WILLIAM DUNBAR.

(1465-1530.)

William Dunbar was born in 1465, in East Lothian, and became a travelling novitiate of the Franciscan order, in which character he visited several parts of England and France; but disliking this mode of life, he returned to Scotland, where he died about 1530. In his younger days (writes Pinkerton) he seems to have had great expectations that his merit would have recommended him to an ecclesiastical benefice; and frequently, in his small poems, he addresses King James IV. to that purpose, but apparently without success; for he spent his life in a state of neglected indigence, while others, of far inferior pretensions, were loaded with the revenues of the church. "While some priests," he complains, "enjoy seven benefices, I am not possessed of one." The cause of this neglect is not known; it had certainly nothing to do, in that age of universal depravity and irreligion, with the loose tone of many of his earlier productions, which of itself would rather have recommended him to favour.

Warton, who has bestowed great commendations on Dunbar, observes that his genius is peculiarly of "a moral and didactic cast;" and it is certainly in such pieces that he is most confessedly superior to all who preceded, and to the large proportion of those who have succeeded him; but his satires, his allegorical and descriptive poetry, and his tales, are all admirable and full of fancy and originality.

His chief productions are, The Thistle and the Rose and The Golden Terge. The first of these was composed for the marriage (1503) of James IV. of Scotland with Margaret, eldest daughter of Henry VII.; an event well calculated to have produced many invocations to the Muses, but which probably was hailed by very few panegyrics so delicate and ingenious as this of Dunbar. In an allegorisation of the royal bridegroom as the thistle, and of the bride as the rose, the poet has interwoven a number of rich and glowing descriptions, much excellent advice, and many delicate compliments, without adulation. The Golden Terge is, perhaps, still superior to The Thistle and the Rose: this is a moral allegory, the object of which is to show the gradual and imperceptible influence of love, which even the golden target of reason cannot always repel. There are descriptions of natural scenery in this poem equal to any thing in poetry. Of Dunbar's comic pieces, all of which possess considerable merit, the most excellent are his two tales of the Two Married Women and the Widow and the Friars of Berwick; the former of which, in particular, Bishop

Percy considers equal to the most humorous productions of Chaucer. The Friars of Berwick is the prototype of Ramsay's Monk and Miller's Wife, and very superior to it in pungency of humour.

GAWIN DOUGLAS.

(Circa 1475-1522.)

One of the most distinguished luminaries that marked the restoration of letters in Scotland at the commencement of the sixteenth century, not only by a general eminence in elegant erudition, but by a cultivation of the vernacular poetry of his country, is Gawin Douglas, the third son of Archibald the great Earl Douglas, by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Lord Boyd, a nobleman who for some time held the office of high chamberlain. He was born in the year 1475. According to the practice of that age, especially in Scotland, his education probably commenced in a grammar-school of one of the monasteries; there is undoubted proof that it was finished at the University of Paris. It is presumable, as he was intended for the sacred function, that he was sent to Paris for the purpose of studying the canon law, in consequence of a decree promulgated by James I., which tended in some degree to reform the illiteracy of the clergy, as it enjoined that no ecclesiastic of Scotland should be preferred to a prebend of any value without a competent skill in that science. Having entered into holy orders, he was appointed rector of Hawick; next, as early at least as 1509, he was nominated provost of the collegiate church of St. Giles, in Edinburgh,-a situation of no small dignity and emolument, which he enjoyed in conjunction with his other benefice. In 1514 the queen-mother (who afterwards married his nephew, the Earl of Angus) presented him to the abbey of Aberbrothoch, and soon after to the archbishopric of St. Andrew's ; but the Pope having refused to confirm his nomination, he never assumed the title. In the next year (1515) he became Bishop of Dunkeld, and after some struggle obtained peaceable possession of that see. But neither his ecclesiastical character, nor his learning, nor his many virtues, were able to preserve him, in those times of violence, from the proscription which involved the whole family of Douglas; so that, towards the close of the year 1521, he was compelled, by the persecution of the Duke of Albany, to seek for protection in England, where he died about the month of April 1522, and was buried in the Savoy church.

The only remaining works of this poet are, 1. King Hart; 2. The

Palace of Honour; 3. a translation of Virgil's Eneid. Mr. Pinkerton has printed the first of these, from a Ms. in the Maitland collection, in his Ancient Scottish Poems; and the second, from the edition of 1533, in the first volume of his Scottish Poems. Of the third there

have been many editions, of which the best is that of Edinburgh, 1710, published by Mr. Ruddiman, with an excellent life of the author, and a very curious and valuable glossary.

The only writer deserving the name of a poet in the reign of Henry VII. is Stephen Hawes. He was patronised by that monarch, who possessed some tincture of literature, and is said by Bacon to have confuted a Lollard in a public disputation at Canterbury.

Hawes flourished about the close of the 15th century, and was a native of Suffolk. After an academical education at Oxford, he travelled much in France, and became a complete master of the French and Italian poetry. His polite accomplishments quickly procured him an establishment in the household of the king, who, struck with the liveliness of his conversation, and because he could repeat by memory most of the old English poets, especially Lydgate, made him groom of the privy chamber. His facility in the French tongue was a qualification which might strongly recommend him to the favour of Henry VII., who was fond of studying the best French books then in vogue.

Hawes has left many poems, which are now but imperfectly known and scarcely remembered. These are: 1. The Conversion of Swerers, in octave verses, 1509; 2. A joyfull Meditation of all England on the Coronacyon of our most naturall Sovereign Lord, King Henry the Eighth, in verse; 3. The Consolation of Lovers; 4. The Exemplar of Virtue; 5. The Delight of the Soul; 6. Of the Prince's Marriage; 7. The Alphabet of Birds; 8. The Passetyme of Pleasure, containing the Knowledge of the seven Sciences and the course of Man's Lyfe in this Worlde.*

ALEXANDER BARCLAY.

(Circa 1480-1552.)

to

Alexander Barclay, whom some writers claim as a Scotchman, while others call him a Devonshire or Somersetshire man, became, in or about 1495, a student at Oriel College, Oxford, where he is said to have distinguished himself by his talents and application; he also appears have spent some time at Cambridge. He afterwards travelled into Holland, Germany, Italy, and France, for the purpose of acquiring the languages of those countries, in all of which he seems to have made a considerable proficiency. On his return to England he was appointed one of the priests or prebendaries of the college of St. Mary Ottery, in Devonshire; afterwards he became a Benedictine monk of Ely monastery, and at length took the habit of the Franciscans at Canterbury. He temporised with the changes of religion; for he possessed some church preferments in the reign of Edward VI., amongst others the church of All Saints in Lombard Street. He died very old, at Croydon in Surrey, August 24, 1552. Barclay was

*The Temple of Glasse, which Warton assigns to Hawes, was written by Lydgate.

a voluminous writer, particularly of translations, which were much admired by his contemporaries, as being distinguished by an ease and fluency which are not to be found in any other author of his age; but his poetical merit seems to have been a good deal overrated.

His smaller pieces of poetry consist of, 1. Five Eclogues on the Miseries of Courtiers, translated from Sylvius; 2. A Satire on Skelton; 3. The Lives of St. George, St. Catherine, St. Margaret, and St. Ethelreda; and 4. Five Eclogues from the Latin of Baptist Mantuan. From these, which Mr. Warton supposes to be the first eclogues written in English, he has selected a number of passages which, though they have no other merit, contain some curious particulars relating to the manners and customs of the time of the work.

But Barclay's principal and most popular poem was his Ship of Foolis, a paraphrase from the German poem, written in 1494, by Sebastian Brandt, or rather from the Latin metrical translation published in the following year. The work was intended to ridicule the vices and follies of every rank and profession, under the allegory of a ship freighted with fools of all kinds; "but it is," says Mr. Warton, "without variety of incident or artifice of fable."

JULIANA BERNERS.

(Circa 1490.)

Dame Juliana Berners, sister of Richard Lord Berners, and prioress of the nunnery of Sopewell, wrote, about the year 1481, three English tracts on hawking, hunting, and armoury or heraldry, which were printed in the neighbouring monastery of St. Alban's, in the year 1486, and again at Westminster, by Wynkyn de Worde, in 1496. From an abbess disposed to turn author we might more reasonably have expected a manual of meditations for the closet, or select rules for making salves, or distilling strong waters. But the diversions of the field were not thought inconsistent with the character of a religious lady of this eminent rank, who resembled an abbot in respect of exercising an extensive manorial jurisdiction, and who hawked and hunted in common with other ladies of distinction. Her work is mentioned here because the second of these trea

tises is written in rhyme. It is spoken in her own person; but the whole work is a translation from the French and Latin, The Boke of the Blazyng of Armys being an abstract of Upton's work De Re Militari et Factis Illustribus, written about 1441. The barbarism of the times strongly appears in the indelicate expressions which she often