Our other extract we give in the old spelling, as it was contributed to the Pictorial History of England by Sir Henry Ellis from a very early MS. of the poem in the Harleian Collection, No. 3490:

1 Undid.

• Blame.

VOL. I.

In a Croniq I fynde thus,

How that Caius Fabricius

Wich whilome was consul of Rome,
By whome the lawes yede and come,"
Whan the Sampnitees to him brouht
A somme of golde, and hym by souht
To done hem fauoure in the lawe,
Towarde the golde he gan hym drawe:
Whereof, in alle mennes loke,
A parte in to his honde he tooke,
Wich to his mouthe in alle haste
He put hit for to smelle and taste,
And to his ihe and to his ere,
Bot he ne fonde no comfort there:
And thanne he be gan it to despise,
And tolde vnto hem in this wise:
"I not what is with golde to thryve,
Whan none of alle my wittes fyve
Fynt savour ne delite ther inne ;
So is it bot a nyce sinne
Of golde so ben to coveitous.
Bot he is riche an glorious
Wich hath in his subieccion

The men wich in possession
Ben riche of gold, and by this skille,

For he may alday whan he wille,
Or be him leef or be him loth,
Justice don vppon hem bothe."

Lo thus he seide, and with that worde
He threwe to fore hem on the borde
The golde oute of his honde anon,
And seide hem that he wolde none,
So that he kepte his liberte,

To do justice and equite,

Without lucre of such richesse.

There be nowe fewe of such I gesse,
For it was thilke tymes used

That every juge was refused,

Wich was not frende to commoun riht;
Bot thei that wolden stonde vpriht
For trouth only to do justice
Preferred were in thilke office,
To deme and juge common lawe,
Wich nowe men seyn is alle withdrawe.
To set a lawe and keep it nouht
There is no common profit souht,
But, above alle, natheless,
The lawe wich is made for pees
Is good to kepe for the beste,

For that set alle men in reste.

The manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis are very numerous. There are no fewer than ten in the Bodleian Library; and several others are in the British Museum, at Cambridge, at Trinity College, Dublin, and in private collections. Dr. Pauli's text, in which he has regulated the spelling in conformity to the demands of the verse, which he apparently assumes to have been as regular as that of Chaucer is held to be by Tyrwhitt, is founded on the printed edition of 1532, collated chiefly with the Stafford MS., and with those in the Harleian Collection numbered 7184, 3869, and 3490. The poem extends to eight Books, and is expressly stated by the author to have been finished in the sixteenth year of Richard II., that is, in the year 1393. It had been begun some years before, at the command of that king, at a time when, as it seems to be intimated, Gower was laboring under ill health,—

Though I sikeness have upon honde,
And long have had -

though it is not quite clear that these words are not intended to describe his condition at the conclusion of his task. He particularly gives it as his reason for choosing the vernacular tongue,— for that fewe men endite In our Englisshe.

BARBOUR.

THIS latter part of the fourteenth century is also the age of the birth of Scottish poetry; and Chaucer had in that dialect a far more worthy contemporary and rival than his friend and fellowEnglishman Gower, in John Barbour. Of Barbour's personal history but little is known. He was a churchman, and had attained to the dignity of Archdeacon of Aberdeen by the year 1357; so that his birth cannot well be supposed to have been later than 1320. He is styled Archdeacon of Aberdeen in a passport granted to him in that year by Edward III. at the request of David de Bruce (that is, King David II. of Scotland), to come into England with three scholars in his company, for the purpose, as it is expressed, of studying in the University of Oxford; and the protection is extended to him and his companions while performing their scholastic exercises, and generally while remaining there, and also while returning to their own country. It may seem strange that an Archdeacon should go to college; but Oxford appears to have been not the only seat of learning to which Barbour resorted late in life with the same object. Three other passports, or safe-conducts, are extant, which were granted to him by Edward at later dates: the first, in 1364, permitting him to come, with four horsemen, from Scotland, by land or sea, into England, to study at Oxford, or elsewhere, as he might think proper; the second, in 1365, by which he is authorized to come into England, and travel throughout that kingdom, with six horsemen as his companions, as far as to St. Denis in France; and the third, in 1368, securing him protection in coming, with two valets and two horses, into England, and travelling through the same to the king's other dominions, on his way to France (versus Franciam) for the purpose of studying there, and in returning thence. Yet he had also been

long before this employed, and in a high capacity, in civil affairs. In 1357 he was appointed by the Bishop of Aberdeen one of his two Commissioners deputed to attend a meeting at Edinburgh about the ransom of the king. Nothing more is heard of him till 1373, in which year he appears as one of the auditors of Exchequer, being styled Archdeacon of Aberdeen, and clerk of probation (clerico probacionis) of the royal household. In his later days he appears to have been in the receipt of two royal pensions, both probably bestowed upon him by Robert II., who succeeded David II. in 1370; the first one of 107. Scots from the customs of Aberdeen, the other one of 20s. from the borough mails, or city rents, of the same town. An entry in the records of Aberdeen for 1471 states on the authority of the original roll, now lost, that the latter was expressly granted to him "for the compilation of the book of the Acts of King Robert the First." In a passage occurring in the latter part of this work he himself tells us that he was then compiling it in the year 1375. All that is further known of him is, that his death took place towards the close of 1395. Besides his poem commonly called The Bruce, another metrical work of his, entitled The Broite or The Brute, being a deduction of the history of the Scottish kings from Brutus, is frequently referred to by the chronicler Wynton in the next age; but no copy of it is now believed to exist. Of the Bruce only one MS. was till lately supposed to be extant, a transcript made in 1489 preserved in the Advocates' Library; and it was from this that the last and best edition of the poem was printed by Dr. Jamieson, in 4to. at Edinburgh, in 1820; but another MS., dated 1488, has since been discovered in the Library of St. John's College, Cambridge. It appears to have been printed before the close of the sixteenth century. A "Patrick Gordon, gentleman," as he designates himself, the author of a metrical work entitled The Famous History of the Renowned and Valiant Prince, Robert, surnamed the Bruce, King of Scotland, which first appeared at Dort in 1615, alludes to Barbour's previous performance on the same subject as "the old printed book"; and Mr. David Laing, in a note to his edition of Dunbar (Edinburgh, 1834), p. 40, states that he is possessed of an edition of Barbour's poem, in small 4to. and black-letter, which, although it has lost the title-page, appears to have been printed at Edinburgh about the year 1570. The oldest edition known to Dr. Jamieson was an Edinburgh one of 1616. It was reprinted at the same

place in 1620 and 1670; at Glasgow in 1672; and again at Edinburgh in 1714 (the title-page, however, being usually dated 1758). The first critical edition was that by Pinkerton, published in 3 vols. 8vo. at London in 1790; the last and best, is that by the Rev. Dr. John Jamieson, forming the first volume of The Bruce and Wallace, 2 vols. 4to. Edinburgh, 1820. We may notice by the way that Gordon, who speaks with great contempt of Barbour's "outworn barbarous speech," and ill-composed and immethodical work, tells a story in the Preface to his Famous History about a still older poem on the exploits of Bruce, written by "a monk of. the Abbey of Melrose, called Peter Fenton," in the year 1369, a manuscript copy of which," old and torn, almost illegible, in many places wanting leaves," yet having the beginning, had been put into his hands by his "loving friend, Donald Farquharson." "It was," he says, "in old rhime like to Chaucer, but wanting in many parts; and especially from the field of Bannockburn forth it wanted all the rest almost, so that it could not be gotten to the press; yet such as I could read thereof had many remarkable tales, worthy to be noted, and also probable, agreeing with the truth of the history, as I have followed it, as well as the other." "One cannot help regretting," Dr. Jamieson sensibly remarks, “that Gordon, instead of bestowing his labor on a new poem, had not favored the public with even the fragments of that written by Fenton." It would have been something if he had even informed us what he had done with the manuscript (if he did not put it into the fire upon finding that he could not read it). He writes the date (1369) in words at full length; but he is evidently not a person upon whose testimony much reliance can be placed as to such a matter. It is a suspicious circumstance, as is hinted by Macpherson, the editor of Wynton's Chronicle, that that writer, though he often quotes Barbour, has never once mentioned Fenton.1

The Scotch in which Barbour's poem is written was undoubtedly the language then commonly in use among his countrymen, for whom he wrote and with whom his poem has been a popular favorite ever since its first appearance. By his countrymen, of course, we mean the inhabitants of southern and eastern, or Lowland Scotland, not the Celts or Highlanders, who have always been and still are as entirely distinct a race as the native Irish are, and always have been, from the English in Ireland, and to confound whom

1 Wyntown's Chronicle, by Macpherson (1795), Pref. p. xxix.