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DUNBAR, WILLIAM, "the
darling of the Scottish Muses," as he has been termed by Sir Walter
Scott, was born about the middle of the fifteenth century. Mr David Laing
suggests the year 1460 as about the date of his birth. The place of his
nativity is not more accurately known. In the Flyting of Dunbar and
Kennedy, a series of satires which these two poets interchanged
with each other, the former speaks of the "Carrick lips" of his
antagonist, a bona fide allusion to the provincial vernacular of
that poet, and, within three lines, he uses the adjective Lothian in
the same way, respecting a part of his own person; thereby, apparently,
indicating that he was a native of that district. Unless Dunbar here meant
only to imply his habitual residence in Lothian, and his having
consequently contracted its peculiar language, he must be held as
acknowledging himself a native of the province. The early events of the
poet’s life are unknown. In 1475, when he must have reached his
fifteenth or sixteenth year, he was sent to the university of St Andrews,
then the principal seat of learning in Scotland. The name of William
Dunbar is entered in the ancient registers of the university, in 1477,
among the Determinantes, or Bachelors of Arts, in St Salvator’s
College, a degree which students could not receive till the third year of
their attendance. His name again occurs in 1479, when he had taken his
degree of Master of Arts, in virtue of which he was uniformly styled Maister
William Dunbar, a designation which was exclusively appropriated till
a late period to persons who had taken that degree at a university. Of his
subsequent history, from 1480 to 1499, no trace remains. He became an
ecclesiastic at an early age, having entered the mendicant order of St
Francis, which had an establishment of Grey Friars at Edinburgh.
In his poem entitled, How
Dunbar was desyred to be ane Frier, he gives the following intimation
on this subject, as reduced to prose, by Dr Irving:—"Before the
dawn of day, methought St Francis appeared to me with a religious habit in
his hand, and said, ‘Go, my servant, clothe thee in these vestments, and
renounce the world.’ but at him and his habit I was scared like a man
who sees a ghost. ‘And why art thou terrified at the sight of the holy
weed?’ ‘St Francis, reverence attend thee. I thank thee for the
good-will which thou hast manifested towards me; but with regard to these
garments, of which thou art so liberal, it has never entered into my mind
to wear them. Sweet confessor, thou needs not take it in evil part. In
holy legends have I heard it alleged that bishops are more frequently
canonized than friars. If, therefore, thou wouldest guide my soul towards
heaven, invest me with the robes of a bishop. Had it ever been my fortune
to become a friar, the date is now long past. Between Berwick and Calais,
in every flourishing town of the English dominions, have I made good cheer
in the habit of thy order. In friars’ weed have I ascended the pulpit at
Dernton and Canterbury; in it have I crossed the sea at Dover, and
instructed the inhabitants of Picardy. But this mode of life compelled me
to have recourse to many a pious fraud, from whose guilt no holy water can
cleanse me.’"
It is probable that he did
not long continue his connection with this order, as he informs us that
the studies and life of a friar were not suited to his disposition. It is
no doubt to his having been a travelling noviciate of the Franciscan order
that his poetical antagonist Kennedy alludes, when he taunts Dunbar with
his pilgrimage as a pardoner, begging in all the churches from Ettrick
Forest to Dumfries. His poems do not inform us how he was employed after
relinquishing the office of a friar, nor how he became connected with the
Scottish Court, where we find him residing, about the beginning of the
sixteenth century, under the patronage of James IV. From some allusions in
his writings, at a subsequent period of his life, to the countries he had
visited while in the king’s service, it is not improbable that he was
employed as secretary, or in some kindred capacity, in connection with the
embassies to foreign states which were maintained by the reigning monarch.
In 1491 he was residing at Paris, in all likelihood in the train of the
Earl of Bothwell and Lord Monypenny, then on an embassy to the court of
France.
In the books of the
treasurer of Scotland, we find that Dunbar enjoyed a pension from his
sovereign. Under date May 23, 1501, occurs the following entry:—"Item,
to Maister William Dunbar, in his pension of Martymes by past, 5l."
Another entry occurs December 20, "quhilk was peyit to him eftir he
com furth of England." If these were half-yearly payments, the
pension must have been one of ten pounds, which cannot be deemed
inconsiderable, when we take into account the resources of the king, the
probable necessities of the bard, and the value of money at that time. In
March, 1504, he first performed mass in the king’s presence. In 1507 we
find that his pension was newly eiked, or augmented, to the sum of
twenty pounds a-year; and in 1510, to eighty pounds. On the marriage of
James IV. to Margaret of England, Dunbar celebrated that event, so
auspicious of the happiness of his country, in a poem entitled "The
Thistle and the Rose," in which he emblematized the junction and
amity of the two portions of Britain. In the plan of this poem, he
displays, according to Dr Irving, "boldness of invention and beauty
of arrangement, and, in several of its detached parts, the utmost strength
and even delicacy of colouring." Dunbar seems to have afterwards been
on as good terms with the queen as he had previously been with the king,
for he addresses several poems in a very familiar style to her majesty. In
one, moreover, "on a Daunce in the Queene’s chalmer," where
various court personages are represented as coming in successively and
exhibiting their powers of saltation, he thus introduces himself: -
"Than in cam Dunbar the
Makar; *
On all the flure there was nane fracar,
And thair he dauncet the Dirry-duntoun:
He hopet, like a filler wantoun,
For luff of Musgraeffe men fulis me.
He trippet quhile he tur his pantoun:
A mirrear daunce micht na man see."
* Writers were so termed in
the sixteenth century.
The next person introduced
was Mrs Musgrave, probably an English attendant of the queen, and, as the
poet seems to have admired her, we shall give the stanza in which she is
described: -
"Then in cam Maestres
Musgraeffe:
Scho micht haff lernit all the laeffe.
Quhen I saw her sa trimlye dance,
Hir gud convoy and contenance,
Than for hir saek I wissit to be
The grytast erle, or duke, in France:
A mirrear dance micht na man see"
Notwithstanding the great
merit of Dunbar as a poet, be seems to have lived a life of
poverty, with perhaps no regular means of subsistence but his pension. He
appears to have addressed both the king and the queen for a benefice, but
always without success. How it came to pass that king James, who was so
kind a patron to men professing powers of amusement, neglected to provide
for Dunbar is not to be accounted for. The poet must have been singularly
disqualified, indeed, to have been deemed unfit in those days for
church-preferment. It appears that the queen became more disposed to be
his patron than the king, for he writes a poem in the form of a prayer,
wishing that the king were John Thomson’s man, that is,
subservient to the views of his consort, so that he might obtain what the
queen desired his majesty to bestow upon him. The poor poet tells the king
that his hopes were in reality very humble: -
"Greit abbais graith I
nill to gather,
Bot ane kirk scant coverit
with hadder
For I of lytil wald be fane:
Quhilk to considder is ane
pane."
His poetry is full of
pensive meditations upon the ill division of the world’s goods - how
some have too much, without meriting even little, while others merit all
and have nothing. He says—
"I knaw nocht how the
kirk is gydit,
Bot benefices are nocht leil divydit;
Sum men hes sevin, and I nocht ane:
Quhilk to considder is ane pane."
He also reflects much upon the vanity of
all sublunary affairs. At the beginning, for instance, of the above poem,
he thus moralizes on "the warld’ instabilitie;"—
"This waverand warldis
wretchidnes,
The failyand and fruitles bissines,
The mispent tyme, the service vane,
For to considder is ane pane.
The slydan joy, the
glaidness schort,
The feinyand luif, the fals comfort,
The sueit abayd, the flichtful trane,
For to considder is ane pane
The sugarit mouthis, with
mynds thairfra;
The figurit speiche, with faces twa;
The pleasand toungis, with harts unplane,
For to considder is ane pane."
Next to "the Thistle
and the Rose," the most considerable poem by Dunbar was "The
Golden Targe," a moral allegorical piece, intended to demonstrate the
general ascendency of love over reason: the golden targe, or shield, of
reason, he shows to be an insufficient protection to the shafts of Cupid.
He is also supposed to be the author of an exquisitely humorous tale,
entitled, "The Freirs of Berwick," which has supplied the
ground-work of a well known poem of Allan Ramsay, designated "The
Monk and the Miller’s wife." Another composition, styled "The
Twa Marriet Wemen and the Wedo," contains much humorous sentiment,
and many sarcastic reflections upon the fair sex; but of all Dunbar’s
poems, it is most open to the charge of immodest description. The poem,
however, displaying the highest powers of mind, is certainly that entitled
"A Dance," which presents pictures of the seven deadly sins, equally
expressive, perhaps, with any that could have been delineated by the pen
of Milton himself.
Dunbar had the fortune,
rare in that age, of seeing some of his works printed in his own lifetime.
In 1508, among the very first efforts of the Scottish press, Chepman and
Millar published his "Golden Targe," his "Twa Marriet Wemen
and the Wedo," and several other poems. Three years after the poet’s
pension had been increased to eighty pounds, came the fatal disaster of
Flodden, involving the destruction of the king and his nobles. How the
fortunes of the bard were affected by this sad national event does not
appear. Mr. Laing thinks it probable that he at last succeeded in
obtaining preferment in the church. "The queen dowager, whom, during
the king’s life, our poet styled his ‘advocate bayth fair and sweit,’
could have no difficulty, during her regency, in providing for his wants;
and we cannot believe that she would allow his old age to pine away in
poverty and neglect. Even were it otherwise, we are not to suppose that he
had no other friends in power who would be willing to assist in procuring
some adequate and permanent provision for an individual who had so long
contributed, by his writings, to the amusement of the court." The
poet is supposed to have survived till 1520, and died at the age of sixty.
The first complete collection of his works was published by Mr David Laing
in 1834. Although Dunbar received from his contemporaries the homage due
to the greatest of Scotland’s early makars, his name and fame
were doomed to a total eclipse, during the period from 1530, when Sir
David Lyndsay mentions him among the poets then deceased, to the year
1724, when some of his poems were revived by Allan Ramsay. Mr Laing
observes, that "if any misfortune had befallen the two nearly coeval
manuscript collections of Scottish poetry by Bannatyne and Maitland, the
great chance is, that it might have been scarcely known to posterity that
such a poet as Dunbar ever existed."
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