ore with granes,
And to the Fiend saul flesh and banes;
They gave them, with ane shout on hie.
The Devil said, 'Welcome all at anes;
Renounce your God, and cum to me.'

"The rest of craftis great aiths swair,
Their wark and craft had nae compair,
Ilk ane unto their qualitie.
The Devil said then, withouten mair,
'Renounce your God, and cum to me.'"

But the greatest of Dunbar's satires--in fact, the greatest of all his
poems--is that entitled "The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins." It is
short, but within its compass most swift, vivid, and weird. The pictures
rise on the reader's eye, and fade at once. It is a singular compound of
farce and earnest. It is Spenser and Hogarth combined--the wildest
grotesquerie wrought on a background of penal flame. The poet conceives
himself in a dream, on the evening preceding Lent, and in his vision he
heard Mahoun command that the wretched who "had ne'er been shriven"
should dance before him. Immediately a hideous rout present themselves;
"holy harlots" appear in their finery, and never a smile wrinkles the
faces of the onlookers; but when a string of "priests with their shaven
necks" come in, the arches of the unnameable place shakes with the
laughter of all the fiends. Then "The Seven Deadly Sins" begin to leap
at once:--

"And first of all the dance was Pride,
With hair wyld back and bonnet on side."

He, with all his train, came skipping through the fire.

"Then Ire came in with sturt and strife;
His hand was aye upon his knife;"

and with him came armed boasters and braggarts, smiting each other with
swords, jagging each other with knives. Then Envy, trembling with secret
hatred, accompanied by his court of flatterers, backbiters, calumniators
and all the human serpentry that lurk in the palaces of kings. Then came
Covetousness, with his hoarders and misers, and these the fiends gave to
drink of newly-molten gold.

"Syne Swearness, at the second bidding,
Came like a sow out of a midding:"

and with him danced a sleepy crew, and Belial lashed them with a
bridle-rein, and the fiends gave them a turn in the fire to make them
nimbler. Then came Lechery, led by Idleness, with a host of evil
companions, "full strange of countenance, like torches burning bright."
Then came Gluttony, so unwieldy that he could hardly move:--

"Him followed mony foul drunkart
With can and callop, cup and quart,
In surfeit and excess."