Dunbar, WILLIAM, the greatest of the old Scottish poets, was born between 1460 and 1465, most probably in East Lothian. It is supposed that he went to St Andrews University in 1475, and graduated as Master of Arts four years later. Of his life for the next twenty years we know nothing save the hints we can gather from his own writings. It seems that he entered the order of St Francis, and was employed for some time as an itinerant or preaching friar. He tells us, in the words of Dr Irving's paraphrase from his autobiographic poem The Visitation of St Francis: 'In the habit of that order have I made good cheer in every flourishing town in England betwixt Berwick and Calais; in it also I ascended the pulpit at Derroton and Canterbury; and crossed the sea at Dover, and instructed the inhabitants of Picardy.' He appears next to have entered the king's service, and to have been retained as secretary to some of James's numerous embassies to foreign courts. In 1500 he obtained from the king a yearly pension of £10, afterwards increased to £20, then to £80. In 1501 he seems to have visited England, most likely in the train of the ambassadors sent thither to conclude the negotiations for the king's marriage. Early in 1503, before the queen's arrival, he composed in honour of the event his most famous poem, The Thriissill and the Rois, perhaps the happiest political allegory in English literature. He seems now to have lived chiefly about court, writing poems, and sustaining himself with the vain hope of preferment in the church. On the 17th March 1504, he received a gift for saying mass for the first time in the royal presence; in 1508 Chepman printed seven of his poems—the earliest specimen of Scottish typography. He is supposed to have visited the northern parts of Scotland in May 1511, in the train of Queen Margaret, and his name disappears altogether after the ruinous defeat at Flodden. He may have fallen there, in which case the Orisone, written not earlier than 1517, and usually ascribed to Dunbar, was the work of another poet; or he may have retired to some quiet church-living given him by the queen. He was certainly dead in 1530, but David Laing argued that he must have died before 1522, the year of Gavin Douglas's death, whom Lyndesay names eight years afterwards as the greatest poet recently dead.
As a poet, Dunbar possessed a wonderful variety of gifts; his genius comprised the excellences of many masters. He is at times as rich in fancy and colour as Spenser in the Faerie Queen; as homely, and shrewd, and coarse as Chaucer in the Miller's Tale; as pious and devotional as Cowper in his hymns; and as wildly grotesque in satire as Burns in his Death and Doctor Hornbook. He reaches his highest level in his masterly satires, The Two Marrit Wemen and the Wedo, and The Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnis. His Lament for the Makaris is a masterpiece of pathos. His one fault as a poet is a gratuitous grossness of phraseology and ideas, which even in his time could hardly have raised his credit as a churchman.
A careful edition of Dunbar's works, by Dr David Laing, was published in 2 vols. in 1834; another by Small and Mackay, for the Scottish Text Society in 1884-89; a German edition, with a Life, by Schipper (1884). See also Irving's History of Scottish Poetry (1861), Dr J. M. Ross's Scottish History and Literature (1884), and Oliphant Smeaton's Dunbar (1898).