THOMAS THE RHYMER. 



35 



with superstitious discrimination. It grew near the western extremity of 

 the village, in the enjoyment of a gi-een old age, till, at length, a storm threw 

 it prostrate, and broke the spell by which, for centm-ies, it had remained firmly 

 rooted to the soil, and interwoven with the superstitions of the village. Its 

 station is now occupied by a handsome edifice, lately erected by a gentleman 

 of the legal profession, which has added a feature of no small ornament to the 

 place, and HteraUy aboHshed superstition by law. 



As the birth-place and abode of the Weird Thomas, to whom a great portion 

 of Ercildoune had come by inheritance, the village has enjoyed a celebrity 

 unrivalled in the south of Scotland — a celebrity to which the rich and fertile 

 imagination of Scott has given enduring interest. The extraordinary attributes 

 with which posterity has invested this mysterious personage, represent him 

 as half minstrel, half magician — one to be loved for his songs, and feared for 

 his sorceries; and whose eye, penetrating the dark veil of futurity, reacl the 

 destiny of kingdoms, and saw those momentous epochs in the fate of his 

 country, his friends, and fanuly, which are now the subject of history. So 

 far in advance of his contemporaries on the path of literary refinement, and 

 in an age when poetry was viewed as an art of incantation, it is by no means 

 siurprising that he should have been so gratuitously invested with the art of 

 magic. ■ He appears to have lived during the greater part of the thirteenth cen- 

 tury. In 1232, when his romance of Sir Tristrem seems to have been well known, 

 and was quoted by Gottfried of Strasburg, he is supposed to have been about 

 thirty years of age, and was still living on the death of Alexander, in 1286. 

 The date of the londermentioned charter, however, is 1289; so that he must 

 have died previously to that period, and hence the part which he is made to 

 act in the adventures of Wallace, in 1296, by Henry the Minstrel, seems 

 apocryphal. 



While the kings and nobles of England were entertained by stories of 

 chivalry in the French language — by the lais of Marie, the romances of Chretien 

 de Foyes, or the fahleaux of the trouveurs ; the legends chaunted in Scotland — 

 which could happily boast of having till then maintained a sway unsuUied by 

 foreign conquest — were composed in that Anglo-Saxo-Pictish measure, known 

 by the name of Inglis, or EngHsh. Although French was no doubt famiUarly 

 understood at the Scotch Court, it seems never to have been spoken by the 

 king or his nobles, while the Inglis continued the standard language among 

 all classes of the people. The EngUsh did not begin to translate the French 

 poems of their conquerors till 1300, nor to compose original romances in their 

 native language, tiU the reign of Henry III. — nearly a century after. But 



