DUNBAR, WILLIAM, the greatest of the old Scottish poets, is supposed to have been born about 1460. In 1475, he went to St. Andrews, where, in 1477, he took the degree of B.A., and in 1479, that of M.A. Considerable obscurity rests upon his career for about twenty years after he left the university. From his own writings, we learn that he entered the order of St. Francis, and was employed for some time as an itinerant or preaching friar. In that capacity, he " ascended the pulpit at Dernton and Canterbury, and crossed the sea at Dover, and instructed the inhabitants of Picardy." He appears to have entered the king's service, and to have been retained as " clerk" or secretary to some of James's numerous embassies to foreign courts. In 1500, he obtained from the king a yearly pension of £10. In 1501, he visited England, in the train, as his biog raphers suppose, of the ambassadors sent thither to conclude the negotiations for the king's marriage. On the 9th May, 1503, three months before the queen's arrival, he composed in honor of the event his most famous poem, the 2hrissil and the Bois. He seems now to have lived chiefly about court, writing poems, and sustaining himself with hope of preferment in the church. On the 17th Mar. 1504, he received a gift for
saying mass for the first time in the royal presence. At Martinmas, 1507, his pension was doubled, and three years afterwards, it again received augmentation. He is sup posed to have visited the northern parts of Scotland in May, 1511, in the train of queen Margaret. After the ruinous defeat at Flodden, and the confusion consequent on the king's death and a prolonged regency, ,D.'s name disappears altogether. He is supposed to have died about 1520.
As a poet, he possessed a wonderful variety of gifts; his genius comprised the excel lences of many masters. He is at times as rich in fancy' and color as Spenser in the Fvery Queen; as homely, and shrewd, and coarse as Chaucer in the Miller's Tale; as pious and devotional as Cowper in his Hymns; and as wildly grotesque in satire as Burns in his Death and Doctor Hornbook. When Scott read portions of his works to Crabbe, in Edinburgh; the latter remarked that, " before the Ayrshire plowman, Scotland possessed at least one great poet," A complete and carefully elaborated edition of D.'s works, by Dr. David Laing, was published at Edinburgh in 1834.