more in accordance
with our methods of conducting life. Dunbar affects us similarly. We
know that he possessed a keen intellect, a blossoming fancy, a satiric
touch that blistered, a melody that enchanted Northern ears; but then we
have lost the story of his life, and from his poems, with their wonderful
contrasts, the delicacy and spring-like flush of feeling, the piety, the
freedom of speech, the irreverent use of the sacredest names, the
"Flyting" and the "Lament for the Makars," there is difficulty in making
one's ideas of him cohere. He is present to the imagination, and yet
remote. Like Tantallon, he is a portion of the past. We are separated
from him by centuries, and that chasm we are unable to bridge properly.

The first thing that strikes the reader of these poems is their variety
and intellectual range. It may be said that--partly from constitutional
turn of thought, partly from the turbulent and chaotic time in which he
lived, when families rose to splendour and as suddenly collapsed, when
the steed that bore his rider at morning to the hunting-field returned at
evening masterless to the castle-gate--Dunbar's prevailing mood of mind
is melancholy; that he, with a certain fondness for the subject, as if it
gave him actual relief, moralised over the sandy foundations of mortal
prosperity, the advance of age putting out the lights of youth, and
cancelling the rapture of the lover, and the certainty of death. This is
a favourite path of contemplation with him, and he pursues it with a
gloomy sedateness of acquiescence, which is more affecting than if he
raved and foamed against the inevitable. But he has the mobility of the
poetic nature, and the sad ground-tone is often drowned in the ecstasy of
lighter notes. All at once the "bare ruined choirs" are covered with the
glad light-green of spring. His genius combined the excellencies of many
masters. His "Golden Targe" and "The Thistle and the Rose" are
allegorical poems, full of colour, fancy, and music. His "Two Married
Women and the Widow" has a good deal of Chaucer's slyness and humour.
"The Dance of the Deadly Sins," with its fiery bursts of imaginative
energy, its pictures finished at a stroke, is a prophecy of Spenser and
Collins, and as fine as anything they have accomplished; while his
"Flytings" are torrents of the coarsest vituperation. And there are
whole flights of occasional poems, many of them sombre-coloured enough,
with an ever-recurr