And even in poems where the mood is melancholy, where the burden is the shortness of life and the unpermanence of felicity, his satiric rage breaks out in single lines of fire. And although his satire is often almost inconceivably coarse, the prompting instinct is healthy at bottom. He hates Vice, although his hand is too often in the kennel to pelt her withal. He lays his grasp on the bridle-rein of the sleek prelate, and upbraids him with his secret sins in language unsuited to modern ears. His greater satires have a wild sheen of imagination about them. They are far from being cold, moral homilies. His wrath or his contempt breaks through the bounds of time and space, and brings the spiritual world on the stage. He wishes to rebuke the citizens of Edinburgh for their habits of profane swearing, and the result is a poem, which probably gave Coleridge the hint of his "Devil's Walk." Dunbar's satire is entitled the "Devil's Inquest." He represents the Fiend passing up through the market, and chuckling as he listens to the strange oaths of cobbler, maltman, tailor, courtier, and minstrel. He comments on what he hears and sees with great pleasantry and satisfaction. Here is the conclusion of the piece:-- "Ane thief said, God that ever I chaip, Nor ane stark widdy gar me gaip, But I in hell for geir wald be. The Devil said, 'Welcome in a raip: Renounce thy God, and cum to me.' "The fishwives net and swore with granes, And to the Fiend saul flesh and banes; They gave them, with ane shout on hie. The Devil said, 'Welcome all at anes; Renounce your God, and cum to me.' "The rest of craftis great aiths swair, Their wark and craft had nae compair, Ilk ane unto their qualitie. The Devil said then, withouten mair, 'Renounce your God, and cum to me.'" But the greatest of Dunbar's satires--in fact, the greatest of all his poems--is that entitled "The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins." It is short, but within its compass most swift, vivid, and weird. The pictures rise on the reader's eye, and fade at once. It is a singular compound of farce and earnest. It is Spenser and Hogarth combined--the wildest grotesquerie wrought on a background of penal flame. The poet conceives himself in a dream, on the evening preceding Lent, and in his vision he heard Mahoun command that the wretched who "had ne'er been shriven" should dance before him. Immediately a hideous rout present themselves; "holy harlots" appear in their finery, and never a smile wrinkles the faces of the onlookers; but when a string of "priests with their shaven necks" come in, the arches of the unnameable place shakes with the laughter of all the fiends. Then "The Seven Deadly Sins" begin to leap at once:-- "And first of all the dance was Pride, With hair wyld back and bonnet on side." He, with all his train, came skipping through the fire. "Then Ire came in with sturt and strife; His hand was aye upon his knife;"