"O morale Gower and Lidgate laureat,
Zour suggurat toungs and lipps aureat
Bene till our eirs cause of grit delyte."
It is curious that Dunbar calls this English and not Scots. He also enumerates a long list of Scottish poets who were deceased, as Sir Hew of Eglintoun, Etrick, Heriot, Wyntoun, Maister John Clerk, James Afflek, Holland, Barbour, Sir Mungo Dockhart of the Lie, Clerk of Tranent, who wrote the adventures of Sir Gawayn, Sir Gilbert Gray, Blind Harry, and Sandy Traill, Patrick Johnstone, Mersar, Rowll of Aberdeen, and Rowll of Corstorphine, Brown of Dunfermline, Robert Henryson, Sir John the Ross, Stobo, Quinten Schaw, and Walter Kennedy. Of these little is now known, except of Henryson, and that chiefly for his ballad of "Robert and Makyn," given by Bishop Percy in his "Reliques of English Poetry."
Gawin Douglas, third son of the celebrated fifth Earl of Angus, called Bell-the-Cat, was born in 1474. He lived a troubled life in those stormy times, and died a refugee in London, of the Plague, in 1522. He was patronised by Queen Margaret, sister of Henry VIII., and richly deserved it, for his learning, his virtues, and his genius. He was most celebrated in his own time for his translation of Virgil's "Æneid," the first metrical version of any ancient classic in either English or Scots. He also translated Ovid's "De Remedio Amoris." But his original poems, "The Palace of Honour," "King Hart," and his "Comœdiæ Sacræ," or dramatic poems from the Scriptures, are now justly esteemed the real trophies of his genius. "The Palace of Honour" and "King Hart" are allegoric poems, abounding with beautiful descriptions and noble sentiments.
The principal poems of William Dunbar (b. 1465, d. 1530,) are "The Golden Terge," or target; "The Thistle and the Rose," in honour of the marriage of Margaret of England with James IV. of Scotland; "The Fained Friar;" the "Lament of the Death of the Makars," or poets, and a number of other poems, chiefly lyrical, which display versatile genius—comic, satirical, grave, descriptive, and religious—and place him in the first rank of Scotland's poets, notwithstanding the obsolete character of his language; and not the least of his distinctions is the absence of that grossness which disfigured the writings of the poets of those times. A few lines may denote the music of his versification:
"Be merry, man, and tak nocht far in mynd
The waivering of this wrechit world of sorrow,
To God be humill, and to thy freynd be kynd,
And with thy nychtbouris glaidly len and borrow;