which is more affecting than if he raved and foamed against the inevitable.  But he has the mobility of the poetic nature, and the sad ground-tone is often drowned in the ecstasy of lighter notes.  All at once the “bare ruined choirs” are covered with the glad light-green of spring.  His genius combined the excellencies of many masters.  His “Golden Targe” and “The Thistle and the Rose” are allegorical poems, full of colour, fancy, and music.  His “Two Married Women and the Widow” has a good deal of Chaucer’s slyness and humour.  “The Dance of the Deadly Sins,” with its fiery bursts of imaginative energy, its pictures finished at a stroke, is a prophecy of Spenser and Collins, and as fine as anything they have accomplished; while his “Flytings” are torrents of the coarsest vituperation.  And there are whole flights of occasional poems, many of them sombre-coloured enough, with an ever-recurring mournful refrain, others satirical, but all flung off, one can see, at a sitting; in the few verses the mood is exhausted, and while the result remains, the cause is forgotten even by himself.  Several of these short poems are almost perfect in feeling and execution.  The melancholy ones are full of a serious grace, while in the satirical a laughing devil of glee and malice sparkles in every line.  Some of these latter are dangerous to touch as a thistle—­all bristling and angry with the spikes of satiric scorn.

In his allegorical poems—­“The Golden Targe,” “The Merle and the Nightingale,” “The Thistle and the Rose”—­Dunbar’s fancy has full scope.  As allegories, they are, perhaps, not worth much; at all events, modern readers do not care for the adventures of “Quaking Dread and Humble Obedience”; nor are they affected by descriptions of Beauty, attended by her fair damsels, Fair Having, Fine Portraiture, Pleasance, and Lusty Cheer.  The whole conduct and machinery of such things are too artificial and stilted for modern tastes.  Stately masques are no longer performed in earls’ mansions; and when a sovereign enters a city, a fair lady, with wings, representing Loyalty, does not burst out of a pasteboard cloud and recite a poetical address to Majesty.  In our theatres the pantomime, which was originally an adumbration of human life, has become degraded.  Symbolism has departed from the boards, and burlesque reigns in its stead.  The Lord Mavor’s Show, the last remnant of the antique spectacular taste, does not move us now; it is held a public nuisance; it provokes the rude “chaff” of the streets.  Our very mobs have become critical.  Gog and Magog are dethroned.  The knight feels the satiric comments through his armour.  The very steeds are uneasy, as if ashamed.  But in Dunbar the allegorical machinery is saved from contempt by colour, poetry, and music.

Quick surprises of beauty, and a rapid succession of pictures, keep the attention awake.  Now it is—­

        “May, of mirthful monethis queen,
  Betwixt April and June, her sisters sheen,
  Within the garden walking up and down.”