Up to this point it does not happen to us to have noted instances of offices of emolument in Scotland given to Frenchmen, and the fuss made about one instance of the kind leads to the supposition that they must have been rare. Dunbar the poet, who was in priest’s orders, was exceedingly clamorous in prose and in verse—in the serious and in the comic vein—for preferment. Perhaps he was the kind of person whom it is as difficult to prefer in the Church as it was to make either Swift or Sydney Smith a bishop. His indignation was greatly roused by the appointment of a foreigner whom he deemed beset by his own special failings, but in far greater intensity, to the abbacy of Tungland; and he committed his griefs to a satirical poem, called ‘The fenyet Freir of Tungland.’ The object of this poem has been set down by historians as an Italian, but M. Michel indicates him as a countryman of his own, by the name of Jean Damien. He is called a charlatan, quack, and mountebank, and might, perhaps, with equal accuracy, be called a devotee of natural science, who speculated ingeniously and experimented boldly. He was in search of the philosopher’s stone, and believed himself to be so close on its discovery that he ventured to embark the money of King James IV., and such other persons as participated in his own faith, in the adventure to realise the discovery, and saturate all the partners in riches indefinite. This was a speculation of a kind in which many men of that age indulged; and they were men not differing from others except in their scientific attainments, adventurous propensities, and sanguine temperaments. The class still exists among us, though dealing rather in iron than gold; as if we had in the history of speculation, from the alchemists down to Capel Court, something that has been prophesied in that beautiful mythological sequence liked so much at all schools, beginning— “Aurea prima sata est ætas, quæ vindice nullo Sponte sua sine lege fidem rectumque colebat.”