Book I

. is a hasty introduction.

[54] _Ibid._

Moreover the reflection is forced upon us at many points that, in addition to the oral accounts of which he makes use, those of actual

## participators like Sir Allan of Cathcart, and John Thomson for the

Irish campaigns, besides relations and reminiscences otherwise derived, Barbour had various contemporary writings at his command. Such was certainly the case with Sir Thomas Gray, who wrote, a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, twenty years before. His _Scalacronica_ embodies the results of research in the library of his prison where he found Scottish chronicles in verse and prose, in Latin, French, and English, and he expressly refers to such chronicles in his account of Bruce, letting us know that there was in existence a description of the Battle of Bannockburn, and, incidentally, that Barbour even has not exhausted the fund of stories of adventure told of the fugitive King. More curious and suggestive is the citation, in the bye-going, by Jean le Bel, Canon of Liège, of a “history made by the said King Robert” (_en hystoire faitte par le dit roy Robert_), that is the King Robert whom, he tells us, Edward I. had chased by hounds in the forests.[55] It is an allowable inference that these accessible materials were known to the learned and inquiring Barbour, when he took to deal with a subject familiar to him from his earliest years, and so congenial to his instincts, literary and national.

It is worth noting that Sir Walter Scott, on the publication of the _Lord of the Isles_, which draws so handsomely upon _The Bruce_, was accused of a lack of proper patriotism, meaning the pungent and rather aggressive patriotism of a long-irritated Scotland distinctive of _The Wallace_ and certain subsequent productions, but not of _The Bruce_, the spirit of which, too, was in harmony with that of the great reviver of romance. There is no malice in _The Bruce_; the malice and bitterness are in the contemporary war-literature of the other side. And Barbour is no sentimentalist; his patriotism is not pretentious or exclusive, nor such as leads him to depreciate an opponent, and is therefore not a distorting influence on facts, as Mr. Henderson postulates it must have been.[56] It is not possible to point to a single error on Barbour’s part which is fairly traceable to this cause. And his faults and errors, such as they are, may be paralleled over and over again from the most reputable of that century’s historians, to say nothing of those who, in later times, had to weave their web from less tangled and broken material.

[55] _Chronique_, I, chap. xxii.

[56] _Scottish Vernacular Literature_, p. 43.

THE BRUCE

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