Dunbar's Song of Welcome to Margaret Tudor as Queen of Scotland

British Museum Appendix to Royal MSS. 58

his poetical activity seems to have been between this date and the fatal battle of Flodden in 1513, after which he is not mentioned. One poem bearing his name refers to a transaction in 1517, and he probably died soon afterwards. If the poem referred to be not genuine, he may have fallen at Flodden. The agitations of the Reformation period submerged him along with the other early Scotch poets; and although some of

Bishop Bale

his poems were printed in his lifetime, only one copy of the edition has come down to us. In 1832 his works were collected by David Laing, and he has since held his place with little controversy at the head of ancient Scotch poetry, a personification of the national character on the side of its vigour and its humour, the latter frequently involving gross indelicacy. In another point of view he is a continuer of James I. and Henryson, whose poetry is grounded upon Chaucer's. He speaks of Chaucer with enthusiasm :

O reverend Chaucer, rose of rhetors all, Surmounting every tongue terrestriall, Far as May's morn doth midnight : and with less discrimination, extols the "sugared lips and tongués aureate," and "angel mouthés most mellifluate" of Lydgate and Gower.

The most Chaucerian of Dunbar's poems is The Golden Targe, an allegory of the type so favoured by Chaucer and his successors, composed in a peculiarly beautiful nine-line stanza, which modern poets might reproduce with advantage. The poet goes forth upon a May morning, brilliantly described :

For mirth of May, with skippis and with hoppis,
The birdis sang upon the tender croppis,

With curious note, as Venus chapel clerks :
The roses young, new spreading of their knoppis,1
Were poudered bright with heavenly beryl droppis,
Through beamés red, burning as ruby sparks,
The skyés rang for shouting of the larks
The purple heaven o'er scaled in silver sloppis,2
O'er gilt the treïs; branches, leaves and barks.

After a while he lies down and dreams, and sees in a vision Beauty landing from a shallop accompanied by a troop of ladies, mostly allegorical personages, who make him, vainly defended by Reason, their prisoner, and deliver him into the custody of, Heavy Cheer. It has been suggested that the poem was designed as the groundwork of a court masque, and this may have been the case, though there is no reason why it might not have been a mere sport of 2 Slopes.

1 Buds.

I heard a merle with merry notis sing

A song of love, with voice right comfortable,
Against the orient beamés amiable
Upon a blissful branch of laurel green ;

This was her sentence sweet and delectable,
A lusty life in love's service bene,1

Under this branch ran down a river bright
Of balmy liquor, crystalline of hue,
Against the heavenly azure skyis light,
Where did, upon the other side, pursue
A nightingale, with sugared notis new,
Whose angel feathers as the peacock shone ;
This was her song, and of a sentence true,
All love is lost but upon God alone.

With notis glad and glorious harmony
This joyful merle so salued she the day,
While rung the wordes of her melody,
Saying, Awake, ye lovers, O, this May.
Lo, freshé Flora has flourished every spray,
As nature has her taught, the noble queen,
The field been clothed in a new array:

A lusty life in love's service bene.

Ne'er sweeter noise was heard with living man
Than made this merry gentle nightingale,
Her sound went with the river as it ran,
Out through the fresh and flourished lusty vale.
"O merle," quoth she, "O fool, stint of thy tale,
For in thy song good sentence is there none,
For both is tynt the time and the travail
Of every love but upon God alone.”

The blackbird and nightingale continue their melodious controversy, always with the same refrain, until it suits the poet to put an end to it, which he can only do by awarding victory to the nightingale. It will have been observed, however, that his taste for earthly splendour is such that he has dressed his nightingale like a peacock. Other moral pieces are rendered poetical by extravagance of invention, as The Devil's Inquest, Kynd Kittock and The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, who exhibit themselves before the Devil with their proper attributes, but are quite outdone by the Highlanders whom Satan summons to wind up the festivity :

These termagents, with tag and tatter,

Full loud in Erse began to clatter,

And roup2 like raven and rook

The Devil so deaved was with their yell,
That in the deepest pit of hell

He smorit them with smoke.

Though not a man of marked original faculty like Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld (1474?-1522 ?) is a true poet. His original poems, The Palace of Honour, and King Heart, allegories in the style of Lydgate, though not devoid of

interest, are still somewhat heavy. He has, nevertheless, gained high reputation as the translator of Virgil's Eneid, not so much for the merit of the version as such, as for the boldness of the undertaking in his day, his priority over other translators, his happy choice of the heroic metre, and especially for the prologues of his own composition prefixed to the various books, in some

of which he appears to great advan-
tage as a descriptive poet. A younger
son of the great Archibald, Earl Douglas,
and provost of St. Giles' Cathedral,
Edinburgh, his fortunes seemed greatly
exalted by the marriage, within a year
after the fatal defeat of Flodden in
which James IV. had perished, of the
widowed Queen Margaret to the Earl
of Angus, Douglas's own nephew.
the Queen's endeavours to advance him
involved him in incessant broils, and
after obtaining the bishopric of Dun-
keld, he was obliged to take refuge in
England, where he died of the plague
in 1522.

But

Douglas professes great indignation at Caxton's version of Virgil from a French romance :

In prose he prent ane buik of Inglis gros,
Clepand it Virgill in Eneados.

Quhilk that he says of French he did trans-
late,

It hes nothing ado therewith, God wait,1
Na mair like than the devill and Sanct

Austyne:

Have he na thank therfor, but lost his pyne.2

Douglas's own translation, though often prosaic, is sometimes truly poetical. His power, however, is chiefly evinced in the Prologues, especially when these are descriptive. Scotch poets seem particularly at home in describing

The grandeur and the bloom,

And all the mighty ravishment of Spring :

-probably from the suddenness of her advent in Northern latitudes, and the magical rapidity of the transformation she effects. The following passage is from the prologue to the twelfth book. The wintry landscape is depicted with equal force in the prologue to the seventh.