Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/94

 The oldest copy of the Wallace extant was written in 1488 by John Ramsay, a cleric and notary of the St. Andrew's diocese. It has been claimed for Ramsay that he was more than a mere copyist, and that he was the collaborator of Harry, and also an interpolator and editor of Barbour's Bruce. This theory, if countenanced, involves unspeakable confusion in the history of King Robert the Bruce, taints with suspicion of redaction every chapter of Barbour's great poem, and implies a deliberate and purposeless fraud by Ramsay in editing, not copying, the poem. But it is a theory happily disproved by the mass of quotations from Barbour extant before 1488, as well as by the failure to establish any single case of real tampering with the text. To Ramsay the scribe we gratefully owe copies of both poems, but the proposition that he was 'redactor' of the Bruce and 'collaborator' in the Wallace would be sufficiently rebutted by the single line of objection that the texts show that he did not always quite understand either poem. There are other texts which, though later in date, have many clearly correct readings where his are palpably corrupt. Such errors are not a privilege that can be conceded to the autograph either of poet or editor. Intelligible as a copyist's errors, they are untenable as editorial.

The Wallace, by the ambition of its design as contrasted