But it is not a question of language only but of content. A great deal of Burns’ work is eighteenth-century conventionalism of a deplorable kind. Most of his love-songs have a deadly sameness. The task of Scottish poetry to-day is to rise out of the rut in which it has so long been confined. It is here that the return to Dunbar is of the utmost value. It means that Scots poetry may be rescued at last from the atmosphere of hopeless anachronism which has long kept it so “fushionless.” It has been said that if Burns is the heart, Dunbar is the head, of Scottish poetry: and certainly at any time during the past century Scots literature has had desperate need to pray Meredith’s prayer for “More brains, O Lord, more brains.” Dunbar is in many ways the most modern, as he is the most varied, of Scottish poets, whereas all but a fraction of Burns’ work (and that fraction by no means confined to the most generally known portion of it) is irrevocably dated and almost indistinguishable from the ruck of imitations of it to which Scots poets have so largely confined themselves during the subsequent century and a half. Even Professor Gregory Smith admits that “there cannot be any quarrel about the richness of the Scottish vocabulary, its frequent superiority to English in both the spiritual and technical matters of poetic diction, its musical movement and suggestion, and, generally, what have been called the ‘grand accommodations’ in the craft of writing as well.” Intelligent young Scots a few years ago might very well have been excused for failing to detect any of these great qualities in the very inferior types of Scots literature they came into contact with. Scottish children are only taught a little Burns and a few of the ballads. They are not taught anything of the Auld Makars. For the most part their attention is confined to English literature. It is not surprising, therefore, that they should regard Scottish literature as a mere side-line, and that, in consequence, Scottish literature should lose the greater part of those who should be contributing to it rather than to a foreign literature, which, in any case, prefers its own sons and daughters. But with the re-discovery of Dunbar in particular by young Scottish poets during the past few years new possibilities have opened up. They realize now upon what grounds testimony is borne to the richness and resource of the Scots language. In Dunbar they see them displayed in a way far beyond anything accomplished since. They see Scots allied to noble ideas, high imaginings, “divine philosophy,” and no longer confined to the foothills of Parnassus, and when they resurvey the problem of the revival of Scots from that angle, many of the difficulties of readjusting and utilizing it to serious literary purpose which have hitherto proved baffling are dispelled. Most of the people who are trying to revive the Doric are, at the same time, trying to maintain