Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/96

 I suld hawe thank, sen I nocht trawaill spard For my laubour na man hecht me reward; Na charge I had off king nor othir lord; Gret harm I thocht his gud deid suld be smord. I haiff said her ner as the process gais; And fenzeid nocht for frendschip nor for fais. Costis herfor was no man bond to me; In this sentence I had na will to be, Bot in als mekill as I rahersit nocht Sa worthely as nobill Wallace wrocht. (Wallace, xi. 1431–42.)

Despite the superior head-shaking of the wise but dull John Major, who distrusted Harry but did not confute him, the eulogist of Wallace was taken at his word: he was in the main accepted more or less as the vernacular annalist of fact. His story of Wallace not only fired the souls of generations of patriotic Scots, but also supplied matter for nearly all the historians till Lord Hailes, greatly daring, said him nay. Since then history may be said to have hanged, drawn, and quartered Harry as a traitor to truth. He remained on the gibbet until Dr. W. A. Craigie one fine day discovered that this obloquy was not altogether fair. He raised a process of rehabilitation, maintaining that it was scant enough justice to condemn Harry as if he were merely a historian, because his work fell to be tested not so much for its history as for its poetry, and because in that sense the honours were divided. While the palm might go to the Aberdonian biographer, Barbour, for his historical story of Bruce, the canons of poetical judgement would secure to Harry the laurel of superior merit, interest, and vivacity in his descriptions of the exploits of Wallace, his portraiture of the hero, and his creation as a poetic whole and patriotic epic. The rivals were not to be weighed against each other by the sole balance of truth, the nil nisi verum which history—a trifle unreasonable sometimes in its standpoint to