reason for the pseudonym. That Irving never expected to have his work taken as literally true, and that he was himself amazed at its success, is apparent from the "Author's Apology" which he printed forty years after the History first appeared. Though it would be illuminating to reproduce the whole of that apology here, space permits of only the concluding words:

"I please myself," says Irving, "with the persuasion that I have struck the right chord; that my dealings with the good old Dutch times, and the customs and usages derived from them, are in harmony with the feelings and humors of my townsmen; that I have opened a vein of pleasant associations and quaint characteristics peculiar to my native place, and which its inhabitants will not willingly suffer to pass away; and that, though other histories of New York may appear of higher claims to learned acceptation, and may take their dignified and appropriate rank in the family library Knickerbocker's history will still be received with good-humored indulgence, and be thumbed and chuckled over by the family fireside."

If the name of Knickerbocker, a hundred and more years after he appeared as an American author, is still familiar to countless folk who do not know that he was a fictitious personage, the same may be said of Blind Harry, equally fictitious,

who, over four hundred years after his appearance as a Scottish author, continues a name to conjure with. Thousands repeat enlivening features of his account of the national hero without realizing their essential untruth. For the most part, however, they are not acquainted with the whole story and do not realize that as a whole (to quote Mr. Neilson) "it requires an almost deranged patriotism to accept as worthy of the noble memory of Sir William Wallace so vitiated a tribute." Happily the time is past when a publisher of the poem could suggest that the concluding words of the Scotichronicon might be "in some respect, peculiarly applicable to Henry's Book."

Non Scotus est, Christe, cui non liber placet iste.
He is not a Scotsman whom this Book does not please.

"I believe," said Isocrates, " that the poetry of Homer won greater glory because he nobly praised those who warred against the barbarians, and that this was the reason why our ancestors conceived the desire to make his art honored both in the contests of the Muses and in the training of young men." The Wallace is not a great epic. It does not deal with a very remote hero. It bears on its face the stamp of individual invention. But it was an astonishingly successful incentive to patriotism, and this because the author so skilfully gathered

up floating traditions and welded them together to foment war against an alien enemy. We shall never be able to judge how great was the effect of his putting his narrative into the mouth of a mysterious blind bard. It subtly gave the poem an almost supernatural authority, and evoked a background of Homeric suggestion that lingers still.

IT

CHAPTER XI

BLIND HARRY AND BLIND HOMER

Neither am I ignorant how fickle and inconstant a thing fiction is, as being subject to be drawn and wrested any way, and how great the commodity of wit and discourse is, that is able to apply things well, yet so as never meant by its first authors.

BACON

T has always been the custom of critics to name one poet after some other among predecessors in his art, who, by a process of transmigration of souls, as it were, might be fancied to live again in a modern descendant.* Major who, it will be remembered, referred to King James as "a second Orpheus," hinted at the likeness, obvious by misapprehension, between Blind Harry and Blind Homer. That he did not go the full length of his thought and openly call Blind Harry "a second Homer" was probably due simply to the disrespect he felt for vernacular verse, except such as was written elegantly by illustrious personages, and to his inherited, overpowering reverence for the great bard of antiquity. "Quis in scriptis Homero

major"? asked Walter Map. "Quegli è Omero poeta sovrano," wrote Dante. There was unanimity of opinion in the Middle Ages as to Homer's greatness, even among those who had not read him,* and no one then doubted that the real author of the glorious epics that went under his name was really blind. The first edition of a Greek Homer was published at Florence, by Demetrius Chalcondylas, in 1488, almost synchronously with the appearance of Blind Harry's Wallace, and it is no wonder that the two poets were connected. Dunbar, in his Goldyn Targe, a poem spiced as thick with classical references as a ham with cloves, refers to Homer and his "ornate style so perfect," along with Tully, whose "lips sweet of rhetoric" he wished were his. The Wallace-poet likewise admired the aureate tongues the old poets were figured to possess, and, as we have seen, adorned his tale with as rich robes of rhetoric as it would bear. When Macpherson came to write of Ossian, he made that blind ancient echo phrases of Homer. Possibly, knowledge of the eyeless bard of the Greeks may have encouraged the author of the Wallace in the use of his pseudonym.

Though Major apparently balked at frankly reincarnating Homer in "Henricus caecus (he perhaps suspected he should have been laughed at by his Parisian colleagues if he had done so), he