flora, Juno, Latona, Proserpine, Diana, and 
 others — all crowned with diadems, glittering like the 
 morning star. The poet leaves his ambush under the trees, 
 and presses forward to gain a better view, when he is 
 espied by Venus, who bids her 'archers keen' arrest the 
 intruder, whereupon all the fair ladies, dropping their gay 
 attire, arm themselves with bows, and form themselves in 
 battle-array. The position of the spy would have become 
 critical had he not at the last moment been championed 
 by Reason armed with the Golden Targe. All the efforts 
 of Beauty and her fair fellow- warriors to overcome the 
 poet are unavailing so long as he is defended by Reason, 
 but at length a magical powder is thrown into the eyes of 
 Reason, who is suddenly deprived of all his powers and 
 reels like a drunken man. Immediately the poet receives 
 a deadly wound and is taken prisoner by Beauty. The 
 allegory is admirably constructed, the Abstract Qualities 
 and Moral Virtues being endowed with all the life-like 
 truth of reality. There is a directness, a poetic swiftness 
 almost Homeric in the action of this allegorical epic, 
 united to a warm imaginative glow, a vigour of thought, 
 and a metrical felicity that is even more marked in the 
 latter piece than in the former. 
 
 The opening of The Golden Targe has been greatly 
 admired for the magical truth of its description. Such a
 
 i 3 2 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 stanza as the following whets one's appetite to have more 
 of the royal fare provided in the poem — 
 
 ' The crystal air, the sapphire firmament, 
 The ruby skyis of the orient, 
 Kissed beryl beams on emerald boughs so green, 
 The rosy garth depaint and redolent, 
 With purple azure, gold and gules gent, 
 Arrayit was by Dame Flora, the queen, 
 So nobily that joy was to be seen : 
 The rock again the river resplendent 
 As low illuminit all the leavis sheen.' 
 
 The other poems which also come under the head of 
 ' allegories,' though less distinctively so, are Beauty and the 
 Prisoner, The Merle and the Nightingale, and one or two 
 smaller pieces of less literary value. The Merle and the 
 Nightingale — a dialogue between the two birds on earthly 
 as against heavenly love — was written late in life, after 
 the death of the King. Interesting indeed is the task to 
 compare the special characteristics of the allegorical poems 
 produced by Dunbar previous to the fatal day of Flodden 
 and those dated subsequent to it. The difference is 
 marked. In The Merle and the Nightingale all the joyous 
 pleasure in life, the keen delight in its enjoyments, the 
 insatiable appetite for novelty and intellectual improvement, 
 seem to have passed away for ever. In their stead there 
 is a world-weary sadness, an unutterable longing for rest 
 and perfect peace wherein to hear the voice of God 
 speaking to him. The Thistle and the Rose and The 
 Golden Targe were written by a man in the full flush of 
 life's meridian, eager to drink the cup of pleasure to the 
 very dregs ; The Merle a?id the Nightingale is the work of
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 133 
 
 the same spirit when his very pleasures have palled on 
 
 him, when he sees that the world after all is but a sorry 
 
 place, and that if there remained not for us a rest when the 
 
 day of toil was done, the human lot were wretched indeed. 
 
 ' The nightingale said, " Fool, remember thee, 
 That both in youth and age, and every hour, 
 The love of God most deir to man should be, 
 That him of naught wrought like His own figure, 
 And died Himself from death him to succour ; 
 O whether was produced their true love or none : 
 God is most true and stedfast paramour, 
 All love is lost but upon Him allone." ' 
 
 Dunbar as a satirist of contemporary men and manners 
 was one of the most trenchant writers that ever lifted pen 
 in this department of letters. If the current definition of 
 Satire be accepted by us, to wit, a discourse or poem in 
 which wickedness or folly is exposed by severity and held 
 up to ridicule and contempt, 1 then some of Dunbar's finest 
 work falls within this category. He has many satiric styles 
 aptly proportioned to the degree of folly or culpability with 
 which he was dealing,— a light, airy style of persiflage and 
 banter, wherein the sting is scarcely perceptible in the 
 genial laughter and fun of merry-making. He had care- 
 fully studied the maxims and examples of Horace in 
 respect to this manner, and his imitations of the great 
 Roman satirist's work are both felicitous and pointed. In 
 this category I would place The Ballad of Kind Kittok, 
 James Doig, Keeper of the Queen's Wardrobe, Of a Blacka- 
 moor, The Joust between the Tailor and the Soutar, and The 
 Testament of Mr. Andrew Kennedy. The last named is a 
 clever specimen of macaronic verse, and is perhaps as early 
 1 Satires and Satirists, by James Hannay.
 
 i 3 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 an instance of its use as we have in English literature. 
 
 The following is a stanza of it — 
 
 ' I wish no priests for me to sing, 
 Dies ilia, dies irae, 
 Nor yet no bells for me to ring, 
 Sicut semper solet fiere ; 
 But a bag-pipe to play a spring, 
 Et unum ale -wisp ante me ; 
 Instead of banners let them bring 
 Quatuor lagenas ceruisie.' 
 
 The second class of Dunbar's satirical poems are those in 
 which he describes, with a keenness of analysis rarely 
 equalled, and a perception into human motives almost 
 startling in its truth and its unerringness, certain of the 
 more venial kinds of culpable folly. Though he hits hard at 
 times, there is still more of fun and frolic in his satirical 
 representations than sarcasm or malice. Among these 
 pieces are the poems In Praise of Women, To the Merchants 
 of Edinburgh, The Dance in the Queen's Chamber, Against 
 Treason, and How shall I Governe me ? From the last- 
 named satire I quote the two concluding stanzas — 
 
 ' I would my guiding were devised ; 
 If I spend little I am despised, 
 If I be noble, gentle, and free, 
 A prodigal man I then am prized. 
 Lord God, how shall I govern me ? 
 
 Now judge they me both good and ill, 
 And sooth I may no man's tongue still, 
 To do the best my mind shall be : 
 Let every man say what he will, 
 The gracious God must govern me.' 
 
 But when we reach the third class of Dunbar's satires — 
 the class represented by The Fenyeit Friar of Tung/and,
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 135 
 
 The Two Married Women and the Widow, The Devil's 
 Inquest, The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, The 
 Birth of Antichrist, and several other pieces of a like 
 character — we enter a different atmosphere altogether. 
 From the genial jesting and ironical incongruities in the 
 style of Horace and of Persius, we are introduced at once 
 into the bitter vitriolic scourgings of Juvenal. The lash 
 of the satirist is all the more merciless when it is artistically 
 laid on. Every word tells. The instinct and the unerring 
 skill of the great literary artist are everywhere visible. Not 
 a false stroke is to be traced in any of his greater satires. 
 They are terrible in the very concentrated essence of their 
 bitterness. As Dr. J. M. Ross remarks, 1 'The real strength 
 of Dunbar lies in his satirical humour. Here he is 
 thoroughly independent, and portrays the aspects of the 
 society about him with incomparable vigour and pungency, 
 He has no shame, no scruples, no reticence, he shrinks 
 from no foulness of language or grossness of incident. 
 There is really no limit to the variety of his humour.' 
 It is by turns mirthful, mocking, sarcastic, grotesque, 
 profane, stern, and intense ; it even shows its Protean 
 character by the multiplicity of its metrical forms. In 
 Dunbar's satires one notes the natural directness of Hall, 
 the subtle depth of Donne, the delicate humour of Breton, 
 the sturdy vigour of Dryden, the scalding, vitriolic bitter- 
 ness of Swift, the pungency of Churchill, the rural 
 ' smack ' of Gay, united to an approach at least to 
 the artistic perfection of Pope. There is one satire of 
 Dunbar's which, taken all in all, is one of the most extra- 
 
 ' Scottish History and Literature, by J. M. Ross, LL.D., p. 198.
 
 136 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 ordinary productions that has ever emanated from the 
 human intellect. The student of literature who peruses 
 with care for perhaps the hundredth time The Dance of 
 the Seven Deadly Sins, equally with the cursory reader 
 who mayhap tumbles across it without the slightest know- 
 ledge of the author's other works, are both equally startled 
 by the amazing realistic power, the profound depth of a 
 moral earnestness at times falling but little short of Dantean 
 impressiveness, and the weird, lurid grandeur of its sub- 
 limity. The whole atmosphere of the piece seems electric 
 with a horror that deepens as the fiery lines rush to their 
 conclusion. Calderon, in some of the most powerful scenes 
 in his Autos Sacramenta/es, has probed depths of imagina- 
 tive power equally grand and terrible. But the great 
 Spaniard writes from the point of view of a reverential, 
 ethical anatomist, who sorrows even where he most 
 trenchantly satirises : Dunbar has a mocking, malicious 
 smile on his lips from start to finish, as though he had 
 realised from the evidence of his own heart the deep, sad- 
 dening truth that mankind at heart were irretrievably 
 corrupt. With him satire broadens into the malignity of 
 sarcasm, the light persiflage dies out of his verse, and a 
 fierce, acrimonious, caustic venom is spirted into the lines 
 — a venom whose acid burns where it lights. As Ross 
 remarks, 1 'It is an allegoric satire, grim and grand, grotesque 
 and horrible.' The scene is laid in no imaginary fairyland 
 of sensuous beauty, where mythological figures are grouped 
 together in ' most admired disorder,' and take part in vain 
 and ridiculous exploits. Hell is rudely opened to our 
 
 1 Scottish History and Literature, p. 200.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 137 
 
 view, and the vices that make havoc of our nature are 
 shown disporting themselves in a ghastly revel under the 
 leadership of ' Mahoun.' It is the night before Lent, when 
 the carnival riot is at its maddest. Everything is morally 
 real, though presented in such a farcical guise. The very 
 idea of a ' Dance in Hell ' is startling, but to Dunbar, as in 
 the case of Burns with Tarn d Shanter, the wild humour 
 of the conception has a weird fascination, as Ross aptly 
 puts it, and 'never until just at the close does the author 
 seek by light-heeled levity to mitigate the horror of the 
 infernal vision.' Even the terrible realism of Burns pales 
 before this awful satire. As evincing the marvellous minute- 
 ness of detail by which the poem is characterised, and how 
 the horror is built up bit by bit, with an accretion of 
 elements, each successive one more terrific than the pre- 
 ceding, we learn that the dance which Mahoun orders to 
 be performed is to be executed by those fiends only who 
 in the other world had never made confession to the priest, 
 and as a consequence had never received absolution. The 
 ' Seven Deadly Sins ' are Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, 
 Sloth, Lust, and Gluttony. Then the dance commences. 
 No music, however, is heard in the hideous halls of Hell, 
 but at last a Highland coronach is shouted by a ' Mac- 
 fadyane,' and kindles a reckless fury in the breasts of the 
 dancers — this last touch being a cut at the Celtic hordes 
 which ever and anon poured over the fertile plains of the 
 Lowlands. The portraits of 'Anger,' 'Envy,' and 'Lust,' 
 in particular, are painted with great vigour and realistic 
 force. The concluding stanza, as Warton states, is ex- 
 clusively a satire on the Highlanders. After the Dance of
 
 138 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 the Seven Sins is over, Mahoun or Mahomet, whose name 
 is always accepted in early English literature, and in par- 
 ticular in ballad minstrelsy, as a synonym for the devil, 
 expresses a desire to see a Highland pageant. One of 
 the fiends is sent again to summon Macfadyane. As soon 
 as the latter commenced his coronach, immediately he 
 gathered round him a prodigious crowd of Celts, who took 
 up great room in hell. These ' worthies ' began to chatter 
 in their own language, and the devil is so stunned with the 
 horrid din that he casts them down to his deepest abyss 
 and smothers them with smoke. The closing pictures of 
 the ' Highland pageant ' are thus represented in this 
 wonderful satire — 
 
 ' Then the foul monster, Gluttony, 
 Of vvame insatiable and greedy, 
 
 To dance he did him dress : 
 Him followed many a foul drunkart, 
 With can and collop, cup and quart, 
 
 In surfeit and excess. 
 Full many a waistless wally-drag, 1 
 With wames unwieldable furth did wag 
 
 In grease that did increase. 
 " Drunk," aye they cried, with many a gape, 
 The fiends gave them hot lead to laip,' 2 
 Their leveray 3 was not less. 
 No minstrels played to them : nor doubt 
 That gleemen there were shutten out, 
 By day and eik by night : 
 Except a minstrel that slew a man, 
 So to his heritage he wan, 
 Entering by bill of right. 
 
 Then cried Mahoun for a Highland padyane, 4 
 Strait ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane 
 Far northwest in a nook, 
 
 1 A silly, useless person. - Lap. 3 Reward. 4 Pageant.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 139 
 
 When he the coronach did shout 
 Then Gaels so gathered him about 
 
 In hell great room they took. 
 These termagants, with tag and tatter, 
 Full loud in Ersche 1 began to clatter, 
 And roup like raven and rook. 
 The Devil so deived 2 was with their yell, 
 That in the deepest pot of hell, 
 
 He smothered them with smoke.' 
 
 Only one more extract shall we cite, and that is from the 
 wonderful satire The DeviPs Inquest. In a dream the 
 poet sees the ' foul fiend ' passing to and fro, and every- 
 where finding his own. All classes of men whom he 
 accosts swear by the most holy oaths that they speak 
 the truth, yet they all lie and cheat. The different char- 
 acters, says Ross, are set before us with that picturesque 
 terseness of touch in which Dunbar excelled all his pre- 
 decessors except Chaucer. Here are one or two stanzas 
 as an example — 
 
 ' A goldsmith said, the gold is so fine 
 That all the workmanship I tine. 
 
 The fiend receive me if I lie. 
 Think on, quoth the Devil, that thou art mine, 
 
 Renounce thy God and come to me. 
 
 A tailor said, in all the town 
 
 Be there a better well made gown, 
 
 I give me to the fiend all free. 
 Gramery, tailor, said Mahoun, 
 
 Renounce thy God and come to me. 
 
 A baker said, I forsake God 
 And all His works, even and odd, 
 If fairer bread there needs to be. 
 
 1 Gaelic. 2 Deafened.
 
 140 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 The Devil laughed, and on him could nod, 
 Renounce thy God and come to me. 
 
 By God's blood, quoth the tavernier, 
 There is such wine in my celleir, 
 
 Has never come in this countrie. 
 Tut, quoth the Devil, thou sells owre dear, 
 
 Renounce thy God and come to me. '
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 DUNBAR AS A LOVE-POET AND ELEGIST 
 
 Dunbar's powers as a writer of amatory verse were of a 
 
 high order. Whether or not we believe the charge, that 
 
 the only experience he ever enjoyed of love was of an illicit 
 
 character, certain it is that the Court Laureate was not 
 
 deficient in the department of his art which to many of the 
 
 courtiers, and certainly to the King, presented itself as the 
 
 chief end of poesy. With such sentiments current in the 
 
 Court, the fact is not without its own significance that 
 
 erotic poetry should form a part so infinitesimal of 
 
 Dunbar's work. Albeit of a nature in earlier years so 
 
 instinct with gaiety and fun, loving life for the very joy of 
 
 living, the fact would have been more than remarkable if 
 
 he had passed from the cradle to the grave heart-whole. 
 
 But, as has been already indicated, his love for the beautiful 
 
 Mrs. Musgrave, or Lady Musgrave, as she would be termed 
 
 to-day, speedily became of a very Platonic character. 
 
 From the internal evidence of the three or four pieces 
 
 which constitute the amatory verse of William Dunbar, I 
 
 am inclined to think, with Schipper and Sheriff Mackay, 1 
 
 that the connection between them was in every respect 
 
 innocent. There are always persons in this world whose 
 
 1 Sheriff Mackay's Introduction. 
 
 141
 
 142 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 imaginations seem to be in a chronic state of ' cesspoolism,' 
 if the word will be pardoned. On the conduct of others 
 they always put the very worst construction, and as though 
 their own motives were perpetually savouring of the moral 
 sewer-pipe, they accredit other people with actions of which 
 they had no more thought than a babe unborn. Dunbar's 
 freedom of speech, due to the inherent coarseness of his 
 age, the somewhat liberal licence he allows himself in the 
 description of the notorious immoralities of his age, united 
 to the fact that, in place of lashing the vice with a whip of 
 scorpions, he pokes genial fun at the peccadilloes, rallies 
 the King gaily over his pre-nuptial amours, as in The Tod 
 and the Lamb, and is not ashamed to portray in broad 
 colours the rustic love-making that finds representation in 
 A Brash of Wooing, have been urged against him as proof 
 positive of his immoral life. It has gained him a worse 
 name than he deserves. He describes in those early poems 
 what was the custom of the Court in the days of James's 
 bachelorhood, but we have not a tittle of evidence to prove 
 that the poet was personally guilty of the slightest indis- 
 cretion that might cast disgrace on his cloth. The coarse- 
 ness of the age and the licence of its manners cannot be 
 alleged as faults against Dunbar ; while, had he been more 
 squeamish and queasy-stomached about calling a spade a 
 spade, he would not have come down to posterity as that 
 unrivalled portrayer of contemporary men and manners 
 which he undoubtedly was. Do not let us therefore con- 
 demn Dunbar for encouraging immorality, when in reality 
 he was doing nothing more than painting faithfully the 
 manners of the Augustan age in Scots literature !
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 143 
 
 But to return to Dunbar's amatory poetry. In a 
 chronological order, the poem To a Lady, and com- 
 mencing 'Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,' marks 
 the first mention made of the tender passion. That he 
 did not realise then how hopeless was his passion is 
 evident. He speaks of her as ' merciless,' but such a 
 word must not be conceived to carry with it the least 
 suggestion of dishonour in any of the favours he hoped 
 to receive from his lady-love. Dante towards his Beatrice, 
 Petrarch towards Laura, were not more content with a 
 look, a smile, or a word of thanks, than was William 
 Dunbar to his lady-love, in whose honour he writes those 
 charming odes in which he immortalises the perfections 
 of the lady of his heart. The unfamiliarity of the language 
 to many will detract from the supreme delight in store 
 for those who possess the Sesame of acquaintance with it. 
 The latter then will be able to corroborate my criticisms, 
 when I say that these love-poems are only excelled in Scots 
 literature by Robert Burns's songs. 1 There is visible in 
 them a tender grace, an exquisite sympathy with the object 
 of his affection, a sweetness of rhythmical flow, and an 
 artistic deftness in technical craftsmanship, that stamp the 
 poems as almost sui generis. With the best of the Eliza- 
 bethans we can claim kinship for him, and some of Thomas 
 Watson's finest pieces in the Hecatompathia are more than 
 rivalled by these noble odes. To Watson's eleventh sonnet, 2 
 
 ' O golden bird and Phoenix of our age, 
 Whose swete records and more than earthly voice,' 
 
 1 See Mr, Logie Robertson on this subject in his excellent paper 
 ' Dunbar and Burns.' 
 " Vide Poems of Thomas Watson (1552-1597), in the Arber Reprints.
 
 i 4 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 I consider Dunbar's ode to his mistress as bearing a close 
 affinity. The following is the poem in full — 
 
 1 Sweet Rose of virtue and of gentleness, 
 Delightsome lily of every lustiness, 
 Richest in bounty and in beauty clear, 
 And every virtue that is held most deir, 
 Except only that ye are merciless. 
 Into your garth this day I did pursue : 
 There saw I flowers that fresh were of hue, 
 Both white and red most lusty to be seen, 
 And wholesome herbs upon their stalks so green ; 
 Vet leaf nor flower found I none of rue. 
 I doubt that March, with his cold blasts so keen, 
 Has slain this gentle herb, that I do mean : 
 Whose piteous death does to my heart such pain 
 That I would fain go plant his root again, 
 So comforting his leaves to me have been.' : 
 
 The ode which in point of time comes next bears internal 
 evidence that Dunbar realised the fact that his fair charmer 
 was not prepared to accord him even so much as a look 
 whereon his love-sick heart might feed. Yet his feelings 
 were under such admirable control that, while he com- 
 plains of her pitilessness, he nevertheless remarks that he 
 would not have her other than she is. Nobler tribute 
 to pure sweet womanhood has never been paid than in 
 those beautiful lines in the poem which opens — 
 
 ' My heart's trcsoiir and sweet assured foe.' 
 
 The second stanza is undoubtedly one of the finest Dunbar 
 
 ever penned — 
 
 ' Have mercy, love, have mercy, lady bright, 
 What have I wrought against your womanheid 
 That you should murder me, a sack less wight 
 
 1 Cf. the last stanza of Burns's Mary Morison.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 145 
 
 Trespassing on you nor in word nor deed, 
 That ye consent thereto, O God forbid. 
 Leave cruelty and save your man for shame, 
 Or through the world quite losed is your name. 3 
 
 The last of the pieces in which Dunbar deals with the 
 passion of love is that entitled Inconstancy of Love. In 
 it the great poet, while recognising the hopelessness of 
 his passion, yet declares at the same time that were 
 Mistress Musgrave to give him encouragement the slightest 
 she would lower herself even in his estimation who suffered 
 by what he called her cruelty. It is a charming little lyric, 
 with much of the daintiness of Suckling and Herrick 
 visible in it, united to a vigour and swiftness of thought to 
 which the Cavalier poets were strangers. Rather of some 
 of the Elizabethan odes does it savour, particularly of some 
 of Lyly's and Fletcher's. The poem runs as follows — 
 
 ' Who will behold of love the chance, 
 With sweet deceiving countenance, 
 In whose fair dissimulance 
 
 May none assure : 
 What is begun with inconstance 
 And ends not but in variance 
 She holdeth with continuance 
 
 No serviture. 
 
 Discretion and considerancc, 
 Are both out of her governance ; 
 Wherefore of it the short pleasance 
 
 May not endure. 
 She is so new of acquaintance, 
 The old goes from rememberance, 
 Thus I give o'er the observance 
 
 Of love's sweet J cure. 
 
 1 I his is one of Branch's conjectural emendations. Schipper reads ' of 
 love's cure.' 
 
 K
 
 i 4 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 It is a point of ignorance, 
 
 To love in such distemperance, 
 
 Since time misspendit may avance 
 
 No creature. 
 In love to keep allegiance, 
 It were as nice * an ordinance, 
 As though one bid a dead man dance, 
 
 In sepulture.' 
 
 These fragments render one's regret all the more poignant 
 that our poet did not write more amatory verses, or, if 
 he did so, that more of it has not come down to our days. 
 What we have only whets our appetite for more. As a 
 love-poet, then, Dunbar stands high, not by any means in 
 the highest place, but so far forward in the great Temple of 
 Poesy as to render his work eminently worthy of attention 
 by every student of the erotic verse of our literature. 
 
 But as an elegist Dunbar once more steps into a 
 supreme place. Elegiac poetry demands for its success- 
 ful execution qualities of genius so opposite in character, 
 and yet, at the same time, so subtly complementary to 
 one another in the production of a great imaginative 
 creation, that the individuals are few indeed who have 
 taken a high place in this form of composition. With 
 the exception of the Bion of Moschus, the Lycidas of 
 Milton, the Adonais of Shelley, the In Memoriam of 
 Tennyson, the Thyrsis of Arnold, and the Ave atque Vale 
 of Swinburne, we have really no great elegiac strains in 
 the history of the literature of the world. To these I 
 would add Dunbar's Lament for the Makars. To a noble 
 elevation of sentiment, to a pathos that is all the more 
 
 1 ' Nice' here takes its primitive meaning of foolish or silly.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR i 47 
 
 profound because seemingly so unpremeditated, there is 
 united a stately march of rhythm that is suggestive of the 
 muffled music at some great military funeral, and a choice 
 dignity yet severity of diction that is eminently in keeping 
 with the nature of the theme. With Sheriff Mackay 1 I 
 warmly agree when he remarks, with his usual penetration 
 and cultured critical instinct, that an oration of Bossuet 
 or Massillon, of Taylor or South, with its splendours of 
 pulpit eloquence, brings less intimately home to us the 
 lessons of death. To the other great elegy which came 
 from the same pen, that upon the Death of Bernard 
 Stewart, Lord of Aubigny, the same criticism applies, 
 though in a modified form. The latter poem has not the 
 same elevation as the Lament, it does not touch the same 
 high-water mark of pure pathos and supreme sympathy with 
 suffering. Great though it is, and of a greatness unap- 
 proached by any of the other elegies in his own country's 
 literature, it will never evoke the same profound sense of 
 regret, the same depth of feeling, as the other. The Lament 
 for the Makars 2 commences as follows — 
 
 ' I that in health was and gladness, 
 Am troubled now with great sickness, 
 Enfeebled with infirmity. 
 
 Timor mortis conturbat vie. 
 
 Our pleasure here is all vain glory, 
 This false world is but transitory, 
 The flesh is britle, the fiend is slee. 3 
 Timor mortis conturbat me. 
 
 1 Introduction to the Poems of Dunbar. 
 
 2 Makars is the old word for poets ; as a poet— derived from the Greek 
 poio to do— implied one who did or made something, so the Scots term by 
 analogy expresses the same idea. 3 Cunning.
 
 148 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 The state of man doth change and vary, 
 Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary, 1 
 Now dancing merry, now "like to dee," 
 Timor mortis conturbat me. 
 
 No state on earth here stands sicker, 
 As with the wind waves the wicker, - 
 So waves this world's vanity. 
 Timor mortis conturbat me. 
 
 Unto the Death go all estates, 
 Princes, Prelates, and Potestates, 
 Both rich and poor of all degree. 
 Timor mortis conturbat me. ' 
 
 The poet then proceeds to name the various classes that 
 have to bow to death, and also those of the tuneful poetic 
 choir of which he was then the only one surviving, with 
 the exception of Kennedy, who lay at death's door. Ross 
 comments on the omission of the name of James I., 
 to which I would add that of Gavin Douglas, though 
 regarding the latter the poet might argue that he could 
 not be included, seeing he was not dead but in excellent 
 health. The solemn and ever-recurring burden of the 
 poem produces a profound effect upon the mind, which 
 the pathetic and affecting conclusion tends to deepen. 
 The Lament for the Makars is one of those imperishable 
 poems which every century will only tend to make more 
 widely popular. 
 
 The Elegy on the Death of Bernard Stewart, Lord of 
 Aubigny, is likewise a piece that deserves to be more 
 generally known. Its merits will appear on perusal. I 
 cite a stanza or two of it — 
 
 1 Sorry. 2 ' Wicker ' means reeds.
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 149 
 
 ' Complain should every noble valiant knight, 
 The death of him that doughty was in deed ; 
 That many a foe in field has put to flight, 
 In weighty wars, by wisdom and manhead : 
 To the Turk sea all lands did his name dread, 
 Whose force all France in fame did magnifie, 
 Of so high price shall none his place posseid, 1 
 For he is gone, the Flower of Chivalrie. 
 
 O duleful death ! O dragon dolorous, 
 
 What hast thou done to dulefullie devour, 
 
 The prince of knighthood, noble and chivalrous, 
 
 The wit of wars, of arms and honour; 
 
 The top of courage, the strength of arms in stour, 
 
 The fame of France, the fame of Lombardy, 
 
 The choice of chieftains, awful in armour, 
 
 The charbuckell 2 chief of every chivalry. ' 
 
 Space will not permit of further citation, anxious though 
 I am to give it. Sufficient, however, has been adduced 
 in the way of example to prove my contention that in 
 elegy, as in satire and allegorical composition, Dunbar's 
 place in English literature is by prescriptive right to be 
 enrolled among the very highest masters of the craft. 
 
 1 Possess. - The carbuncle, esteemed then of great value.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 DUNBAR AS A PAINTER OF CONTEMPORARY MANNERS — AS 
 A DIDACTIC OR RELIGIOUS POET — CONCLUSION 
 
 And now, before bringing this little sketch to a conclusion, 
 I would like to add a single word upon Dunbar's powers 
 as a painter of contemporary manners. From the work 
 of Pitscottie and other early Scots chroniclers we are 
 enabled to form a very exact and fair estimate as to 
 whether Dunbar is to be regarded as a faithful and vera- 
 cious mirror of the spirit of his time. The great office 
 of the poet, as of the dramatist, is to hold the mirror up 
 to nature, to reflect in his verse the most delicate finances 
 as well as the most startling colours of the age wherein 
 he lived. Valuable indeed it is to the antiquary, to the 
 historian, and to the artist to have the spirit of the age 
 portrayed with such matchless truth as it exists for us 
 in the verse of Dunbar. As a painter of contemporary 
 manners, then, his powers were of the noblest order. He 
 had all the vividness of a Callot, united to the broad 
 humour of a Teniers, and the minute touch of a Meissonier. 
 To Dunbar every historian from Drummond to Burton, as 
 well as every Scots artist from Jameson to our own immortal 
 Sir Noel Paton, has repaired for information regarding 
 the humours of the age in the reign of the greatest of the 
 
 150
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 151 
 
 Stuarts. As Tytler 1 very pithily puts it, the whole life 
 of James and his Court, of the Edinburgh of the sixteenth 
 century, and the Scotland of the same period, flash back 
 once more upon us from the literary mirror of this great 
 artist. His poems enable us to accompany the King to 
 his chapel-royal at Stirling ; we see the boys of the choir 
 bending down to remove his spurs, and to receive their 
 accustomed largesse; we follow James in his progresses 
 through his royal burghs, and listen to the thanks of the 
 guidwife of the King's lodging as the generous monarch 
 bestows his gratuity on her ; we climb the romantic crag 
 on which St. Anthony's Chapel is situated and almost hear 
 his confession ; we can follow him into his study, and find 
 him adding to the scanty library which was all the times 
 permitted even to a king, the works of Quintilian and 
 Virgil, and the ' Sangbuiks ' in which he took such delight ; 
 his shooting at the butts with his nobles; his bandying 
 jokes with his artillerymen ; his issuing to the chase or the 
 tournament from his royal castles of Stirling or Falkland, 
 surrounded by a cavalcade of noble knights and beautiful 
 damsels ; his presence at the christening of the Earl of 
 Buchan's son, and the gold piece which he drops into the 
 caudle — all are conjured up before us, as by the wand of 
 potent magician, in the pages of these wonderfully varied 
 poems. So realistic are the pictures, so graphically por- 
 trayed are the sayings and doings of the characters, that 
 we lose sight of our prosaic present altogether, and seem 
 transported back into that romantic time, rose-tinted and 
 fascinating with all the glories of the past, which lives in 
 
 1 Tytler's Lives of Scottish Worthies.
 
 152 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 the verse of William Dunbar. The reader who studies with 
 care Dunbar's Dirge to the -King, Tidings from the Session, 
 The Devil's Inquest, To the Merchants of Edinburgh, The 
 Joust between the Tailor and the Soutar, The Flyting of 
 Dunbar and Kennedy — the last named of which I have 
 said nothing in my poetical criticisms, because it is only 
 valuable from a biographical and historic point of view, — 
 The Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy, The Queen's Recep- 
 tion at Aberdeen, and other poems of a kindred nature, 
 will have thereby gained an insight into the manners 
 of the Scotland of the sixteenth century obtainable in 
 no other way. To substantiate a statement so sweep- 
 ing, I trust I shall not be thought tedious if I cite 
 a few lines from Dunbar's remarkable poem, the Remon- 
 strance to the King, upon which I have already drawn 
 some pages back. 
 
 The poet is speaking of the crowd of needy adventurers 
 that throng the Court. 
 
 ' Kirkmen, courtmen, and craftsmen fine, 
 Doctors in jure and medicyne : 
 Divinours, rhetours, and philosophours : 
 Astrologists, artists, and Oratours : 
 Men of amies and valiant Knights : 
 And mony other goodly wights : 
 Musicians, minstrels, and merry singers, 
 Chevalouris, callandaris, and flingars, 
 Cunyeours, carvours, and carpenters, 
 Buildars of barks and ballingars, 
 Masouns, lying upon the land, 
 And ship wrights hewing upon the strand, 
 Glasing wrights, goldsmiths, and lapidaris, 
 Printers, paintours, and potingaris.' 
 
 All these mingle and elbow and jostle each other at
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 153 
 
 the King's motley Court in order to obtain an audience 
 with the man whose smile made or marred them. Oh, 
 it was a strange rout ! but how it lives and moves and 
 has its being in the pages of this wonderful literary 
 artist ! 
 
 Finally, of Dunbar as a didactic or religious poet I 
 should like to say a word. His work in this department 
 is full of significance to the student of Scots literature. 
 The poems falling under this category evince an exalted 
 spiritual enthusiasm, a noble belief in all the great Christian 
 verities, with a passionate assertion of the proposition that 
 religion is not a thing of rites and ceremonies, but a rela- 
 tion established between man and his Maker. Crashaw 
 has risen to no more exalted height of spiritual fervour 
 than appears in his pieces on the Nativity and Passion of 
 Christ : while all the calm, devotional elevation of Herbert, 
 the purity and incisiveness of Vaughan, and the vigorous 
 thought of Quarles appear in such poems as Love Earthly 
 and Divine, The Manner of Passing to Confession, The 
 Table of Confession, The Resurrection of Christ, and the 
 two Ballads on Our Lady. The mind that could rise 
 to such a soaring altitude of spiritual enthusiasm as is 
 evinced in the following lines must have been deeply 
 imbued with true religious feeling — 
 
 ' Though I have naught thy precious feet to kiss, 
 As had the Madelene when she did mercy crave, 
 I shall as she weep tears for mine amiss, 
 And every morrow seek thee at thy grave : 
 Therefore forgive me as Thou her forgave ; 
 That seest my heart as hers is penitent, 
 That precious body ere that I receave, 
 I cry Thee mercy and leisure to repent.
 
 154 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 ' To make me, Jesu, on Thee for to remember, 
 I ask Thy Passioun in me so to abound ; 
 While naught of me unmenyeit be ane member, 1 
 But feeling woe with Thee in every wound, 
 And every stroke make through my heart a stound 
 That ever did asting Thy fair flesh innocent, 
 So that no part be of my body sound, 
 But cry Thee mercy and leisure to repent. ' 
 
 Dunbar was a careful metrical craftsman. To any one 
 who reads his works with attention the conviction is 
 powerfully driven home that a more fastidious furbisher 
 of his work after its first rough execution has rarely been 
 known in Scots literature. Though his spontaneity and 
 facility were quite equal to that of Burns and Scott, he 
 was a much more careful artist than either of them. He 
 was fond of experimenting in various measures, and there 
 is scarcely a metrical form among those that are better 
 known among scholars which Dunbar did not essay. That 
 he was equally successful in all cannot be asserted, but in 
 most of them, and particularly in those which were the 
 popular measures of the day, he exhibits a technical per- 
 fection and an artistic grace rare indeed in his age. 
 
 We have already noted that in some respects he is 
 surpassed by his rival Kennedy in mellifluous sweetness 
 and rhythmic music. But what Dunbar might lack in 
 polish as compared with his friend and rival, he more 
 than redeemed by his vigour and robust force. This is 
 at once visible when we compare, side by side, such 
 poems as Kennedy's Passion of Christ and Dunbar's 
 pieces on the same theme, or on The Nativity or his 
 Ballad of Our Lady. Kennedy has sweetness with grace, 
 
 1 ' While naught of me be untouched by Thy anguish. '
 
 WILLIAM DUNBAR 155 
 
 Dunbar has both sweetness and grace, with intellectual 
 force superadded. 
 
 Lastly, Dunbar's diction is eminently worthy of study. 
 As has been previously remarked, it is notable for its pure 
 Anglo-Saxon foundation. Though he uses many Latinised 
 forms, and also several that exhibit traces of that influence 
 exercised on the style of our sixteenth -century Scots 
 writers by their intimate intercourse with France, still 
 Dunbar generally prefers a Saxon to a Latin or Gallic 
 derivative, where the first named will express his meaning 
 with equal precision and force. His vocabulary, as a 
 whole, is rich, and his command over the resources of the 
 language quite as imperial as that of Chaucer. This fact 
 is most apparent in his Thistle and the Rose and in The 
 Golden Targe. 
 
 Such then was William Dunbar, who with the mighty 
 ploughman-poet of Ayr and ' the last and greatest of the 
 minstrels ' form the supreme trio of Scottish poets. Great 
 as compared with his contemporaries, he becomes greater 
 when we estimate his rank by the work of the other 
 singers both of his own century and those that succeed. 
 He is verily a giant in an age of pigmies. By Edinburgh 
 citizens also Dunbar has every claim to be regarded as 
 one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of that glorious 
 family of sons who loved the ' romantic town ' with a 
 veneration that partook somewhat of the nature of a 
 religious worship. Though Dunbar was not a native 
 of the city, though his experiences of his life within her 
 walls were not altogether of the pleasantest character,
 
 156 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 though he suffered the continual pinch of poverty, being 
 oppressed with what was to a courtier the direst of all 
 diseases, atrophy of the purse, still his happiness through- 
 out these years was unquestionable. The epithets em- 
 ployed in Dunbar's Dirge to the King at Stirling were 
 not wholly the result of the artistic exigencies of the case, 
 but to some extent at least expressed his own personal 
 feelings. If Edinburgh were Paradise, as he states, and 
 Stirling its antipodes, Dunbar testified to his desire to 
 remain in Paradise by clinging with a devotion that was 
 both patriotic and pathetic to the city of his adoption. 
 But, alas ! she repaid his love by over two centuries of 
 neglect. Only with the advent of the present century, 
 and the awakening of a genuine patriotic enthusiasm 
 among her sons, has his name and fame been disinterred 
 by the fond admiration of Sir Walter Scott, David Laing, 
 Hill Burton, yEneas Mackay, and, earliest of all, Lord Hailes. 
 Among the memorials raised to commemorate the men 
 who lived and loved and laboured in the queen city of 
 the Forth, not the least noble tribute is due by right 
 prescriptive to him who was Scotland's earliest poet, 
 who, in the truest sense of the word, was national, and 
 who, by the indefeasible passport of his supreme genius, 
 has an indisputable title, in the apostolic succession of 
 British poetry, to that place between Chaucer and Spenser 
 — that place which can only be claimed by one whose 
 genius was co-ordinate with theirs.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Aberdeen, 103, 104. 
 Albany, Duke of, 117, 120. 
 Andre, Bernard, jj. 
 Angus, Earl of, 10, 19, 120. 
 Argyll, Earl of, 10. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 146. 
 Athole, Earl of, 10. 
 Ayala, Pedro de, 61. 
 
 Barton, Sir Andrew, 11, no. 
 
 Benedictines, the, 13, 26. 
 
 Bion, 146. 
 
 Blackadder, Archbishop, 47, 54, 73, 
 
 in. 
 Boccaccio, 55. 
 Borchloen, J. L. de, 31. 
 Bossuet, 147. 
 Bothvvell, Earl of, 73. 
 Breton, Nicolas, 135. 
 Bruce, 87. 
 Brunelleschi, 55. 
 Buchanan, George, 26, 29. 
 
 Robert, 63. 
 
 Burns, 137, 143. 
 Burton, Hill, n, 156. 
 Butler, 126. 
 Byzantine, n. 
 
 Caithness, Earl of, 10. 
 Calderon, 136. 
 Carey, Sir R., 88. 
 Chaucer, 9, 45, 51, 125, 157. 
 Chepman, Walter, 12. 
 
 and Myllar, 97. 
 
 Churchill, 135. 
 Claudero, 87. 
 Clerk of Tranent, 99. 
 Colet, 11, 28. 
 1 lum 55. 
 
 Confession, Dunbar's poems on, 32. 
 Crauford, Earl of, 10. 
 Crichton, the Admirable, 29. 
 
 Damirn, John, 89. 
 
 Dante, 55. 
 
 Dispensation, Papal, j^. 
 
 Dominicans, the, 26. 
 
 Donatello, 55. 
 
 Donne, 135. 
 
 Douglas, Gavin, 14, 17, 18, 20, 88, 
 90, 123. 
 
 Douglases, the, 19. 
 
 Drummond, family of, 51, 52. 
 
 W.,ofHawthorndcn,ii3,ii4,iis. 
 
 Dryden, 18, 22, 135. 
 
 Dunbar, William, his contempo- 
 raries, 9-22 ; birth and parentage, 
 23, 24 ; studies at St. Andrews, 30, 
 at Oxford and Paris, 32 ; life as a 
 friar, 35, 38 ; King's messenger, 
 45 ; travels in Europe, 47, 49 ; 
 travels with regard to the royal 
 marriage, 52, 54, 57; engaged in 
 the Fly ting, 60, 61, 68 ; first 
 pension, 69 ; visit to England, 73, 
 74 ; poem on London, 75 ; presents 
 Epithalamium, 81 ; first mass, 90 ; 
 pleading for benefice, 93 ; second 
 pension, 94 ; relations with Mrs. 
 Musgrave, 95 ; illness, 98 ; visits 
 Aberdeen, 103, 104 ; against assist- 
 ing France, 112 ; his action during 
 Flodden period, 10, 100 ; supposed 
 year of death, 122 ; as an allegorist 
 and satirist, 124 ; as a love-poet and 
 elegist, 140 ; painter of contempor- 
 ary manners and religious poet, 150. 
 
 Duthac's, St., 103. 
 
 157
 
 153 
 
 Edinburgh, 80. 
 Elphinstone, Earl of, 10. 
 Erasmus, n, 12, 29. 
 Errol, Earl of, 10. 
 
 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Falstaff's recipe, 41. 
 
 Ferdinand and Isabella, 56, 72. 
 
 Fergusson, Robert, 87. 
 
 Flodden, 10, 100. 
 
 Florence, 60. 
 
 Fly ting, The, 15, 16, 34, 39, 60. 
 
 Forbes, Lord, 10. 
 
 Forman, Andrew, 73, 111. 
 
 Franciscans, the, 24, 25, 26, 34, 42, 90. j 
 
 Franco, Matteo, 16, 59. 
 
 Friars, the Scots, 38. 
 
 Giotto, 55. 
 Gratuities, royal, 70. 
 Great Michael, n, no. 
 Greece, n. 
 Greyfriars, 25, 90. 
 Grocyn, n, 28. 
 
 Haddington, 24, 25. 
 Hailes, Lord, 18. 
 Hall, Bishop, 135. 
 Haroun Alraschid, 11. 
 Hay, Sir Gilbert, 99. 
 Henry VII., 73, 76, 82, 96. 
 
 vin., 13, 20, 102, 112. 
 
 Henryson, Robert, 13, 14, 99. 
 
 Hertford, Earl of, 88. 
 
 Heryot, 99. 
 
 Honour, Palice oj, 17, 19. 
 
 Horace, 18. 
 
 Hume, Sir Patrick, 60. 
 
 Illuminati, 11. 
 
 James i., 24, 45. 
 
 11., 100. 
 
 in., 43- 
 
 iv., 10, 12, 13, 44. S6> 76, 79- 
 
 87, 100, 102, 113, 115. 
 
 James v., 100, 117. 
 
 vi., 88. 
 
 Johnstoun, Patrik, 99. 
 
 Jointure, Margaret's marriage, 74- 
 
 Juana Donna, 72. 
 
 Julius 11., Pope, 102. 
 
 Justice, College of, 35. 
 
 Kennedy, Bishop, 28, 47. 
 Kennedy, Walter, 15, 16, 39, 59, 60, 
 
 62, 63, 65, 154. 
 Knox, John, 26, 29, 30. 
 
 Laing, David, 24, 31, 124. 
 
 Lamberton Kirk, 79. 
 
 Lennox, Earl of, 10. 
 
 Leo X., no, 122. 
 
 Leyrva, John, 26. 
 
 Linacre, n, 28. 
 
 Lokert, Sir Mungo, 99. 
 
 Louis XII., 102, in. 
 
 Lowell, J. R., 125. 
 
 Lundy, Sir Robert, 7^. 
 
 Lyndsay, Sir David, 17, 22, 122. 
 
 Mackay, Sheriff, 62, 121, 156. 
 
 Makar, the, 13. 
 
 Makars, The Lament for, 17, 98, 147. 
 
 Mar, Earl of, 10. 
 
 Margaret, Queen, 13, 73, 76, 78, 96. 
 
 Marriage, royal, 81. 
 
 Massillon, 147. 
 
 Maxwell, Lord, 10. 
 
 Medici, Lorenzo de, 40, 46, 56, 59. 
 
 Melville, Andrew, 26, 29. 
 
 Mersar, 22. 
 
 Messenger, King's, 45. 
 
 Milton, 146. 
 
 Montgomerie, Alex., 60. 
 
 Morley, Professor, n. 
 
 Morton. Earl of, 10. 
 
 Moschus, 146. 
 
 Mouth-thankless, Invective against, 
 
 17- 
 Musgrave, Mrs., 84, 95, 141. 
 Myllar, Andro, 13.
 
 INDEX 
 
 i59 
 
 New World, 55. 
 Newfoundland, 55. 
 Nightingale, Merle and, 15. 
 
 Observantines, Order of, 25, 34, 42. 
 Oxford, 11. 
 
 Papyngo, Complaint of King's, 
 Passion of Christ, The, 17. 
 Paton, Sir Noel, 150. 
 Pensions, Dunbar's, 69. 
 Pitscottie, 11. 
 Pope, 18, 135. 
 Praise of Age, The, 17. 
 Printing, Scots, 12. 
 Pulci Luigi, 16, 59. 
 
 Quadrivium, the, 26. 
 
 Raphael, 56. 
 
 Realm, Estates of, y^, 120. 
 
 Renaissance, the, 11, 28. 
 
 Robene and Makyne, 14. 
 
 Rome, 11. 
 
 Rose, Thistle and the, 15, 17. 
 
 Rosebery, Earl of, 24. 
 
 Ross, Sir John the, 60, 99. 
 
 Ross, Lord, 10. 
 
 Roull of Aberdeen, 99. 
 
 Scaligers, the, 29. 
 Schaw, Quintyne, 60, 99. 
 Schevaz, William, 31, 46. 
 Schipper, Dr., 23, 45, 69, 121. 
 
 17- 
 
 Shelley, 146. 
 
 Sinclair, Lord, 10. 
 
 Smeaton, Principal T., 26, 29. 
 
 Spenser, 9, 126, 157. 
 
 Stewart, house of, 10. 
 
 Swift, 135. 
 
 Swinburne, 63, 146. 
 
 Targe, The Golden, 15. 
 Tasso, 56. 
 Tennyson, 146. 
 Trail, Sandy, 99. 
 Trivium, 26. 
 
 University, Aberdeen, u. 
 
 Glasgow, 11. 
 
 Oxford, 11, 32, 34. 
 
 Paris, 32, 33, 34. 
 
 St. Andrews, 11, 19, 23, 28, 30. 
 
 Vautrollier, 65. 
 Venice, 53. 
 
 Vergil, Polydore, 20, jy. 
 Vinci, Leonardo da, 56, 
 
 Wallace, 87. 
 Wardlaw, Bishop, 28. 
 Watson, Thomas, 143. 
 Wood, Sir Andrew, 11. 
 Wyntoun, 99. 
 
 XiMENES, Cardinal, 54. 
 
 Yellow Caravel, 11.
 
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