William Dunbar was born about 1465, and educated at the University of St. Andrews. He entered the Franciscan order of Grey Friars, and travelled in the garb of the order in Scotland, England, and France. In 1500 he received a pension from the king, James IV. of Scotland. He is known to have survived the year 1517, and must have died about 1520, or later. His chief poems are “The Golden Terge” (Targe, or Shield), “The Thistle and the Rose,” and the “Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins.”… The only complete edition of Dunbar’s works is that entitled, “The Poems of William Dunbar, now first collected, with Notes, and a Memoir of his Life, by David Laing;” 2 vols. 8vo., Edinburgh, 1834. “The Thistle and the Rose” is found in the Bannatyne MS. in the Advocate’s Library at Edinburgh.

  The imagination of Dunbar is not less suited to satirical than to sublime allegory: and that he is the first poet who has appeared with any degree of spirit in this way of writing since Pierce Plowman.

  The greatest poet that Scotland has produced.

  In the poetry of Dunbar, we recognise the emanations of a mind adequate to splendid and varied exertion—a mind equally capable of soaring into the higher regions of fiction, and of descending into the humble walk of the familiar and ludicrous. He was endowed with a vigorous and well-regulated imagination, and to it was superadded that conformation of the intellectual faculties which constitutes the quality of good sense. In his allegorical poems we discover originality and even sublimity of invention, while those of a satirical kind present us with striking images of real life and manners. As a descriptive poet he has received superlative praise. In the mechanism of poetry he evinces a wonderful degree of skill. He has employed a great variety of metres; and his versification, when opposed to that of his most eminent contemporaries, will appear highly ornamental and poetical.

  A poet of a rich and lively fancy, and possessing great natural command of language.

  It is evident that a union of talents of this wide range must necessarily be of rare occurrence; nor can we wonder that a century should elapse before a poet in any high degree approaching the genius of Chaucer made his appearance in our island. Not indeed until Dunbar arose in the sister kingdom, had we another instance of the combination of first-rate abilities for humour and comic painting, with an equally powerful command over the higher regions of fiction and imagination.

  This great genius, who has enriched the poetry of his country with a strain of versification superior in power, originality, and sweetness to any of his predecessors, we have to repeat, alas! the same story of unavailing regret, that little is known; and that little, founded on very imperfect evidence.

  A poet, whose tales may be safely put in the same class with those of Chaucer and Prior, whose odes and songs are not unworthy to stand beside those of Horace, and whose burlesque is as glorious as that of Aristophanes himself.

  We venture to call him the Dante of Scotland; nay, we question if any English poet has surpassed “The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins through Hell” in its peculiarly Dantesque qualities of severe and purged grandeur, of deep sincerity, and in that air of moral disappointment and sorrow, approaching despair, which distinguished the sad-hearted lover of Beatrice, who might almost have exclaimed, with one yet mightier than he in his misery and more miserable in his might,

  May justly be styled the Chaucer of Scotland, whether we look to the wide range of his genius, or to his eminence in every style over all the poets of his country who preceded and all who for ages came after him. That of Burns is certainly the only name among the Scottish poets that can yet be placed on the same line with that of Dunbar; and even the inspired ploughman, though the equal of Dunbar in comic power, and his superior in depth of passion, is not to be compared with the elder poet either in strength or in general fertility of imagination.

  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.

  The very existence of the works of William Dunbar has been hailed as a signal proof of “the immortality of real merit;” for we know not at what precise time he was born, nor when he died, and his very name is not, with one solitary exception, to be met with in the whole compass of our Literature for two hundred years; nor was it till after the lapse of three centuries that his poems were collected and published—to secure him the reputation, among his own countrymen, of being one of the greatest of Scotland’s poets.

  This jolly quick-witted friar and courtier is sometimes called the Scottish Chaucer. The two have, indeed, a good many points of resemblance. Both were men of the world and favourites at Court; companionable men, witty and good-humoured: both showed sufficient address and business dexterity to be employed on embassies of state. But if we wish to give the title of “Scottish Chaucer” its full significance, we must place considerable emphasis on the adjective. Dunbar and Chaucer belong to the same class of easy self-contained men, whose balance is seldom deranged by restless straining and soaring; but within that happy pleasure-loving circle they occupy distinct habitations: and one way of bringing out their difference of spirit is to lay stress upon their nationality. Dunbar is unmistakably Scotch. He is altogether of stronger and harder—perhaps of harsher—nerve than Chaucer; more forcible and less diffuse of speech; his laugh is rougher; he is boldly sarcastic and derisive to persons; his ludicrous conceptions rise to more daring heights of extravagance; and, finally, he has a more decided turn for preaching—for offering good advice. Not that he is always strong-headed, extravagantly humorous, or gravely moral; there are green places in his heart, and his fancies are sometimes sweet and graceful; but the strength of head, the extravagance of humour, and the gravity of good counsel are, upon the whole, predominant in his composition.

  His “Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins,” over which the excellent Lord Hailes went into raptures, is wanting in everything but coarseness; and if his invention dance at all, it is like a galley-slave in chains under the lash. It would be well for us if the sins themselves were indeed such wretched bugaboos as he has painted for us. What he means for humor is but the dullest vulgarity; his satire would be Billingsgate if it could, and, failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. Mr. Sibbald, in his “Chronicle of Scottish Poetry,” has admiringly preserved more than enough of it, and seems to find a sort of national savor therein, such as delights his countrymen in a haggis, or the German in his sauerkraut. The uninitiated foreigner puts his handkerchief to his nose, wonders, and gets out of the way as soon as he civilly can…. Dunbar’s works were disinterred and edited some thirty years ago by Mr. Laing, and whoso is national enough to like thistles may browse there to his heart’s content. I am inclined for other pasture, having long ago satisfied myself by a good deal of dogged reading that every generation is sure of its own share of bores without borrowing from the past.

  The special characteristics of Dunbar’s genius are variety and force. His volume is a medley in which tenderness and vindictiveness, blistering satire and exuberant fancy meet. His writings are only in a minor degree bound up with the politics of his age, and though they reflect its fashions, they for the most part appeal to wider human sympathies. He has not wearied us with any very long poem. His inspiration and his personal animus find vent within moderate bounds, but they are constantly springing up at different points and assuming various attitudes. At one time he is a quiet moralist praising the golden mean, at another he is as fierce as Juvenal. Devoid of the subtlety and the dramatic power of Chaucer, his attacks, often coarse, are always direct and sincere. His drawing, like that of the “Ballads,” is in the foreground: there is no chiaroscuro in his pages, no more than in those of his countrymen from Barbour to Burns.

  Has been called the Scotch Chaucer, a designation which recalls Coleridge’s remark on hearing Klopstock styled the German Milton, “A very German Milton indeed.”

  Indeed, with the exception of the Ayrshire Ploughman at his best, Dunbar is, perhaps, the greatest poet that Scotland has ever produced. No English poet from Chaucer to Spenser approaches him, and in some respects I would rank him above the latter. Wyat and Surrey are not to be spoken of in the same breath with this “darling of the Scottish muse,” as Scott termed him.

  In range and variety of interest and subject, in swiftness and force of attack, and in vividness and permanence of effect, Dunbar is equally remarkable. His allegories are more than merely ingenious exercises in the art of mystical deliverance, as such things had been prone to become after Chaucer’s time; his lyrics are charged with direct and steadfast purpose, and while they are all melodious, the best of them are resonant and tuneful; and the humorous satires are manifestly the productions of a man of original and penetrating observation, gifted above most with a sense of the hollowness and weakness of evil, and with the ability to render it ridiculous.

  He was the last great representative of Chaucer’s School in Scotland; he stands on the boundary between the world of the Middle Ages and the world of the Renaissance. Like the rich and lovely architecture of his time, Dunbar’s poetry is the fine flower of expiring Mediævalism.

  The poet himself was not so dignified or harmonious as his verse. He possessed the large open-air relish of life, the broad humour, sometimes verging on coarseness, which from the time of James I. to that of Burns has been so singularly characteristic of Scots poetry: and found no scene of contemporary life too humble or too ludicrous for his genius—thus his more familiar poems are better for our purpose than his loftier productions, and show us the life and fashion of his town and time better than anything else can do.

  In “The Golden Terge” there is playful grace of the poet, who is the first since Chaucer in whom we recognise again a Master in his art. Dunbar was a man of genius, born poet, with wide range of powers, cultivated mind, and perfect training in the mechanism of verse.

  No early poet has attempted so great a variety, either in subject, in style, or in form of verse, as Dunbar. In varying temper and on varying occasion he has essayed nearly every rôle of poetry, and to each he has given the supreme touch of the master-hand. Allegory, satire, and moral musing, invective, comic narrative, and natural description, personal pleading, courtly compliment, and the wild riot of Rabelaisian farce, all are here, treading each inimitably its appropriate measure. Smock and gay doublet, blackthorn cudgel and friar’s hood, flashing rapier and dazzling pageant dress, each is assumed as occasion asks, and none is laid down till its part has been played to perfection…. Brilliant beyond any of the poet company he sang, Dunbar still lacked one thing to set him in the ranks of the greatest of the immortals. That place is reserved for those alone who, supreme in other gifts, possess also the key to the fountain of tears. Humour the wildest, wit the keenest, imagination the richest and most glowing, illumine his page; but nowhere, except lightly in “The Lament for the Makaris,” and in one little love poem perhaps, does he stir the deeper currents of the heart.

  Dunbar’s poetry does not possess altogether the directness of Chaucer’s, it demands a greater amount of reflective power. The Scottish poet is a Master who shows himself in his limitation, and although he frequently does not limit himself in his descriptions, this is not done with the intention of becoming discursive, but because he takes artistic pleasure in his own charming delineations. His style is always clear, precise, and pregnant; and there are few poets who can command such a far-reaching scale of tones as he, where we have, at the same time, to admire so much gracefulness, so much intelligence, so much vigour and intrepidity; few poets have at their disposal so much sublime and lovely imagery, so much grotesque humour, and so much elegance in the expression of discrete worldly wisdom. As a writer of “occasional poems,” in the narrowest, as well as in the widest sense, Dunbar raised lyrics on to a higher stage, in fact, was the first writer actually to create classic lyrics of an artistic kind, in English or the Scottish language.

  There is nothing which strikes one so much in reading the poems of Dunbar as the immense power of the writer—a power which, if it had ever found its fullest expression, might have raised him to equality with any poet of either kingdom,—the extraordinary command of language and the overflowing facility which enables him as readily to adorn the most delicate and scholarly conception with an exuberance of graces such as Spenser could hardly have surpassed, as to picture a scene of the coarsest merriment in such colours as even Hogarth would not have ventured to put upon canvas.

  Warton was generous in his appreciation of Dunbar’s merits. Scott, in the next generation, proclaimed him to be the greatest of Scottish poets. Campbell compared him with Chaucer. His poems, collected in 1834 by David Laing, allow us to form a cooler estimate of his genius, and show us that Dunbar, while possessing a rich, vigorous, and versatile imagination, wanted the qualities which entitle a man to the front rank in the history of national poetry. Essentially a poet of the court, his talents were always employed in satisfying the momentary tastes of his patrons, so that though his works are of great importance to the antiquary, he rarely touches those notes of human interest which are the passport to the sympathy of the general reader…. As a poet he may be described as a jongleur transformed to meet the requirements of a literary age. His poems show a shrewd knowledge of men and manners, and remarkable skill in presenting under a variety of novel aspects, the somewhat narrow range of themes acceptable to a court. His favourite poetical device was to carry a single burden or refrain through a number of stanzas, each containing a different turn of thought; but he frequently amused the king and queen with personal satires on the courtiers, or with rapid sketches of scenes in actual life, which have all the character of improvisations.

  Endowed with an ever-ready mind and an unfailing power of invention, Dunbar, following his natural tastes, and wishing, at the same time, to imitate Chaucer, decks his pictures with glaring colours, and “out-Chaucers Chaucer.” His flowers are too flowery, his odours too fragrant; by moments it is no longer a delight, but almost a pain. It is not sufficient that his birds should sing, they must sing among perfumes, and these perfumes are coloured.

  We gather, indeed, that Dunbar was recognised at once as the first poet of the age, and we may console ourselves by believing that in the ninety or a hundred poems of his which we are fortunate enough to possess, we hold the fine flower of Scotch Renaissance poetry. Dunbar, let it be plainly said, is the largest figure in English literature between Chaucer and Spenser, to each of whom, indeed, he seems to hold forth a hand…. In reaching Dunbar we find that we have escaped from the dead air of the late Middle Ages. The poetry of this writer is defective in taste—rhetorical, over-ornate; he delights to excess in such terms as “crystalline,” “redolent,” “aureate,” and “enamelling.” He never escapes—and it is this which finally leads us to refuse the first rank to his gorgeous talent—from the artificial in language. He does not display any considerable intellectual power. But when all this is admitted, the activity and versatility of Dunbar, his splendid use of melody and colour, his remarkable skill in the invention of varied and often intensely lyrical metres, his fund of animal spirits, combine to make his figure not merely an exceedingly attractive one in itself, but as refreshing as a well of water after the dry desert of the fifteenth century in England…. The analogy of Dunbar with Burns is very striking, and has often been pointed out; but the difference is at least that between a jewel and a flower, the metallic hardness of Dunbar being a characteristic of his style which is utterly out of harmony with the living sensitiveness of his greater successor. This metal surface, however, is sometimes burnished to a splendour that few poets have ever excelled.

  A short, rather rotund figure, a face ruddy and stamped with evidences of the love of good cheer; eyes small, beady, and dark, twinkling at times with an ever-present sense of the humorous side of life, then anon blazing with a fierce, contemptuous scorn of meanness, hypocrisy, and injustice; a tongue as mellifluous in speech as his to whom was given the title “Golden Mouth,” yet betimes capable of a sardonic sarcasm that burned like an acid where it lighted,—such is the portrait that has come down to us from various sources of that mighty genius, who, though, alas! all too little known among us of these latter days, has yet been adjudged by many of our most competent English critics to be the peer, if not in a few qualities the superior, of Chaucer and Spenser.