the secret, if secret it was. But it was to no Scot's advantage to discuss the authorship of the work publicly, and the real name of the writer became so soon disassociated from the poem as never to have reached the ears of Major, who knew only that he was called Blind Harry.

CHAPTER VII

THE REAL AUTHOR OF THE WALLACE

He was a man of middle age;

In aspect manly, grave, and sage,

As on king's errand come;
But in the glances of his eye

A penetrating, keen, and sly

Expression found its home.

Marmion

NO all intents and purposes the Wallace is an

To

anonymous book; but we can now speculate much more intelligently than ever before regarding the rank and character of the real author, since we need no longer treat his poem as the work of an abnormal, afflicted man. Forgetting, then, if possible, all that has been written about the poor old wandering minstrel of the critics' imagination, let us examine the Wallace just as we should any anonymous poem and seek from internal evidence to discover the qualities of the writer.

First, we naturally ask: what does he say of himself? Not much that is undisguised, it must be admitted, but a good deal that is worth attention. If any passage in the Wallace be autobiographical, it is the conclusion, where the poet emphasizes cer

tain conditions under which he says he wrote, and appeals to his readers for their indulgence. In some twoscore lines, he here reaffirms that he had diligently followed a Latin book by the hero's chaplain Master Blair; gives new would-be proofs of the reliability of that fabulous work, from which he asserts he departed but once and then only under strong pressure on the part of certain knights, who on one point caused him to "make a wrong record"; dwells upon the value of advancing the fame of noble Wallace, whose good deeds it was

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great harm" to blot; and bespeaks the gratitude of "worthy men" for his own conscientious efforts to that end; after which he indulges in the following envoy:

Go nobill buk, fulfillyt off gud sentens,
Suppos thow be baran of eloquens.
Go worthi buk, fulfillit off suthfast deid;
Bot in langage off help thow has greit neid,
Quhen gud makaris rang weill in to Scotland,
Gret harm was it that nane of thaim ye fand.
Zeit thar is part that can the weill awance;
Now byd thi tym, and be a remembrance.
I yow besek, off your beneuolence,

Quha will nocht low, lak nocht my eloquence;
It is weill knawin I am a burel man,

For her is said as gudly as I can:

My spreyt felys na termys asperans.

Now besek God, that gyffar is off grace,

Maide hell and erd, and set the hewyn abuff,

That he ws grant off his der lestand luff.

These are the words of a clever, self-conscious, literary man, evidently intent on the impression his book is likely to make. He presents himself as particularly anxious to establish the truth of his matter (“though it be not pleasant to all ") while extremely modest with regard to his own artistic power. Insisting that he feigned not for friendship or for foes, he ostentatiously proclaims his work to be merely a faithful record of facts.

In all his conclusion, it appears, the author was simply throwing dust in the eyes of credulous readers, to induce them the more willingly to follow his fictions. He was merely imitating the devices of that arch-impostor of the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Monmouth, author of the Historia Regum Britanniae, who with similar humility asserted his reliance solely on a mysterious book which he alone was privileged to possess, and with similar anxiety protested the soothfastness of his account, through it might not tally wholly with the information obtainable from other sources.

Geoffrey, like Blind Harry, wrote with a political purpose, hoping to arouse pride of independence and encourage a martial spirit in his land, and he was wise enough not to maintain that he was himself responsible for the perversion of past history that he presented. Writing in Latin, he declares that he had been given "a very ancient book in

the British tongue," which, in a continued regular story and elegant style, related the actions of all the kings of Britain from Brutus down. He claims that he got this book from one Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, and makes bold to dedicate his composition to Robert, Earl of Gloucester. " Of the matter now to be treated of, most noble Earl," so he begins his eleventh book, "Geoffrey of Monmouth shall be silent; but will, nevertheless, though in a mean style, briefly relate what he found in the British book above mentioned, and heard from that most learned historian, Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, concerning the wars which this renowned king [Arthur] upon his return to Britain after this victory, waged against his nephew." And he ends his work with a warning to his contemporaries, Caradoc of Llancarvan, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, to be silent about the kings of the Britons, "since they have not that book written in the British tongue, which Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought out of Brittany, and which, being a true history published in honor of those princes, I have thus taken care to translate.”

Geoffrey, moreover, explains with engaging modesty that while in the midst of his history he was obliged to publish the prophecies of Merlin, who was then "the subject of public discourse," because urgently requested to do so by Alexander,