George Gregory Smith

“ He is spoken of as the Rhymer of Scotland in the accounts of the English privy council dealing with the visit of the mission for the hand of Margaret Tudor, rather because he wrote a poem in praise of London, than because, as has been stated, he held the post of laureate at the Scottish court. In 1511 he accompanied the queen to Aberdeen and commemorated her visit in verse. Other pieces such as the Orisoun (“Quhen the Gouernour past in France”) , apropos of the setting out of the regent Albany, are of historical interest, but they tell us little more than that Dunbar was alive. ”

“ It opens with a description of the state of Scotland at the death of Alexander III. (1286) and concludes with the death of Douglas and the burial of the Bruce’s heart (1332) . The central episode is the battle of Bannockburn. Patriotic as the sentiment is, it is in more general terms than is found in later Scots literature. The king is a hero of the chivalric type common in contemporary romance; freedom is a “noble thing” to be sought and won at all costs; the opponents of such freedom are shown in the dark colours which history and poetic propriety require ”

“ The date of his death is uncertain. He is named in Lyndsay’s Testament and Complaynt of the Papyngo (1530) with poets then dead, and the reference precedes that to Douglas who had died in 1522. He certainly survived his royal patron. ”

“ Wyntoun speaks (Chronicle III. iii.) of a “Treteis” which Barbour made by way of “a genealogy” of “Brutus lynagis”; and elsewhere in that poem there are references to the archdeacon’s “Stewartis Oryginale.” This “Brut” is unknown; but the reference has been held by some to be to (3) a Troy-book, based on Guido da Colonna’s Historia Destructionis Troiae. Two fragments of such a work have been preserved in texts of Lydgate’s Troy-book, the first in MS. Camb. Univ. Lib. Kk. ”