is only one specimen out of many similar embellish

ments.

How he discomfit him alane

Twa hundredth, and slue fyften certane, &c.

The reflections with which the poet has enriched his narrative are a thousand times better than any of his inventions. They are invariably the breathings of a noble and generous spirit, disdaining all ordinary prejudices, and animated with an almost holy reverence for the rights of man as a being of mind, and destined for immortality. His eulogy on Liberty, the very first to be found in the English language, has been often quoted, but not more often than it deserves. The following are the lines:

O hou FREDOM is nobil thyng!
For it maks men to haif lyking.
FREDOM all solace to men givis :
He livis at eis that frelie livis.
A nobil heart may haf na eis,
Nor nocht als that may it pleis
If FREDOM fale. For fre lyving
Is yarnit* abone uther thyng.
O he quha hes ay livit free

May nocht know weil the properté,
The aungir nor the wretchit dome
That is couplit to thirldom!
Bot gif he had assayit it,

Than all perquiert he micht it wit;
And suld think FREDOM mair to pryse,

Than all the gold men could devyse.

* Desired.

+ By book.

He

The date of this great poet's birth is not precisely known. He died, aged, in 1396, and is therefore supposed to have been born about 1316 or 1326. was brought up to the church; and in 1357 we find him styled, Archdeacon of Aberdeen. Of this last date, there is in Rymer's Fœdera the copy of a passport from the King of England in favor of “ John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, coming, with three scholars in his company, into England, for the purpose of studying in the University of Oxford; et ibidem actus scolasticos exercendo," &c. Dr. Henry makes rather a strange use of this document. He imagines, that the archdeacon himself was going to study at Oxford; and proceeding on this assumption, he presents us with a pleasant enough specimen of the art of filling up a scanty biography. 66 His love of learning," says Henry, "was so strong, that he continued to prosecute his studies after his promotion. With this view, he prevailed upon his own sovereign, David Bruce, with whom he was in great favor, to apply to Edward III. for permission to study at Oxford, which was granted," &c. Now the meaning of the document plainly is, that it was "the three scholars in his company"-probably, youths of family committed to his charge-who were going to England to study at Oxford, and not the archdeacon himself. And the whole business of prevailing on the Scottish king, to apply to the English king for permission, &c., dwindles, in reality, into nothing more than the ordiBary affair of procuring a passport to a foreign country. "That an archdeacon," as Mr Pinkerton justly observes, "should have performed actus scolasticos would have been a phenomenon, indeed, when he

could not have been in that rank without having gone through them a dozen years before."*

Rymer furnishes us with another document, (vi. 39) from which it appears, thar Barbour was appointed in 1357, by the Bishop of Aberdeen, one of his commissioners, to treat at Edinburgh concerning the ransom of the captive King of Scotland, David II. This appointment is dated in September, 1357; the passport to go to Oxford was granted in August of that

a

*The writer of this Memoir is smart on Dr. Henry; seduced probably by the example of Mr. Pinkerton, an ingenious but very hazardous annotator; but, after all, it is not so clear that Henry is in the wrong. If Barbour must have gone through his actus scolasticos " dozen years before," where was it that he went through them? St. Andrew's, the oldest university in Scotland, was only founded in 1413, nearly twenty years after Barbour's death. The fact is, that clerical degrees were, in early times, matters of such loose dispensation, that there is no telling what was previously necessary. Neither can the circumstance of Barbour's being an archdeacon, and therefore probably advanced in life, be regarded as decisive of the improbability of Dr. Henry's version. At a much later period, Sir George Mackenzie, after being many years Lord Advocate of Scotland, and publishing many erudite works, retired to England, with the view of spending the remainder of his days in lettered ease at Oxford; and, in his fifty-fourth year, was admitted a student there, by a grace passed in the congregation, June 2, 1690.

A. S.

year; so that the business of the ransom was probably transacted by Barbour when passing through Edinburgh, on his way from Aberdeen to Oxford.*

In 1365, there appears to have been a second passport granted to Barbour, to go through England, with six knights in company, to St. Denis in France. The object of this journey is not stated, nor is there any thing else respecting it on record.

Such are all the memorials which the destructive hand of time has left us, of one of the first and best of our poets. The editions of his " Bruce," the only work which we know him to have written, are numerous; but the only one which can be relied on, for the purity of the text, is that edited by Mr. Pinkerton, which was copied from a MS. in the Advocate's library, written in 1489, and in fine order. It is much to be wished, for the sake of the less wealthy orders of our coutrymen with whom Barbour is still a great favorite, that they had the advantage of a cheap edition, printed from the same text. H. S.

A reasonable inference, which does away with that of Mr. Pinkerton's, that, because Barbour had this business to transact, he could not have remained to study at Oxford.

A. S.

ANDREW WYNTOUN.

In the midst of that fine expanse of water, Lochleven, and near to the island which contained the Castle of Lochleven, so celebrated as the prison of the unfortunate Mary, there is a smaller island, called the Inch, or St. Serf's, on which the ruins may yet be traced of a priory which was dedicated to St. Serf, or Servanus. It is said to have been founded by Brudo, the last but one of the Pictish kings; and before the Reformation untenanted its walls, many things occurred within and about it, all of which I should begin to relate to you in minute detail, were it in the power of walls, crumbling to dust, to revive in one the same indefatigable and proper spirit, which centuries ago distinguished those monkish worthies, whose tapers (to use the words of poor Bruce, Lochleven's ill-fated bard)

through the windows beam'd,

And quiver'd on the undulating wave.

The most memorable of these worthies was that venerable chronicler, Andrew Wyntoun, the author of one of the oldest Scottish works known to exist; and, after the admirable example which he has set us in his Cronykil of Scotland," of going through the whole history of the world, spiritual and terrestrial, before he comes to that bit of barren space,* the events of

*Which, form'd in haste, was planted in a nook, But never enter'd in Creation's book.

CHURCHILL.