them; and Hallidon, manured by the bones of
slaughtered thousands, lay at their hand.

Yet, before sunrise, thousands were crowding to the gay scene, from
every corner of Berwickshire, and from Roxburgh and the Eastern Lothian.
The pavilions exhibited more costly decorations. Fair ladies, in their
gayest attire, hung upon the arms of brave knights. An immense
amphitheatre, where the great tourneyings and combats of the day were to
take place, was seated round; and at one part of it was a richly
canopied dais, where the young king, with his blooming queen, and the
chief peers and ladies of both countries, were to sit, and witness the
spectacle. Merry music reverbed in every direction, and the rocks and
the glens re-echoed it; and ever and anon, as it pealed around, the
assembled thousands shouted--"Long live our guid king James, and his
bonny bride." Around the pavilions, too, strutted the courtiers with the
huge ruffles of their shirts reaching over their shoulders--their
scented gloves--flat bonnets, set on the one side of their heads like
the cap of a modern dandy--spangled slippers, and a bunch of ribbons at
their knees.

Amongst the more humble followers of the court, the immortal Dunbar,
who was neglected in his own day, and who has been scarce less neglected
and overlooked by posterity, was conspicuous. The poet-priest appeared
to be a director of the intellectual amusements of the day. But although
they delighted the multitude, and he afterwards immortalised the
marriage of his royal master, by his exquisite poem of "The Thistle and
the Rose," he was doomed to experience that genius could neither procure
the patronage of kings nor church preferment; and, in truth, it was
small preferment with which Dunbar would have been satisfied, for, after
dancing the courtier in vain (and they were then a race of beings of
new-birth in Scotland), we find him saying--

"Greit abbais graith I nill to gather
But _ane kirk scant coverit with hadder,
For I of lytil wald be fane_."

But, in the days of poor Dunbar, church patronage seems to have been
conferred somewhat after the fashion of our own times, if not worse, for
he again says--

"I knaw nocht how the kirk is gydit,
But benefices are nocht leil divydit;
Sum men hes sevin, and I nocht ane!"

All around wore a glad and a sunny look, and, while the morning was yet
young, the sound of the salute from the cannon on the ramparts of
Berwick, annou