Barbour guides Harry's course. Barbour too began with a prophecy of Thomas of Ercildoun that Bruce should be king,
And haiff this land all in leding,[1] (Bruce, ii. 86).
As we have seen Harry already laying sacrilegious hands on a bishop, we need not marvel to find him kidnapping a prophet.
Everywhere it is the same, whether the matter is of mist,[2] of battle-speech,[3] of division of spoil,[4] of battle tactics,[5] of cutting tent-ropes in night-surprises, the Wallace of Harry is a rib out of Bruce's side, although, of course, there are things which derive elsewhere. Originality is a merely relative term; imagination is often a mere disorder of the memory; in Harry's case the matter of Wallace was largely a memory carefully re-arranged. The older conceptions of the place of imitative licence were laxer than ours, and Harry used Barbour with a latitude beyond the wide limits even of mediaeval canon.
The Wallace Portrait
If anywhere we could expect to find originality it surely must be when now and again Harry turns from his arithmetic of slaughter, his unending rhetoric of victory and bloodshed, to describe the person and characteristics of his hero. He describes his tall stature, his broad shoulders, his great and brawny limbs:
Woundis he had in mony divers place,
Bot fair and weill kepyt was his face.
Off ryches he kepyt no propyr thing;
Gaiff as he wan, lik Alexander the king.
In tym off pes mek as a maid was he;
Quhar wer approchyt the rycht Ector was he.
