Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 16.djvu/162

 and although it is not unlikely that the poet's old age was comfortable, we have no distinct record of him after Flodden.

Between the date of his becoming a salaried court poet and the battle of Flodden the only ascertained facts in Dunbar's career, apart from suggestive allusions in the poems, connect him with the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor. He seems to have accompanied the ambassadors sent to the court of Henry VII to negotiate the marriage, and it was probably this visit that inspired him with his poem ‘In Honour of the City of London.’ There is little doubt, moreover, that he is the ‘rhymer of Scotland’ referred to in the ‘Privy Purse Accounts of Henry VII’ as receiving, during a second visit (probably when the princess was affianced), certain sums of money in return for satisfaction given to his royal audience. The marriage and his first great poem, ‘The Thrissill and the Rois,’ both belong to 1503. Dunbar seems to have been a privileged favourite of the queen, and a valuable descriptive poem, ‘The Quenis Progress at Aberdeen,’ which is manifestly the result of actual observation, would seem to show that he was in her train when she visited the north of Scotland in 1511. It is only a surmise that she would do her best for him when her own sad change of circumstances occurred after Flodden, 8 Sept. 1513.

Owing to loss and irregularity of the treasurer's accounts for ten years after Flodden, there is no record to show whether or not Dunbar's pension was continued; and it is curious enough that there is no mention in his works of what Lyndsay calls ‘that most dolent day,’ or of his own later fortunes. If he were alive after 1513, he must have been very different from the Dunbar of previous years, who was so full of the movement of his time, and so anxious regarding his own worldly position. With the exception of the ‘Orisone,’ a lament on public degeneracy, written when the Duke of Albany went to France, and bringing the record at least to 1517, he gives no expression of his interest in anything outside of his own study. The poems that may fairly be set down to his later years are mainly of a moral and religious character, evidently indicating that the poet had set himself to gather up the results of his experience. Two explanatory theories have been proposed regarding this difficulty: one, that Dunbar fell with the king at Flodden, and therefore did not write the ‘Orisone;’ and the other, that the queen dowager had helped him to church preferment, and that he passed the evening of his life in studious retirement and faithful application to his clerical duties. The problem, in all likelihood, will never be solved. The one thing clear about Dunbar after Flodden is that he was dead in 1530, for in that year Sir David Lyndsay, in his ‘Testament and Complaynt of the Papyngo,’ pays him a high tribute as a poet of the past. There is something to be said for Laing's inference, from Lyndsay's reference to Gawin Douglas as the greatest of poets recently deceased, that Dunbar's death must be placed earlier than 1522, the year in which Douglas is known to have died.

The only one of Dunbar's poems that can be accurately dated is ‘The Thrissill and the Rois,’ written in honour of the royal marriage 9 May 1503, three months before Margaret, the English rose, arrived as consort of Scotland's thistle, James IV. He was, however, a recognised poet before this, for Gawin Douglas, in 1501, pays him a special tribute in his ‘Palice of Honour.’ In all likelihood three more of his best poems—‘The Goldyn Targe,’ the ‘Flyting’ (divided with Kennedy), and the ‘Lament for the Makaris’—were produced between 1503 and 1508. In the latter year these poems issued from the press of Chepman & Myllar, who had introduced the art of printing into Scotland in 1507. The other poems cannot be chronologically arranged, although it is probable that such satires as ‘The Twa Marriit Wemen and the Wedo’ and ‘The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis,’ in which he reaches his highest level, are later than these. 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.

By ‘The Thrissill and the Rois’ Dunbar brilliantly proved himself a worthy laureate. We have frequent glimpses of him, in late minor poems, in relation to royalty. He would appear (as already mentioned) to have been a special favourite with the queen, to whom he addresses certain playful lyrics on her wardrobe-keeper, Doig, and so on, and in whose presence he describes himself as taking part in a certain uncouth dance arranged for her amusement. Towards the king he adopts a different tone. While apparently