Dunbar is great for three reasons:

1. He is an artist, first and last, and a great artist, parsing the colour fullness of his pictures and his melody, Logouts remarks, “He dazzles the eyes and ravishes the ears.”

2. He has firm command over style and versification: no one had ever added so many colours to his picture, and no one had ever given such swing to his lines and stanzas.

3. His humor is a rough and as vigorous as that of Burns, and this lands a peculiar charm to his satires, which are often boisterous brutal, coarse and indecent.