Note 88 — Chapter II · SUMMARY.

Dunbar, like most poets, was not over-gifted with this world’s gear. He was destitute of all support at the commencement of one severe winter. In order to set forth his claims to royal bounty, he wrote a supplication in verse in the character of an old broken-down palfrey, who had grown gray in his King’s service, and needed shelter from the cold of the approaching Christmas, which his royal lord, he knew, was too humane to refuse to his creatures, either four-footed or biped. James the Fourth often answered his petitioners in verse; on this occasion he took the pen, and wrote off the following order to his Treasurer:—

“Responsio Regis.

“After our writing, Treasurer, Take in this gray horse, old Dunbar, Which in my aucht[89] with service true In lyart[90] changed is his hue. Go house him now against this Yule! And busk[91] him like a bishop’s mule; For with my hand I have endorst To pay whate’er his trappings cost.”

Dunbar, the poet-laureate of James IV., must not be confounded with another elegant poet, Bishop Gavin Dunbar, nearly of the same era, to whom Queen Margaret afterward confided the education of her infant son, James V.