That on Freedom is familiar.[263]
But its highest merit is the natural and unstrained tone of manly courage
in it, the easy and familiar way in which Barbour always takes chivalrous
conduct as a matter of course, as if heroism were the least you could ask
of any man. I modernize a few verses to show what I mean. When the King
of England turns to fly from the battle of Bannockburn (and Barbour with
his usual generosity tells us he has heard that Sir Aymer de Valence led
him away by the bridle-rein against his will), Sir Giles d'Argente
"Saw the king thus and his menie
Shape them to flee so speedily,
He came right to the king in hy [hastily]
And said, 'Sir, since that is so
That ye thus gate your gate will go,
Have ye good-day, for back will I:
Yet never fled I certainly,
And I choose here to bide and die
Than to live shamefully and fly.'"
The "Brus" is in many ways the best rhymed chronicle ever written. It is
national in a high and generous way, but I confess I have little faith in
that quality in literature which is commonly called nationality,--a kind
of praise seldom given where there is anything better to be said.
Literature that loses its meaning, or the best part of it, when it gets
beyond sight of the parish steeple, is not what I understand by
literature.
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