croft's tradition of yeoman's service rendered in battle by the first Douglas to an obscure king, he shifts the date some four centuries down the ages, substitutes William the Lion for Solvathius, and shows reason for regarding the incident as plausible. Interesting, also, is the evidence he brings forward as to the origin of the family. It was not to be expected that a difficulty which had so far baffled the genealogists would now be resolved; but Sir Herbert narrows the issue as to reduce it to an alternative—that of derivation from a Flemish colonist, an ancestor held in common with the house of Moray; or from a native chief of Clydesdale who had received a charter of his hereditary lands. The balance of probability, based upon a passage in Wyntoun's Chronicle (B. viii. c. 7), and upon community of nomenclature and heraldic insignia, inclines to the former alternative.
For the author's treatment of the history of the earlier Douglases we can find nothing but praise. Coming down, however, to the classic period of the Black Douglas—the Cid of Scottish history—it seems to us that he has missed a literary opportunity. We have spoken of his style as admirably clear; it is also lighted up by no infrequent gleams of humour—as, for instance, when he tells us that Sir James Douglas died, in 1420, 'of influenza,' an epidemic whose nature was not understood by the faculty, and which was vulgarly spoken of as 'the Quhew,' 'just as at the present time we may hear it spoken of as "the flue."' But the story of the 'Good Sir James'—endeared as it has become to every Scottish schoolboy through Scott's Tales of a Grandfather—called for other literary qualities than those of the mere expositor. And, truth to tell, at this point Sir Herbert's narrative strikes us as bald and matter-of-fact. This is the more surprising as the author has obviously a special interest in feats of martial prowess, in the treatment of which he often shows peculiar skill. Also, later on, when he comes to treat of George and Willie Douglas, and of Queen Mary's escape from Lochleven Castle, he shows somewhat of that picturesqueness, imaginative insight and literary grace which he so entirely misses in what ought to be a Romancero at once delightful and veracious.
Again, in his narrative of Otterburn, his scientific scepticism strikes us as excessive and uncalled for. The dying words of Douglas have been accepted, in slightly varying forms, by every authority from Froissart to Fraser; was it reserved for
