All this has been illustrated in the case of the poet who is the subject of the volume before us. As Mr. Ruskin has pronounced _Aurora Leigh_ to be the greatest poem of this century, so Sir Walter Scott, who has, by the way, been singularly unjust to Lydgate and Hawes, pronounced Dunbar to be “a poet unrivalled by any that Scotland has ever produced.” a reckless judgment which he could never have expressed deliberately. Ellis followed suit, and in Ellis’ notice Dunbar is “the greatest poet Scotland has produced.” These judgments have, in effect, been reverberated by successive writers and editors. In due time, some fourteen years ago, appeared the inevitable German monograph, “William Dunbar: sein Leben und seine Gedichte,” by Dr. J. Schipper, to whom Mr. Oliphant Smeaton appropriately and reverently inscribes the present monograph. In Mr. Oliphant Smeaton’s work Dunbar assumes the proportions which might be expected--he is a “mighty genius.” “The peer, if not in a few qualities, the superior of Chaucer and Spenser. By the indefeasible passport of the supreme genius he has an indisputable title to the apostolic succession of British poetry to that place between Chaucer and Spenser, that place which can only be claimed by one whose genius was co-ordinate with theirs.” As probably eight out of every ten of Mr. Smeaton’s readers will know nothing more of Dunbar than what Mr. Smeaton chooses to tell them, and as we, considering the space at our disposal, cannot refute him by a detailed examination of Dunbar’s works, it is fortunate that he has given us a succinct illustration of the value of his critical judgment. The following are four typical stanzas of a poem which Mr. Smeaton ranks with Milton’s _Lycidas_ and Shelley’s _Adonais_; we give them as Mr. Smeaton gives them, modernised:-- “I that in health was and gladness Am troubled now with great sickness. Enfeebled with infirmity, _Timor mortis conturbat me._ “Our pleasure here is all vain glory, This false world is but transitory, The flesh is brittle, the fiend is slee, _Timor mortis conturbat me._ “The state of man doth change and vary, Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary Now dancing merry, now like to dee, _Timor mortis conturbat me._ “No state on earth here stands sicker, As with the wind waves the wicker, So waves this world’s vanity, _Timor mortis conturbat me._” As the following is pronounced to be one of the finest stanzas Dunbar ever penned, it is interesting as illustrating what is, in Mr. Smeaton’s opinion, the best work of this rival of Chaucer and Spenser:-- “Have mercy, love, have mercy, lady bright; What have I wrought against your womankeid, That you should murder me a sackless wight, Trespassing on you nor in word nor deed? That ye consent thereto, O God forbid; Leave cruelty and save your man for shame, Or through the world quite losëd is your name.”