id do not belong entirely
to the sixteenth century. The reader will find a great deal of beautiful
poetry among the works of Dunbar. These lighter verses serve our purpose
in showing once more how perennial has been this vein of humorous
criticism, and frank fun and satire, in Scotland, in all ages, and in
throwing also a broad and amusing gleam of light upon Edinburgh in the
early fifteen hundreds, the gayest and most splendid moment perhaps of
her long history.

All these splendours, however, were hard to keep up, and though
Edinburgh and Scotland throve, the King's finances after a while seem to
have begun to fail, and there was great talk of a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land--it is supposed by the historians as a measure of securing that the
King might not have the uncomfortable alternative of cutting short his
splendours at home. This purpose, if it was gravely entertained at all,
and not one of the proposals of change with which, when need comes, the
impecunious of all classes and ages amuse themselves to put off actual
retrenchment, never came to anything. And very soon there arose
complications of various natures which threw all Christendom into an
uproar. Henry VIII, young, arrogant, and hot-headed, succeeded his
prudent father in England, and the treaty with the Scots which made, or
seemed to make, England safe on the Borders, gave the English greater
freedom in dealing with the other hereditary foe on the opposite side of
the Channel; while France on her side began to use all possible efforts
to draw from the English alliance the faithful Scots, who had always
been the means of a possible diversion, always ready to carry fire and
flame across the Border, and call back the warring English to look after
their own affairs. James, with perhaps his head slightly turned by his
own magnificence and the prosperity that had attended him since the
beginning of his career, seemed to have imagined that he was important
enough to play the part of peacemaker among the nations of Europe. And
there are many embassies recorded of a bustling bishop, Andrew Forman,
who seems for some time to have pervaded Christendom, now at Rome, now
at Paris, now in London, with various confused negotiations. It was a
learned age, and the King himself, as has been seen, had very
respectable pretensions in this way; but that there was another side to
the picture, and that notwithstanding the translator of Virgil, the
three Universities now establi