lours which history and poetic propriety require; but there
is none of the complacency of the merely provincial habit of mind. The
lines do not lack vigour; and there are passages of high merit, notably the
oft-quoted section beginning "A! fredome is a noble thing." Despite a
number of errors of fact, notably the confusion of the three Bruces in the
person of the hero, the poem is historically trustworthy as compared with
contemporary verse-chronicle, and especially with the _Wallace_ of the next
century. No one [v.03 p.0390] has doubted Barbour's authorship of the
_Brus_, but argument has been attempted to show that the text as we have it
is an edited copy, perhaps by John Ramsay, a Perth scribe, who wrote out
the two extant texts, preserved in the Advocates' library, Edinburgh, and
in the library of St John's College, Cambridge. Extensive portions of the
poem have been incorporated by Wyntoun (_q.v._) in his _Chronicle_. The
first printed edition extant is Charteris's (Edinburgh, 1571); the second
is Hart's (Edinburgh, 1616).

(2) Wyntoun speaks (_Chronicle_ III. iii.) of a "Treteis" which Barbour
made by way of "a genealogy" of "Brutus lynagis"; and elsewhere in that
poem there are references to the archdeacon's "Stewartis Oryginale." This
"Brut" is unknown; but the reference has been held by some to be to (3) a
Troy-book, based on Guido da Colonna's _Historia Destructionis Troiae_. Two
fragments of such a work have been preserved in texts of Lydgate's
_Troy-book_, the first in MS. Camb. Univ. Lib. Kk. v. 30, the second in the
same and in MS. Douce 148 in the Bodleian library, Oxford. This ascription
was first made by Henry Bradshaw, the librarian of Cambridge University;
but the consensus of critical opinion is now against it. Though it were
proved that these Troy fragments are Barbour's, there remains the question
whether their identification with the book on the Stewart line is
justified. The scale of the story in these fragments forces us to doubt
this identification. They contain 595 + 3118 = 3713 lines and are concerned
entirely with "Trojan" matters. This would be an undue allowance in a
Scottish "genealogy."

(4) Yet another work was added to the list of Barbour's works by the
discovery in the university library of Cambridge, by Henry Bradshaw, of a
long Scots poem of over 33,000 lines, dealing with _Legends of the Saints_,
as told in the _Legenda Aurea_ and other legendaries. The general likeness
of this poe