[1] 'Gar:' cause. [2] 'Till:' to. [3] 'Deeming:' opinion. [4] 'Deir:' injure. [5] 'Sark:' shift. [6] 'Perfite:' perfect. [7] 'Lesum:' lawful. [8] 'Mailies:' eyelet-holes. [9] 'Purfill'd:' fringed. [10] 'Ilk:' each. [11] 'Thole:' endure. [12] 'Weet:': wet. [13] 'Pansing:' thinking. [14] 'Her hals-ribbon of ruth:' her neck-ribbon of pity. [15] 'Sickerness:' firmness. [16] 'Seill:' salvation. [17] 'Set:' became. WILLIAM DUNBAR This was a man of the true and sovereign seed of genius. Sir Walter Scott calls Dunbar 'a poet unrivalled by any--that Scotland has ever produced.' We venture to call him the Dante of Scotland; nay, we question if any English poet has surpassed 'The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins through Hell' in its peculiarly Dantesque qualities of severe and purged grandeur; of deep sincerity, and in that air of moral disappointment and sorrow, approaching despair, which distinguished the sad-hearted lover of Beatrice, who might almost have exclaimed, with one yet mightier than he in his misery and more miserable in his might, 'Where'er I am is Hell--myself am Hell.' Foster, in an entry in his journal, (we quote from memory,) says, 'I have just seen the moon rising, and wish the impression to be eternal. What a look she casts upon earth, like that of a celestial being who loves our planet still, but has given up all hope of ever doing her any good or seeing her become any better--so serene she seems in her settled and unutterable sadness.' Such, we have often fancied, was the feeling of the great Florentine toward the world, and which--pained, pitying, yearning enthusiast that he was!--escaped irresistibly from those deep- set eyes, that adamantine jaw, and that brow, wearing the laurel, proudly yet painfully, as if it were a crown of everlasting fire! Dunbar was not altogether a Dante, either in melancholy or in power, but his 'Dance' reveals kindred moods, operating at times on a kindred genius. In Dante humour existed too, but ere it could come up from his deep nature to the surface, it must freeze and stiffen into monumental scorn --a laughter that seemed, while mocking at all things else, to mock at its own mockery most of all. Aird speaks in his 'Demoniac,' of a smile upon his hero's brow, 'Like the lightning of a hope about to DIE For ever from the furrow'd brows of Hell's Eternity.' Dante's smile may rather be compared to the RISING of a false and self- detected hope upon the lost brows where it is never to come to dawn, and where, nevertheless, it remains for ever, like a smile carved upon a sepulchre. Dunbar has a more joyous disposition than his Italian prototype and master, and he indulges himself to the top of his bent, but in a style (particularly in his 'Twa Married Women and the Widow,' and in 'The Friars of Berwick,' which is not, however, quite certainly his) too coarse and prurient for the taste of this age.