Knowing but little of Dunbar’s life, our interest is naturally concentrated on what of his writings remain to us.  And to modern eyes the old poet is a singular spectacle.  His language is different than ours; his mental structure and modes of thought are unfamiliar; in his intellectual world, as we map it out to ourselves, it is difficult to conceive how a comfortable existence could be attained.  Times, manners, and ideas have changed, and we look upon Dunbar with a certain reverential wonder and curiosity as we look upon Tantallon, standing up, grim and gray, in the midst of the modern landscape.  The grand old fortress is a remnant of a state of things which have utterly passed away.  Curiously, as we walk beside it, we think of the actual human life its walls contained.  In those great fire-places logs actually burned once, and in winter nights men-at-arms spread out big palms against the grateful heat.  In those empty apartments was laughter, and feasting, and serious talk enough in troublous times, and births, and deaths, and the bringing home of brides in their blushes.  This empty moat was filled with water, to keep at bay long-forgotten enemies, and yonder loop-hole was made narrow, as a protection from long-moulded arrows.  In Tantallon we know the Douglasses lived in state, and bearded kings, and hung out banners to the breeze; but a sense of wonder is mingled with our knowledge, for the bothy of the Lothian farmer is even more in accordance with our methods of conducting life.  Dunbar affects us similarly.  We know that he possessed a keen intellect, a blossoming fancy, a satiric touch that blistered, a melody that enchanted Northern ears; but then we have lost the story of his life, and from his poems, with their wonderful contrasts, the delicacy and spring-like flush of feeling, the piety, the freedom of speech, the irreverent use of the sacredest names, the “Flyting” and the “Lament for the Makars,” there is difficulty in making one’s ideas of him cohere.  He is present to the imagination, and yet remote.  Like Tantallon, he is a portion of the past.  We are separated from him by centuries, and that chasm we are unable to bridge properly.

The first thing that strikes the reader of these poems is their variety and intellectual range.  It may be said that—­partly from constitutional turn of thought, partly from the turbulent and chaotic time in which he lived, when families rose to splendour and as suddenly collapsed, when the steed that bore his rider at morning to the hunting-field returned at evening masterless to the castle-gate—­Dunbar’s prevailing mood of mind is melancholy; that he, with a certain fondness for the subject, as if it gave him actual relief, moralised over the sandy foundations of mortal prosperity, the advance of age putting out the lights of youth, and cancelling the rapture of the lover, and the certainty of death.  This is a favourite path of contemplation with him, and he pursues it with a gloomy sedateness of acquiescence,