In what other mediaeval romance can these lines be equalled? What wearies us in Barbour is the common defect of mediaeval poets, the occasional display of learning, references to what Cato did, or Hannibal, or Scipio, and the like, but Barbour is not tedious when, after giving a minute portrait of the good Lord James of Douglas, he compares him to Hector, though, for valour,
To Hector dare I none compare
Of all that ever in world were.
The story never drags, adventure follows adventure, and there is none of the weary exaggeration of romance. Bruce does not slay his thousands, like Arthur. When he, a mounted man in armour, Ms the better of three plaided clansmen, MacNaughton, who is of the hostile party, cries
Surely, in all my time,
I never heard, in song or rhyme,
Tell of a man that so smartly
Displayed such great chivalry.
But Bruce is soon obliged to give his horse to one of the ladies, and go on foot, like Prince Charles, living on such venison as his arrows may procure. Barbour has to invent no fanciful dangers; he knows the racing tides and dangerous shoals of Argyll—
The waves wide that breaking were,
Weltered as hills, here and there.
Unlike Chaucer, Barbour has a scorn of astrology: no man ever (he says) made three correct prophecies, by knowledge of the stars! He is far from scrupulous, and does not blame Douglas when, like Achilles, he slays prisoners of war: apparently because he could not take them with him in his retreat, and secure their ransoms. Barbour has not, of course, the genius of Chaucer; but he has a touch of the genius of Scott, he has spirit, and a true sense of loyalty, chivalry, and patriotism; these, with his subject, place him beside Chaucer in so far as that he may still be read with unaffected enjoyment.
Wyntoun.
Between Barbour and the first true Scottish disciple of Chaucer, James I, comes the author of a Chronicle in rhyming octosyllabic couplets "The Orygynale Cronykil". This is Andrew Wyntoun, who was a canon of St. Andrews Cathedral, and prior of St. Serfs on a little island in Loch Leven, the loch of Queen Mary's captivity. Wyntoun appears to have been an old man when, in 1413, the first Scottish university was founded at St. Andrews, by a bull of the Anti-Pope, Pedro de la Luna. The place must, with its Augustinian canons, have been a seat of learning before 1413, but the new university was very poor, and a thing of small beginnings.