The flower of that silken hair; Maid of the golden vest, and glossy hair, Sweet thy twitter, gentle swallow, P. 391. 'Apleis, &c. The white wave dash'd on the Leucadian steep; While high above, And drunk with love, Traveller, mark yon marble pile, I saw ANACREON'S image smile. He sang to youth, and love, and beauty gay. sleep. [breast Sweet, gentle earth! on thy maternal While in each rocky clift, and forest tree, RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW. ON DUNBAR THE POET.* J. M. IN these days of poetasters and dull copyists, our only way of taking off a little the nausea which they raise in us, is to turn back ever and anon to the pure models which they would ape. True it is, that such small fry has abounded in every age since poets began to multiply on the face of this earth, or at least since they could find people foolish enough to print and to buy their performances. Old Time, however, that purifier and cleanser-out of all things, has long swept from the garner of Fame all such chaff of former harvests. But constant sweeping has too often carried away with the chaff part of the grain also, causing thereby irreparable diminution of those stores which should belong to our heritage. Of the losses which we have thus sustained, no one is more to be lamented than the works of the Scottish poet William Dunbar: and we owe many thanks to that worthy bookseller of the modern Athens, David Laing, for the collection he has here given us of what remains of 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. Dunbar was a first-rate poet; but the circumstance of his having written in the broad Doric dialect of the North, has caused him, like others of his countrymen, to be neglected by us people of the South, whose tongue happens to be formed on the pure West Saxon in which Alfred wrote. We doubt, however, if this very broadness of dialect, though it is a hindrance to his popularity, be not itself a beauty in the kind of subjects in which, to judge by his remains, our Scottish poet has the greatest excellence. But how came such a poet to be neglected in his own country? many of our readers will naturally ask. The history of that country will readily furast us with an answer. The age during which poetry flourished in Scotland was followed by a long period of barbarism, when taste and genius were drowned, for a time at least, amid the furious waves of party discord and fanatical lence. Before they were calmed, the works of her poets had been destroyed, or the few remnants lay concealed in scattered leaves of manuscript, which had found their way into some private library. Two such manuscripts, at Edinburgh, the other at Cambridge, contain nearly all that remains Dunbar. Dunbar, like Homer, wandered under many a clime, and visited many towa and flourishing cities, without leaving anywhere a testimonial of his presence: his story is not much less obscure than that of the Bard of Chios. He we born, as Mr. Laing tells us, about the middle of the fifteenth century; he seems from an early period of his life to have been destined for the church, with that prospect, he was educated at the University of St. Andrews. After wards, he assumed the habit of the Franciscan Friars, or Mendicants, and a this garb travelled over most of the western countries of Europe. But the life of a friar was not congenial to Dunbar's disposition, for he seems to hav loved the gaiety of a court rather than the wanderings of a mendicant, the name of a "makkar" (maker), a term synonymous in every respect with the Greek word poet (moinτns), teaching "Venus lawis," as he has it, to that of an itinerant preacher, and accordingly he laid aside his friar's habit "probar at no very advanced period of his life." Nearly all the notices we have left af the events or circumstances of the poet's history, are the allusions to them c tained in his poems: in one of them he tells how, in after times, a fiend in the likeness of St. Francis, appeared to him in a dream, and desired him to reassume his friar's weeds, and to renounce the world. But Dunbar, "By him, and by his habit both y-scared, very civilly declined the proposal, alleging that— "If ever my fortune was to be a frere, I oft have in thy habit made good cheer." At the same time he hints that he would with all willingness accept the robes of a bishop, and that in this garb he should travel to Heaven with great satisfaction ; "In haly legendis haif I hard allevin, Ma sanctis of bischeppis, nor freiris, be sic sevin; We give this passage in its original Doric, because we are going to quote a paraphrase of it in Latin, from the elegant pen of George Buchanan, whose somnium is an imitation of this poem of Dunbar. The terseness and point of the original is, perhaps, rather dissipated in the copy. "Mentior, aut peragra saxo fundata vetusto Atque inter monachos erit hæc rarissima vestis: A bishopric, indeed, appears to have been the grand object of Dunbar's ambition in his younger days. But, though he had powerful and princely patrons at court, yet so much more acceptable were his services there as a poet than as a priest, that in his manhood no petitions or expostulations of Dunbar himself, no influence of his friends, could prevail on the King to dispense with his company in that character, or to accede to his earnest solicitations for a benefice. To stop his complaints for a time, the King granted him a pension, to be continued "until he be promoted by our Sovereign Lord to a benefice,” which pension was from time to time increased, as his petitions for preferment were renewed, till we find it raised to the sum of eighty pounds annually, "until he be promoted to a benefice of 100l. or above," a good living no doubt at that time. His hopes, however, were not realised, and his solicitations did not cease; and "it is somewhat amusing to consider with what ingenuity and address he varies his petitions. In general, he seems to found his chief claims for preferment upon former services which he had rendered, his youth having been spent in the King's employment, while he intimates that his wants would be easily satisfied. But, whether in the form of a satirical or of a pathetic appeal to the King, or simply as a congratulation on the new year, or whether under some humorous personation he brought forward his request, still the burden of Dunbar's song was a benefice!" It happens that many of his smaller pieces which remain to us, were written with this object. At a time when many benefices were vacant, and he saw them all bestowed away, and himself passed over, he urgently expostulated to the King, representing to him the injustice of filling some till they burst, whilst others equally deserving, are left empty. "Sire, at this feast of benefice, Think that small parts make great service, And equal distribution Makes them content who have reason, Or fill a full man till he burst; And let his fellow die for thirst, At another time he touches the subject in a more playful mood, and as the Queen was his especial friend, and seems to have earnestly wished that his petition might be granted, he prays that the King may be "John Thomson's man," a term then applied to a person whose wife, as the saying is now, "wore the breeches." "Sire, for your grace both night and day, I would give all that ever I have God give, ye were John Thomson's man! On that condition, so God me save, One year to be John Thomson's man. God give, ye were John Thomson's man! My advocate, both fair and sweet, The whole rejoicing of my sp'rite, Would speed well in my errands than ; If ye were once John Thomson's man. Ever, when I think you hard or dure, Or merciless in my succour, Then pray I God and sweet Saint Ann, As you to make John Thomson's man. Give that ye were John Thomson's man!" Still Dunbar remained at court, where he appears all along to have been a great favourite, and he seems to have entered into all its gaieties. In his account The Rose and the Thistle are alluded to as the well-known emblems of England (the Queen being daughter of Henry VII.), and of Scotland. of the "dance in the Queen's chamber," he himself makes not the least etaspicuous figure in the picture : "Then came in Dunbar the Makkar, And there he danced the Dirrye-danton; He hopped like a pillie wanton, For love of Musgrave, men tell me : He tript, until he lost his panton (slipper, A merrier dance might no man see.” In 1513, the King and his nobility fell at Flodden; and after this event nothing is known of Dunbar, though it seems probable that he soon after ceived from the Queen, now regent of the kingdom, the object of his desira, preferment in the church. The latest of his poems which is extant, s assigned to the year 1517, and he is supposed to have died about thre years after. It is not possible to modernize the language of Dunbar's poems in the manner we have modernized most of our extracts, without losing much of ther spirit and beauty. We are obliged to retain obsolete phraseology, to substitute for obsolete words, new ones, which do not well supply their places, and w have sometimes to add a word to fill out the rithm of the line. The rhime. too, which in Dunbar are always perfect, sometimes suffer in the transform tion. We can, however, safely recommend to our readers, who would be a quainted with the poet's beauties, the book itself, which is admirably edited, with sensible notes, and a sensible glossary, containing-seldom the case a books of this kind!-neither too much nor too little, though, if its editor in at all, it is by leaning too much toward the latter vice. It is to be lamented that so few of Dunbar's larger poems have come down to us. The two tales of "The Friars of Berwick," and "The Two Married Women and the Widow," are perfect in their kind, and either of them wi fully repay the labour-no great labour, indeed, for he is not much more colete than Spenser-of making ourselves familiar with his language. His tw allegorical poems, the "Thistle and the Rose," written to celebrate the Scottiet King's nuptials with the English Princess, and the "Golden Targe," have often been the subjects of deserved admiration. We are not ourselves partia to this old allegorical school of poetry: but from the comparative shortness of these poems, the allegory is less tiresome, and their rich luxuriance of descr tion cannot fail to make them favourites. We have another short poem Dunbar, somewhat in the style of the two last mentioned, "The Merle and the Nightingale." The poet feigns that he hears these two birds, in the month a May, disputing on the subject of love. "In May, as that Aurora did up-spring, With cristall ene chasing the cluddis sable, I hard a Merle, with mirry notis, sing This wes hir sentens sueit and delectable, Quhair did, upone the tothir syd, persew Saying, Awaik, ye luvaris of this May; Nevir suetar noys wes hard with levand man Out throw the fresche and flureist lusty vaill: 'O Merle!' quoth scho, O fule! stynt of thy taill, For in thy song gud sentens is thair none, For boith is tynt, the tyme and the travaill, Of every Luve bot upone God allone.'" The Merle, for a time, opposes vigorously the doctrine of her rival songstress, alleging, among other reasons, "O Nichtingaill! it wer a story nyce That luve suld nocht depend on cherite ; She, in the end, however, acknowledges herself beaten, and joins with the Nightingale in singing "All Luve is lost bot upone God allone." Dunbar's smaller poems, with the exception of a few moral and religious pieces, are mostly such as were suggested by the times and people among whom he lived. But in elegance and wit, and epigrammatic point, they stand high above the common standard of such productions. The commendation he bestows on the subject of his esteem, or the sarcasms and abuse which he heaps on the objects of his dislike, are equally original and interesting. Among the foremost of the objects of his aversion were the Highlanders. In one of the most magnificent of Dunbar's works, "The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins," a poem which abounds in descriptions such as have been realised only by the pencil and graver of Callot, after noticing the want of musicians, for no "gle-men" were in Hell, “except a menstrall that slew a man," the devil signifies his desire for a Highland "padyane," as the most proper music for the occasion "Then cried Mahoun for a Highland Padyane : Far northward in a nook; By he the Correnoch had made shout, These termagants, with tag and tatter, The devil so deafen'd was with their yell, He smored them with smoke." In explanation of the last line but one of this passage, it is only needful to observe, that, according to the popular notion of that time, the souls below were generally punished in pots or cauldrons. Tailors and Souters (or Shoemakers) had also provoked his displeasure, and he takes ample vengeance on them in his satirical account of "The justs between the Tailor and Souter," held, like the last-mentioned scene, in the infernal domains. The "Amends to the Tailors and Souters," possesses much elegant point. He tells them that he has dreamt, in a moment of inspiration, how an Angel appeared to him, declaring aloud their praise, and proclaiming their merits before God. |