ancient apologies of authorship, namely, "the request of friends" -for he says,

"Men besoght me many a time

To torn it bot in light rhyme."

His Chronicle,' it seems, was likely to be an acceptable work to social parties, assembled

"For to haf solace and gamena

In fellawship when they sit samen.' b

In rude states of society verse is attached to many subjects from which it is afterwards divorced by the progress of literature; and primitive poetry is found to be the organ not only of history, but of science,* theology, and of law itself. The ancient laws of the Athenians were sung at their public banquets. Even in modern times, and within the last century, the laws of Sweden were published in verse.

De Brunne's versification, throughout the body of the work, is sometimes the entire Alexandrine, rhyming in couplets; but for the most part it is only the half Alexandrine, with alternate rhymes. He thus affords a ballad metre, which seems to justify the conjecture of Hearne, that our most ancient ballads were only fragments of metrical histories. † By this time (for the date of De Brunne's Chronicle' brings us down to the year 1339)‡ our popular ballads must have long added the redoubted names of Randal [earl] of Chester, and Robin Hood, to their list of native subjects. Both of these worthies had died before the middle of the preceding century, and, in the course of the next hundred years, their names became so popular in English song,

6

*Virgil, when he carries us back to very ancient manners, in the picture of Dido's feast, appropriately makes astronomy the first subject with which the bard Iopas entertains his audience.

Cithara crinitus Iopas
Personat aurata, docuit quæ maximus Atlas;
Hic canit errantem lunam, solisque labores.
Eneid I.

+["The conjectures of Hearne," says Warton (vol. i. p. 91), were generally wrong." An opinion re-echoed in part by Ellis.-Spec. vol. i. p. 117.]

Robert de Brunne, it appears, from internal evidence, finished his Chronicle' in May of that year.-Ritson's Minot, XIII. [He began it in 1303, as he tells us himself in very ordinary verse.]

that Langlande, in the fourteenth century, makes it part of the confession of a sluggard, that he was unable to repeat his paternoster, though he knew plenty of rhymes about Randal of Chester and Robin Hood.* None of the extant ballads about Robin Hood are however of any great antiquity.

The style of Robert de Brunne is less marked by Saxonisms than that of Robert of Gloucester; and though he can scarcely be said to come nearer the character of a true poet than his predecessor, he is certainly a smoother versifier, and evinces more facility in rhyming. It is amusing to find his editor, Hearne, so anxious to defend the moral memory of a writer, respecting whom not a circumstance is known beyond the date of his works and the names of the monasteries where he wore his cowl. From his willingness to favour the people with historic rhymes for their "fellawship and gamen,' Hearne infers that he must have been of a jocular temper. It seems, however, that the priory of Sixhill, where he lived for some time, was a house which consisted of women as well as men, a discovery which alarms the good antiquary for the fame of his author's personal purity. "Can we therefore think," continues Hearne, " that, since he was of a jocular temper, he could be wholly free from vice, or that he should not sometimes express himself loosely to the sisters of that place? This objection" (he gravely continues) "would have had some weight, had the priory of Sixhill been any way noted for luxury or lewdness; but whereas every member of it, both men and women, were very chaste, we ought by no means to suppose that Robert of Brunne behaved himself otherwise than became a good Christian during his whole abode there." This conclusive reasoning, it may be hoped, will entirely set at rest any idle suspicions that may have crept into the reader's mind respecting the chastity of Robert de Brunne. It may be added, that his writings betray not the least symptom of his having been either an Abelard among priests, or an Ovid among poets.

Considerably before the date of Robert de Brunne's 'Chronicle,' as we learn from De Brunne himself, the English minstrels, or those who wrote for them, had imitated from the French many

*[Pierce Plowman's Visions, as quoted by Warton (vol. i. p. 92). Langlande tells it of a friar, perhaps with truthful severity.]

compositions more poetical than those historical canticles, namely, genuine romances. In most of those metrical stories, irregular and shapeless as they were, if we compare them with the symmetrical structure of epic fable, there was still some portion of interest, and a catastrophe brought about, after various obstacles and difficulties, by an agreeable surprise. The names of the writers of our early English romances have not, except in one or two instances, been even conjectured, nor have the dates of the majority of them been ascertained with anything like precision. But in a general view, the era of English metrical romance may be said to have commenced towards the end of the thirteenth century. Warton, indeed, would place the commencement of our romance poetry considerably earlier; but Ritson challenges a proof of any English romance being known or mentioned, before the close of Edward I.'s reign, about which time, that is, the end of the thirteenth century, he conjectures that the romance of 'Hornchild' may have been composed. It would be pleasing, if it were possible, to extend the claims of English genius in this department to any considerable number of original pieces. But English romance poetry, having grown out of that of France, seems never to have improved upon its original, or, rather, it may be allowed to have fallen beneath it. As to the originality of old English poems of this kind, we meet, in some of them, with heroes whose Saxon names might lead us to suppose them indigenous fictions, which had not come into the language through a French medium. Several old Saxon ballads are alluded to, as extant long after the Conquest, by the Anglo-Norman historians, who drew from them many facts and inferences; and there is no saying how many of these ballads might be recast into a romantic shape by the composers for the native minstrelsy. But, on the other hand, the Anglo-Normans appear to have been more inquisitive into Saxon legends than the Saxons themselves; and their Muse was by no means so illiberal as to object to a hero because he was not of their own generation. In point of fact, whatever may be alleged about the minstrels of the North Country, it is difficult, if it be possible, to find an English romance which contains no internal allusion to a French prototype. Ritson very grudgingly allows that three old stories may be called original English romances,

until a Norman original shall be found for them ;* while Mr. Tyrwhitt conceives that we have not one English romance, anterior to Chaucer, which is not borrowed from a French one.

*Those are, 'The Squire of Low Degree,' 'Sir Tryamour,' and 'Sir Eglamour. Respecting two of those, Mr. Ellis shows that Ritson might have spared himself the trouble of making any concession, as the antiquity of The Squire of Low Degree' [Ritson, vol. iii. p. 145] remains to be proved, it being mentioned by no writer before the sixteenth century, and not being known to be extant in any ancient MS. Sir Eglamour' contains allusions to its Norman pedigree.

The difficulty of finding an original South British romance of this period, unborrowed from a French original, seems to remain undisputed: but Mr. Walter Scott, in his edition of Sir Tristrem,' has presented the public with an ancient Scottish romance, which, according to Mr. Scott's theory, would demonstrate the English language to have been cultivated earlier in Scotland than in England. I have elsewhere (post, Scottish Poetry) expressed myself in terms of more unqualified assent to the supposition of Thomas of Erceldoune having been an original romancer, than I should

[a" The strange appropriation of the Auchinleck poem as a Scottish production, when no single trace of the Scottish dialect is to be found throughout the whole romance which may not with equal truth be claimed as current in the north of England, while every marked peculiarity of the former is entirely wanting, can hardly require serious investigation. From this opinion the ingenious editor himself must long ago have been reclaimed. The singular doctrines relative to the rise and progress of the English language in North and South Britain may also be dismissed, as not immediately relevant. But when it is seriously affirmed that the English language was once spoken with greater purity in the Lowlands of Scotland than in this country, we Sothrons' receive the communication with the same smile of incredulity that we bestow upon the poetic dogma of the honest Frieslander :

:

Buwter, breat, en greene tzies,
Is guth Inglisch en guth Fries.
Butter, bread, and green cheese,
Is good English and good Friese."

-Price, Warton's Hist., vol. i. p. 196., ed. 1824.

"As to the Essayist's assertion (Mr. Price's) that the language of 'Sir Tristrem' has in it nothing distinctively Scottish-this is a point on which the reader will, perhaps, consider the authority of Sir Walter Scott as sufficient to countervail that of the most accom lished English antiquary." -Lockhart, Advt. to 'Sir Tristrem,' 1833.

No one has yet satisfactorily accounted for the Elizabethan-like Inglis of Barbour and Blind Harry, or the Saxon Layamon-like Inglis of Gawain Douglas. Did Barbour, who wrote in 1375, write in advance of his age, and Douglas, who began and ended hisÆneid' in 1513-14, behind his age? Or did each represent the spoken language of the times they wrote in? Scott's view of the priority in cultivation of Inglis in Scotland over England is sanctioned by Ellis in the Introduction (p. 127) to his 'Metrical Romances.']

In the reign of Edward II., Adam Davie, who was marshal of Stratford-le-Bow, near London, wrote 'Visions' in verse, which

be inclined to use upon mature consideration. Robert de Brunne certainly alludes to Sir Tristrem,' as "the most famous of all gests" in his time. He mentions Erceldoune, its author, and another poet of the name of Kendale. Of Kendale, whether he was Scotch or English, nothing seems to be known with certainty. With respect to Thomas of Erceldoune, or Thomas the Rhymer, the Auchinleck MS. published by my illustrious friend professes to be the work not of Erceldoune himself, but of some minstrel or reciter who had heard the story from Thomas. Its language is confessed to be that of the fourteenth century, and the MS. is not pretended to be less than eighty years older than the supposed date of Thomas of Erceldoune's romance. Accordingly, whatever Thomas the Rhymer's production might be, this Auchinleck MS. is not a transcript of it, but the transcript of the composition of some one who heard the story from Thomas of Erceldoune. It is a specimen of Scottish poetry not in the thirteenth but the fourteenth century. How much of the matter or manner of Thomas the Rhymer was retained by his deputy reciter of the story, eighty years after the assumed date of Thomas's work, is a subject of mere conjecture.

Still, however, the fame of Erceldoune and Tristrem remain attested by Robert de Brunne; and Mr. Scott's doctrine is, that Thomas the Rhymer, having picked up the chief materials of his romantic history of 'Sir Tristrem' from British traditions surviving on the border, was not a translator from the French, but an original anthority to the continental romancers. It is nevertheless acknowledged that the story of Sir Tristrem' had been told in French, and was familiar to the romancers of that language, long before Thomas the Rhymer could have set about picking up British traditions on the border, and in all probability before he was born. The possibility, therefore, of his having heard the story in Norman minstrelsy, is put beyond the reach of denial. On the other hand, Mr. Scott argues that the Scottish bard must have been an authority to the continental romancers, from two circumstances. In the first place, there are two metrical fragments of French romance preserved in the library of Mr. Douce, which, according to Mr. Scott, tell the story of Sir Tristrem' in a manner corresponding with the same tale as it is told by Thomas of Erceldoune, and in which a reference is made to the authority of a Thomas. But the whole force of this argument evidently depends on the supposition of Mr. Douce's fragments being the work of one and the same author-whereas they are not, to all appearance,

a [Over gestes it has the steem

Over all that is or was,

If men it sayd as made Thomas.]

b[Sir Tristrem,' like almost all our romances, had a foreign origin-its language alone is ours. Three copies-in French, in Anglo-Norman, and in Greek-composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and edited by Francisque Michel, appeared in two vols. 8vo. at London in 1835. But Scott never stood out for Thomas's invention. "The tale," he says, "lays claim to a much higher antiquity." (P. 27, ed. 1833.) To a British antiquity, however. See also Scott's Essay on Romance,' in Misc. Prose Works (vol. vi. p. 201), where he contends that it was derived from Welsh traditions, though told by a Saxon poet.]