A nychtingaill with suggurit notis new
Quhois angell fedderis as the peacock schone:

obviously a bird that sings sweetly must likewise be gor-
geously plumaged. And yet Dunbar is likewise a powerful
and delightful poet in his own right, and one who, but for
the difficulties of his voluble Scottish tongue, must long
since have come more fully into his own. Music there is,
and movement, in all Dunbar's poetry, and it has been
confidently affirmed that he was the first British poet
to create classical lyrics of an artistic kind. ¹

In Scotland Dunbar had but one rival, Gawain Douglas,
translator of the Æneid, a learned humanist to whom
poetry was one of the diversions of rhetoric. Stephen
Hawes, too, in England similarly practised poetry as a
commendable moral occupation, setting up his poetical
trinity, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, too pious to dis-
tinguish their attributes, or perhaps too dull to discern
them. An abler man and more abreast with his age was
Alexander Barclay, translator of Brandt Ship of Fools
and author of the earliest eclogues in the English tongue;
and abler still was John Heywood, the epigrammatist, and
writer of clever and witty interludes. But no one of these
worthy writers could have been betrayed into an indiscre-
tion such as a lyric. Such was not true of their greater
contemporary, John Skelton. Skelton was Henry VIII's
poet much as Dunbar had been the poet of James IV.

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