Such are the facts known to us of the life of Barbour, few in number, but sufficient to represent the career of a learned and busy, pious and prosperous ecclesiastic. His poems add scarcely any personal details except those already noted, but their spirit reveals a character in keeping with his external circumstances. They are frank and simple expressions of the early style of narrative poetry, free from all effort of laboured art, sometimes tedious from their minuteness of detail, but at other times charming from their naturalness, and occasionally striking a deep note of national or human feeling. The age in which they were written, and the effect of the ‘Brus’ upon the character of the Scottish nation, give their author a place in literature beyond the intrinsic merit of his works, either as poetry or history. The ‘Brus’ was in great part copied by Wyntoun, and the main facts, which Barbour may easily have derived from eye-witnesses, one of whom, Sir Alan Cathcart, he names, may be relied on; although, by an inexplicable blunder, he has confounded his hero with his grandfather, the competitor of Baliol for the crown before Edward I at Norham. The aim of true history and the pleasure it gives have seldom been better described than in the prologue of this poem:—
Storyis to red ar delitabill,
Suppos that tha be nocht but fabill.
Than suld storyis that suthfast wer
And tha wer said on gud maner
Haf doubill plesans in herying:
The fyrst plesans is the carping,
And the tothir the suthfastnes
That schawis the thing rycht as it wes.
The praise of the national virtue of independence, which is the moral of his poem, was the natural voice of a time when Scotland was rejoicing at its escape from the imperial schemes of the Plantagenet kings; but it deserves note that Barbour bases it on the value of personal freedom—
A! fredom is a noble thing;
Fredom mais man to haf liking,
Fredom all solace to man giffis:
He lifis at es that frely lifis—
and laments the position of the serfs whose emancipation had not yet come:—
Schortly to say is nane can tell
The sair condicioun of a threll.
In other passages he shows a gentleness which recalls Chaucer, as in the anecdote of the king stopping his host to provide for the delivery of a poor woman. But his humour is far inferior. As a compensation he never trenches on the coarseness to be found not only in the English, but in a worse form in some of the later Scottish poets. His range and depth of observation are also much more limited. Instead of the comedy of human nature in the ‘Canterbury Tales,’ he has given us only a drama of war with a single hero. His other poems are almost literal translations: the ‘Legends of the Saints’ from the ‘Legenda Aurea,’ and the Troy book from Guido da Colonna's ‘Historia Destructionis Troiæ.’ His imagination required facts or legends to stimulate it. He is not a creative poet. It is only on rare occasions that he indulges even in the graces of composition sometimes thought inseparable from poetry. To one of these, his description of spring, the reader is referred as representing his verse at its best; but to compare it, as has been done, with the melodious ease of Chaucer's rhythm is too severe a trial.
The German edition of the ‘Legends of the Saints’ claims for that poem a superiority over the ‘Brus’ in form and skill in composition, but this seems the partiality of an editor. There is little in this respect to choose between them, and the interest of the historical surpasses that of the legendary poem.
The few romances and other poems of earlier date than Barbour, whose authors are for the most part unknown, and which exist only in fragmentary form, cannot displace him from the unique position of being the father both of vernacular Scottish poetry and Scottish history. Blind Harry's ‘Wallace’ is a century later; Wyntoun was a contemporary, but of a younger generation. In virtue of this position Barbour did much to fix the dialect which sprang from the Northumbrian or northern English, and was preserved by the writers who succeeded him in the form known as broad Scotch, though it is still called by Barbour and even later Scottish poets ‘Inglis,’ or by one of them ‘Inglis of the northern leid.’ His works have therefore a special linguistic interest which has attracted the notice of modern philologists.
The chief manuscripts of the ‘Brus’ are those in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, and in St. John's College, Cambridge, both of which are transcripts by John Ramsay towards the end of the fifteenth century. The oldest printed edition extant is that ‘imprentit at Edinburgh by Robert Likprink at the expensis of Henrie Charteris, MDLXXI,’ of which a copy, probably unique, was sold at the sale of Dr. D. Laing's library for 142l. 10s. This was followed by the edition of Hart in 1616, and there have been many since, of which the best are those of Dr. Jamieson, Mr. Cosmo Innes, and the Early English Text Society (edited by Skeat).
