The romance ascribed to Thomas of Erceldoune is deservedly regarded as a precious relique of early British poetry; it is highly curious as a specimen of language, and not less curious as a specimen. of composition. The verses are short, and the stanzas somewhat artificial in their structure; and amid the quaint simplicity of the author's style, we often distinguish a forcible brevity of expression. But his narrative, which has a certain air of originality, is sometimes so abrupt as to seem obscure, and even enigmatical.—IRVING, DAVID, 1861, History of Scottish Poetry, ed. Carlyle, p. 60.

He had the fame not only of an epic poet or bard, but of a prophet, occupying in his own country somewhat of the position held by Merlin in England, and afterwards by Nostradamus in France.BURTON, JOHN HILL, 1867, The History of Scotland, vol. IV, p. 119.

We can see in him, as he lived, an obvious awakening to the powers of outward nature, the feeling of the spring-tide and the rejoicing birds, the love of lonely lingering among the hills, the sense of the unspeakable silence and solitude of the benty moorland, and the poetic yearning for some form of a mysterious life with which he might commune on the wild. Thomas of Erceldoune was the man of the time who felt these influences, and doubtless expressed them, more powerfully than any other. The mythical story of his intercourse and selection by the Queen of Faerie was the imaginative embodiment in a free, wild, and graceful form of the Rhymour as he appeared to the people around him the theory of his somewhat mysterious life.-VEITCH, JOHN, 1878, The History and Poetry of the Scottish Border, p. 236.

Whether the earlier figure of Thomas of Erceldoune is more than phantom may still be doubted, and there is no satisfactory evidence for believing him to be the author of the "Romance of Sir Tristrem" which Scott published in 1804. We are not even certain that this romance has any claim to be regarded as a product of Scottish literature; it exists only in a transcript executed in England, and it has no Scottish peculiarities.-Ross, JOHN MERRY, 1884, Scottish History and Literature, ed. Brown, p. 107.

The arguments which assail the trustworthiness of these documents are suggested by somewhat hypercritical doubts, and the theories designed to supplant them are based upon conjectures wholly unsupported by evidence. M'NEILL, G. P., 1886, ed. Sir Tristrem (Scottish Text Society).

The poem is written in an involved stanza in striking contrast to the simple style of the narrative and the obvious eagerness of the narrator to press on with his tale. The design of the composition, as in most old romances, is of the character best adapted for recitation-a series of adventures, each complete in itself, strung upon the lives of the lovers. At the same time there is a certain arrangement, a proportion and balance of parts around the central idea, which give to the story an artistic unity. The situations frequently possess strong dramatic point, as when Tristrem, having drunk the love-potion with Isonde, has to fulfil his mission and hand her over in marriage to the king. Most notable of all, the characters of the tale from first to last are firmly and even subtly drawn. Limned from the outside by their action and words, they stand distinct as if reproduced from life or from the most intimate tradition. EYRE-TODD, GEORGE, 1891, Early Scottish Poetry, p. 17.

"Thomas the Rhymer"

is

a brilliant example of a ballad in which the art of minstrelsy is employed to preserve, in a glorified form, the memory of a real man in whom the popular imagination is interested. From the beginning of the fourteenth century the fame of Thomas of Erceldoune, or Thomas Rymour, or True Thomas, for prophecy, was celebrated through Scotland; and the predictions attributed to him had so much consistency, that in 1603 they were collected into a volume with the Prophecies of Merlin. Thomas Rymour of Erceldoune is known to have been a real person, who is reported to have been alive in the closing years of the thirteenth century. Not original enough to invent a story for himself, the minstrel who took Thomas as his hero sought his materials in existing romances, and by the middle of the fifteenth century a poem, which forms the groundwork of the ballads on the subject, was committed to writing. In its most

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the same time, the most sternly orthodox of Theologians. On the eternity of matter he transcends his master: he accepts the hardy saying of Avicembron, of the universality of matter. He carries matter not only higher than the intermediate world of Devils and Angels, but up into the very Sanctuary, into the Godhead itself. God is still with him the high, remote Monad, above all things, though throughout all things. In him, and not without him, according to what is asserted to be Platonic doctrine, are the forms and ideas of things. With equal zeal, and with equal ingenuity with the Thomists, he attempts to maintain the free will of God, whom he seems to have bound in the chain of inexorable necessity. He saves it by a distinction. which even his subtlety can hardly define. Yet, behind and without this nebulous circle, Duns Scotus, as a metaphysical and an ethical writer, is remarkable for his bold speculative views on the nature of our intelligence, on its communication with the outward world, by the senses, by its own innate powers, as well as by the influence of the superior Intelligence. He thinks with perfect freedom; and if he spins his spiderwebs, it is impossible not to be struck at once by their strength and coherence. Translate him, as some have attempted to translate him, into intelligible language, he is always suggestive, sometimes conclusive.-MILMAN, HENRY HART, 1855, History of Latin Christianity, vol. VI, bk. xiv, ch. iii, pp. 467, 468.

Between his Scholasticism and the Romanic Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, there is, indeed, this distinction: that in the former, clearer traces are discernable of the ethical tendency which characterizes the Germanic mind. Scotus presents to us the picture of a vigorous wrestling mind, in which a new principle travails unto birth, still struggling with the chains imposed upon it by the antagonistic principle which had held sway. Whereas, previously, the theoretical and physical, necessity and nature (essence), had held almost undisputed sway, he now puts. forth the claims of free will, though his mode of doing so is marked by abruptness and exclusiveness.-DORNER, J. A., 1861, History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, tr. Simon, vol. 1, div. ii, p. 346.

As an opponent of Thomism he founded the philosophical and theological school names after him. His strength lay rather in acute, negative criticism of the teachings of others, than in the positive elaboration of his own. Strict faith in reference to the theological teachings of the Church and the philosophical doctrines corresponding with their spirit, and farreaching skepticism with reference to the arguments by which they are sustained, are the general characteristics of the Scotist doctrine. After having destroyed by his criticism their rational grounds, there remains to Scotus as the objective cause of the verities of faith only the unconditional will of God, and as the subjective ground of faith only the voluntary submission of the believer to the authority of the Church. Theology is for him a knowledge of an essentially practical character. UEBERWEG, FREDERICH, 1862-71, A History of Philosophy, tr, Morris, vol. 1, p. 452.

If the disputed question, as to whether Duns Scotus was an Englishman, a Scotchman, or an Irishman were to be decided by asking which land was the most devoted to the extension of his fame, he belongs unquestionably to Ireland.-ERDMANN, JOHANN EDUARD, 1865-76, A History of Philosophy, ed. Hough, vol. I, p. 485.

He was rightly named by the crowds that flocked round him in Paris and Cologne the Subtle Doctor; he made distinctions and definitions until he seemed to bewilder himself, but his erudition, his patience, his industry, and his dialectic skill, have not had a compeer altogether in European literature. The services he rendered to the cause of psychology and theology have never been fairly acknowledged; by giving extreme and undue prominence to one principle, which had been almost entirely overlooked by his predecessors, he banished others equally as important into the shade, and thus vitiated his whole system as a system, but he undoubtedly drew attention to some points which have never since lost their hold in philosophy or dogma, and which have tended to give increased richness and fulness to each of them. Had his genius been less critical and more philosophic, less merely microscopic and more comprehensive, he might have

The style of de Brunne is superior to that of Robert of Gloucester in ease, though we can hardly say, grace of expression. His literary merits are slender. -MARSH, GEORGE P., 1862, The Origin and History of the English Language, etc., p. 235.

Robert was a pious ecclesiastic, yet any propensity to asceticism was far from him. He was ever ready to grant an innocent amusement to others as well as to himself, and especially to the poor. His was an unassuming, genial spirit, with a light touch of humour; he was a friend of music and good stories. He did not ascend to the higher regions of thought, and mystical contemplation was quite foreign to him; but his eye scanned the world around him with all the greater interest; and his view, if not particularly sharp, was very clear. Robert was curious and even inquisitive; but his curiosity had the background of a warm sympathy for the lot of his fellow-men. Like his namesake of Gloucester, he was the friend and advocate of the poor. High position and birth did not blind him to the faults and vices behind their glitter.-TEN BRINK, BERNHARD, 1877-83, History of English Literature (To Wiclif), tr. Kennedy, p. 298.

It was in 1303 that Robert of Brunne (known also as Robert Manning) began to compile the "Handlyng Synne," the work which, more clearly than any former one, foreshadowed the road that English literature was to tread from that time forward. There are so many foreign words, that we should set the writer fifty years later than his true date had he not himself written it down. In this book we catch our first glimpse of many a word and idiom that were afterwards to live for ever in the English Bible and Prayerbook, works still in the womb of Time.

that was to be the common rule in our land after his time. He has six French words out of fifty; a little later Mandeville and Chaucer were to have eight French words of fifty; this is the proportion in Shakespere's comic parts; and it is also the proportion in the every-day talk of our own time, as may be seen in the dialogues of Miss Yonge's and Mr. Trollope's works. OLIPHANT, T. L. KINGTON, 1878, The Old and Middle English, pp. 447, 448, 588.

Manning is remarkable as being the first to use the modern English order of words.-EMERY, FRED PARKER, 1891, Notes on English Literature, p. 9.

Robert was doubtless one of the most important links in the chain immediately preceding Chaucer, but he cannot be called the "patriarch" of modern literary English with any more justice than Wycliffe, or the authors of "Havelok" and "King Horn," or the poets of the "Cædmon School."--HEATH, H. FRANK, 1894, Social England, vol. II, p. 541.

In the "Handlyng Synne" the reader may still breathe the same atmosphere that inspired the "Dialogues" of Gregory the Great; but he will also detect the presence of an element that prepares him for the transition to the style of Gower's "Confessio Amantis;" from which point. he may travel by easy stages to the plots of the Elizabethan dramatists.-COURTHOPE, W. J., 1895, A History of English Poetry, vol. 1, p. 142.

This is not, as might be supposed, a dry book. Mannyng dearly loved a tale, and the more bizarre it was, the better. He distributes his censures broadcast, but the worst offenders, from his point of view, are the women, who, he pleasantly observes, do no wrong except all day.SNELL, F. J., 1899, The Fourteenth Century, Periods of European Literature, p.