ousness, 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."

"Drink, aye they cried," with their parched lips; and the fiends gave them hot lead to lap.

Minstrels, it

appears, are not to be found in that dismal place :—

"Nae minstrels played to them but doubt,
For gleemen there were halden out

By day and eik by nicht:

Except a minstrel that slew a man,

So to his heritage he wan,

And entered by brieve of richt."

And to the music of the solitary poet in hell, the strange shapes pass. The conclusion of this singular poem is entirely farcical. The devil is resolved to make high holiday :

"Then cried Mahoun for a Hielan Padyane,
Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane,
Far north-wast in a neuck;

Be he the coronach had done shout,
Ersche men so gatherit him about,
In hell great room they took.
Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter,
Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter,
And roup like raven and rook.

The Devil sae deaved was with their yell,
That in the deepest pot of hell

He smorit them with smook."

There is one other poem of Dunbar's which may be quoted as a contrast to what has been already given. It is remarkable as being the only one in which he assumes the character of a lover. The style of thought is quite modern; bereave it of its uncouth orthography, and it might have been written to-day. It is turned with much skill and grace. The constitutional melancholy of the man comes out in it; as, indeed, it always does when he finds a serious topic. It possesses more tenderness and sentiment than is his usual. It is the night-flower among his poems, breathing a mournful fragrance :—

"Sweit rose of vertew and of gentilnes,
Delytsum lyllie of everie lustynes,
Richest in bontie, and in beutie cleir,
And every vertew that to hevin is dear,
Except onlie that ye ar mercyles,

"Into your garthe this day I did persew:

Thair saw I flowris that fresche wer of dew,

Baith quhyte and reid most lustye wer to seyne,
And halsum herbis upone stalkis grene:

Yet leif nor flour fynd could I nane of rew.

"I doute that March, with his cauld blastis keyne,
Hes slane this gentill herbe, that I of mene;
Quhois pitewous deithe dois to my hart sic pane,
That I wald mak to plant his rute agane,

So comfortand his levis unto me bene."

The extracts already given will enable the reader to form some idea of the old poet's general powerhis music, his picturesque faculty, his colour, his satire. Yet it is difficult from what he has left to form any very definite image of the man. Although his poems are for the most part occasional, founded upon actual circumstances, or written to relieve him from the over-pressure of angry or melancholy moods, and although the writer is by no means shy or indisposed to speak of himself, his personality is not made clear to us. There is a great gap of time between him and the modern reader; and the mixture of gold and clay in the products of his genius, the discrepancy of elements, beauty and coarseness, Apollo's cheek, and the satyr's shaggy limbs, are explainable partly from a want of harmony and completeness in himself, and partly from the pressure of the half-barbaric time. His rudeness offends, his narrowness astonishes. But then we must remember that our advantages in these respects do not necessarily arise from our being of a purer and nobler essence. We have these things by

inheritance; they have been transmitted to us along Five centuries share with us the

a line of ancestors.

merit of the result. Modern delicacy of taste and intellectual purity-although we hold them in possession, and may add to their sheen before we hand them on to our children—are no more to be placed to our personal credits than Dryden's satire, Pope's epigram, Marlborough's battles, Burke's speeches, and the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Intellectual delicacy has grown like our political constitution. The English duke is not the creator of his own wealth, although in his keeping it makes the earth around him a garden, and the walls of his house bright with pictures. But our inability to conceive satisfactorily of Dunbar does not arise from this alone. We have his works, but then they are not supplemented by personal anecdote and letters, and the reminiscences of contemporaries. Burns, for instance,-if limited to his works for our knowledge of him,-would be a puzzling phenomenon. He was in his poems quite as unspoken as Dunbar, but then they describe so wide an area, they appear so contradictory, they seem often to lead in opposite directions. It is, to a large extent, through his letters that Burns is known, through his short, careless, pithy sayings, which imbedded themselves in the memories of his hearers, from the recollections of his contemporaries and their expressed judgments, and the multiform reverberations of fame lingering around such a man-these fill up

interstices between works, bring apparent opposition into intimate relationship, and make wholeness out of confusion. Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in his asides.

With Dunbar there is nothing of this. He is a name, and little more. He exists in a region to which rumour and conjecture have never penetrated. He was long neglected by his countrymen, and was brought to light as if by accident. He is the Pompeii of British poetry. We have his works, but they are like the circumvallations of a Roman camp on the Scottish hillside. We see lines stretching hither and thither, but we cannot make out the plan, or divine what purposes were served. We only know that every crumbled rampart was once a defence; that every half-obliterated fosse once swarmed with men; that it was once a station and abiding-place of human life, although for centuries now remitted to silence and blank summer sunshine. ·