literature—might seek to apply, regardless of wrong to that imaginative faculty which ranks so high among poetic gifts.
While thus in 1893 my friend Dr. Craigie contrasted Barbour and Harry, as Literature, not a little to Harry's profit, my friend, Mr. J. T. T. Brown, in 1900 supplied him with a 'Collaborator' who not only found him his facts[1] from chronicle, and his quotations from literature, but was busy about the same time in redacting Barbour and embroidering Bruce from the cradle to the grave. Although quite unable either to countenance redaction in the one case, or to admit collaboration in the other, I shall pursue with interest and appreciation not a few valuable lines of examination started by Mr. Brown into the sources of Harry, whether he had a collaborator or not.
The Wallace is a Renaissance heroic poem so curiously composite that one need never expect to trace all its elements. But many are patent, and their character is sufficient not only to bring into the literary contrast challenged by Dr. Craigie certain ethical factors which cannot be set aside, but also to show yet more fully than before the dependence of Harry's Wallace on Barbour's Bruce.
Some Poetical Sources
There is no need to linger over the purely historical citations made from the prose chronicler Walter Bower, or from the earlier poet-historian, Andrew of Wyntoun,[2] which in every sense deserve commendation as true historic buttresses of the epic scheme. Nor is it with any question of propriety that we look at some other poetical models which Harry followed. The ten-syllabled couplet verse of the Wallace comes from the Canterbury Tales. Direct quotations from
- ↑ Wallace and Bruce Restudied, pp. 58–77.
- ↑ Wyntoun's Cronykil, viii. 2011–2116, Wallace, vi. 107–248.
