place and fat livings. Yet these denunciations
have no very spiritual origin. His rage is the rage of a disappointed
candidate, rather than of a prophet; and, to the last, he seems to have
expected preferment in the Church. Not without a certain pathos he
writes, when he had become familiar with disappointment, and the sickness
of hope deferred--

"I wes in youth an nureiss knee,
Dandely! bischop, dandely!
And quhen that age now dois me greif,
Ane sempill vicar I can nocht be."

It is not known when he entered the service of King James. From his
poems it appears that he was employed as a clerk or secretary in several
of the missions despatched to foreign courts. It is difficult to guess
in what capacity Dunbar served at Holyrood. He was all his life a
priest, and expected preferment from his royal patron. We know that he
performed mass in the presence. Yet when the king in one of his dark
moods had withdrawn from the gaieties of the capital to the religious
gloom of the convent of Franciscans at Stirling, we find the poet
inditing a parody on the machinery of the Church, calling on Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, and on all the saints of the calendar, to transport the
princely penitent from Stirling, "where ale is thin and small," to
Edinburgh, where there is abundance of swans, cranes, and plovers, and
the fragrant clarets of France. And in another of his poems, he
describes himself as dancing in the queen's chamber so zealously that he
lost one of his slippers, a mishap which provoked her Majesty to great
mirth. Probably, as the king was possessed of considerable literary
taste, and could appreciate Dunbar's fancy and satire, he kept him
attached to his person, with the intention of conferring a benefice on
him when one fell vacant; and when a benefice _did_ fall vacant, felt
compelled to bestow it on the cadet of some powerful family in the
state,--for it was always the policy of James to stand well with his
nobles. He remembered too well the deaths of his father and
great-grandfather to give unnecessary offense to his great barons. From
his connexion with the court, the poet's life may be briefly epitomised.
In August, 1500, his royal master granted Dunbar an annual pension of 10
pounds for life, or till such time as he should be promoted to a benefice
of the annual value of 40 pounds. In 1501, he visited England in the
train of the ambassadors sent thither to negotiate the king's marriage.