"The Twa Mariet Wemen and the Wedo." It is constructed according to the alliterative rule originally observed in this sort of verse, that at least three words in each line should begin with the same letter, as for example:

Of ferliful* fyne favour war their faces meik,

All full of flurist fairhead,† as flouris in June.

*

*

*

*

*

The morrow myld was and meik, the mirrie sonne

upsprong,

And all removit the mist and the waveand wodis

Silver schouris down schuik

And birdis schoutit in the schaw with thair schill notis,
The golding glitterand gleme so glaid thair hairtis
Thai maid ane gloreus gle amang the grene bewis
The soft south of the swyre, and sound of the stremes
The sweit savour of the swairde, and singing of fewlis
Micht comfort ony creature of the kyn of Adam.

Dunbar's chief productions were the "Rose and Thistle," and the "Golden Terge," of the distinguishing merits of which Dr. Henry presents us with the following discriminating sketch.

"Dunbar, an ecclesiastic, or, at least, an expectant of church preferment, seems to have languished at the court of James the Fourth, whose marriage with Margaret Tudor, of England, he has celebrated in the Thistle and the Rose, a happy allegory, in which the vulgar topics of an epithalamium are judiciously

* Wonderful.

+ Blooming fairness.
Breeze of the hill.

avoided, and exhortation and eulogy delicately insinuated; the versification of the poem is harmonious, the stanza artificial and pleasing, the language copious and selected, the narrative diversified, rising very often to dramatic energy. The poem, from its subject, is descriptive, but Dunbar improves the most luxuriant description, by an intermixture of imagery, sentiments, and moral observations.-The Golden Terge is another allegorical poem of Dunbar's, constructed in a stanza similar to Spenser's, but more artificial, and far more difficult. In description, it, perhaps, excels, in sentiment, it scarcely equals, the Thistle and Rose. Its narrative is not intercharged with dialogue; its allegory refers to the passions, the dominion of beauty, the subjection of reason, and is less fortunate than the Thistle and the Rose; whose occult and secondary signification is an historical truth that subsists apart, and however embellished cannot be obscured by the ostensible emblem. When the passions or the mental powers are personified or involved in action, we pursue the tale, forgetful of the abstraction to which it is relative; but to remedy this, the Golden Terge has a merit in its brevity which few allegorical poems possess. The allegorical genius of our antient poetry discovers often a sublime invention; but it has intercepted what is now more valuable, the representation of genuine character, and of the manners peculiar to antient life. These manners, Dunbar has sometimes delineated with humour in poems lately retrieved from oblivion, and from them he appears in the new light of a skilful satirist and an attentive observer."

J. M.

SIR JAMES INGLIS.

IN 1548 or 1549, a work was published at St. Andrew's, called the Complaynt of Scotland. It was, till republished within a few years ago by Dr. Leyden, a work of extreme rarity, and scarcely known, except through an abstract of it, given by Mackenzie in his Lives of Scottish Writers. Few of our ancient productions, however, had probably stronger claims to be republished, as there is none which contains so minute an account of the manners, customs, and popular literature of Scotland at the early period at which it was written. It is, in fact, the only memorial we have of the existence of many tales and songs which have been long ago irretrievably lost.

The author of this poem is said, by Mackenzie, to have been a Sir James Inglis, who was born in the reign of James IV.; was educated at St. Andrew's ; went to Paris; returned in the minority of James V. into whose favour he ingratiated himself by his poetry; took arms against the English invaders under Somerset, and so distinguished himself, that he was knighted on the field; retired, towards the close of his life, to Culros in Fife, where he died in 1554.

The accuracy of this account has been questioned, for a reason which, at first sight, carries with it considerable weight. A copy of The Complaynt is preserved in the British Museum; it wants the title

page; but, in the Oxford Catalogue, it is mentioned twice, and, in both instances, referred to as WedderBURN's Complaynt of Scotland. Only three other ancient copies of the work are known to be in existence -one of which belongs to the Duke of Roxburgh; another to John M'Gowan, Esq.; and the third to Mr. G. Paton; but none of these possesses an original title, except the first, of which, however, no more than the two first words," The Comp." are preserved.

The names of Inglis and Wedderburn both occur in the lists of our ancient poets; and both about a period which might admit of either being the author of the Complaynt.

Lord Hailes has published, from the Maitland folio MS., a "General Satyre," which bears, at the end, to be the production of "SCHIR JAMES INGLIS ;" and Lindsay, in his Prologue to the Papingo, printed in 1538, thus alludes to the same individual:

Quha can say mair than Schir James Inglis sayis
In ballatis, farsis, and in plesand playis?
Bot Culros has his pen maid impotent.

Row, minister of Perth, a contemporary of Lindsay, mentions, in a MS. History of the Estate of the Kirk of Scotland, along with "Sir David Lindsay's Poesies," WEDDERBURNE'S Psalms and Godlie Ballads ;" and in the Bannatyne MS. occur three poems, which have the name of Wedderburn attached to them.

As there was therefore both an Inglis and a Wedderburn existing about the time when the Complaynt made its appearance, all that we have to consider is, whether we ought to believe Mackenzie, who ascribes PART 2.]

E

it to Inglis, or the Oxford Catalogue, which gives it to Wedderburn?

Mackenzie, it must be confessed, is a writer, on whose testimony it is hard to believe any thing; yet he is the older authority by far, and, in a question of this kind, age ought to have some weight in the scale. The work, it is necessary to remark, has every appearance of having been, at first, published anonymously. Is it not," says Mr. Herbert, "highly probable, considering the subject and the time, that the book should be printed privately, and, if the printer was in danger, was it not necessary for the author to conceal his name? If the author's name was mentioned on the title-page, what occasion was there to omit it at the end of the Dedication (which is extant in all the copies?)" To the end of the work, too, there is the following sentence appended from Cicero, which has no connection with the text, and would be without any apposite signification, were it not designed, by the author, as an apology for the concealment of his name: "Nihil est turpius, quam sapientis vitam, ex insapientium sermone pendere." Assuming then, that the work was published anonymously, is it not far more likely, that Mackenzie, whose labours lay so peculiarly among the relics of Scottish biography surviving in his day, should come at a right knowledge of the author, than the compiler of a catalogue which did not exist for more than a century after? Mackenzie's fault, as a biographer, consists rather in a prodigious appetite for fables, than in a habit of inventing them; and it would be erring in the opposite extreme of incredulity to suppose, that he could have given the Complaynt to Sir James Inglis without ha