BLIND HARRY. 25 



laird's hall and by the farmer's ingle, and that he pro- 

 fessed to base his narrative on a history of Wallace, writ- 

 ten in Latin by his chaplain, named Blair. The poem is 

 Homerically crowded with incident, and its hero-worship 

 of Wallace is as fervent as Homer's of Odysseus. 

 There is no trace of that sentimental delicacy which 

 glows in the chivalrous romances of the nineteenth 

 century ; no cosmopolitan sympathy ; not the faint- 

 est surmise that anything can be said on the other 

 side of the question. National bards are ruthless par- 

 tisans from 'the Ionian father of the rest', downwards. 

 Homer does not apologize for Ulysses when he lays waste 

 the town of the harmless Cyconians, and distributes their 

 goods, wives, and children among his followers. Homer 

 has not one tear of pity for the tortured Melanthius, 

 tortured for no fault but his courage ; or for the female 

 slaves, cruelly murdered for not having been incon- 

 ceivably faithful to their master and mistress ; and it 

 never occurs to him as possible that any one can think 

 the slaughter of the suitors themselves, for the sole fault 

 of continuing to pay their addresses to a woman who 

 would not frankly say No, and whose husband, they 

 reasonably trusted, was at the bottom of the sea, rather 

 startling in its sternness. Compare the return of Odys- 

 seus with the return of Enoch Arden, who, by Homeric 

 law, ought to have cut down his Annie with one blow, 

 and her Philip Ray with another, and you will perceive 

 the difference, in what may be called emotional atmo- 

 sphere, between the time of Tennyson and those periods 

 of national life in which poems like Homer's Odyssey 

 and Blind Harry's Wallace come into existence. In gen- 

 eral poetical capacity the Scottish minstrel is incom- 

 parably inferior to Homer ; but it was owing doubtless to 

 the entireness and intensity of his patriotic devotion to 



