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day, making merry with some friends in the tower of Erceldoune, a person came and told them that a hart and hind, from the neighbouring forest, were slowly parading the street of the village. Thomas at once left the house and followed the animals back to the forest, whence he was never seen to return. It was also believed that, after he dreed his weird (fulfilled his destiny), he would again revisit the earth.

In none of the prophecies attributed to him is it assumed that he is himself the narrator, and from the manner of busteous his introduction, as "the beirne on the bent" (the huge man on the wild), it might be supposed that his appearance was supernatural, and long after his disappearance as a natural There are at inhabitant of the earth. least three MSS. of about the 15th century giving an account of his abstraction by the Queen of Fairyland; but their language being somewhat obscure, the more modern ballad (Part I.), given in the Minstrelsy of the Border, is more suitable as a popular account of it. Part II., which follows, is a ballad of his principal prophecies.

THOMAS THE RHYMER.

PART FIRST.

True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank;
A ferlie he spied wi' his ee;
And there he saw a ladye bright,

Come riding down by the Eildon tree.

Her shirt was o' the grass-green silk,
Her mantle o' the velvet fyne;
At ilka tett of her horse's mane,
Hung fifty siller bells and nine.

True Thomas, he pull'd aff his cap, And louted low down to his knee, "All hail, thou mighty queen of heaven! For thy peer on earth I never did see.""O no, O no, Thomas," she said; "That name does not belang to me; I am but the queen of fair Elfland, That am hither come to visit thee.

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Harp and carp, Thomas," she said;
Harp and carp along wi' me;
And if ye dare to kiss my lips,
Sure of your bodie I will be."

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Betide me weal, betide me woe,

That weird shall never daunton me." Syne he has kissed her rosy lips,

All underneath the Eildon tree.

"Now, ye maun go wi' me," she said; "True Thomas, ye maun go wi' me; And ye maun serve me seven years,

Thro' weal or woe as may chance to be." She mounted on her milk-white steed;

She's ta'en true Thomas up behind; And aye, whene'er her bridle rung, The steed flew swifter than the wind. O they rade on, and farther on;

The steed gaed swifter than the wind; Until they reach'd a desert wide,

And living land was left behind.

"Light down, light down, now, true Thomas,

And lean your head upon my knee; Abide and rest a little space,

And I will shew you ferlies three.

"O see ye not yon narrow road,·
So thick beset with thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Though after it but few enquires.

That weird, &c. -That destiny shall never frighten me.

"And see ye not that braid braid road, That lies across that lily leven? That is the path of wickedness,

Though some call it the road to heaven.

"And see not ye that bonny road,

That winds about the fernie brae? That is the road to fair Elfland,

Where thou and I this night maun gae.

"But, Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue, Whatever ye may hear or see;

For, if you speak a word in Elflyn land, Ye'll ne'er get back to your ain countrie."

O they rade on, and farther on,

And they waded through rivers aboon the knee,

And they saw neither sun nor moon,

But they heard the roaring of the sea.

It was mirk mirk night, and there was nae stern light,

And they waded through red blude to the knee;

For a' the blude that's shed on earth
Rins through the springs o' that countrie.

Syne they came to a garden green,

And she pu'd an apple frae a tree1"Take this for thy wages, true Thomas; It will give thee the tongue that can never lie."

"My tongue is mine ain," true Thomas said;

"A gudely gift ye wad gie to me! I neither dought to buy nor sell, At fair or tryst where I may be.

I The traditional commentary upon this ballad informs us, that the apple was the produce of the fatal Tree of Knowledge, and that the garden was the terrestrial paradise. The repugnance of Thomas to be debarred the use of falsehood, when he might find it convenient, has a comic effect.

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interest in our early romances, which has led to their reinvestigation and study with greater critical exactness and thoroughness than had previously been applied to them. To do more than briefly indicate the chief points of the controversy to which the authorship and the nationality of Sir Tristrem has given rise, would here be out of place.

English monk, a native of Malton, in Yorkshire, who translated into English rhyme the French Chronicle of England, by Peter de Langtoft, a canon of Bridlington, while resident in the Priory of Brunne, and hence called Robert de Brunne, there was nothing to connect Thomas of Erceldoune with the authorship of Sir Tristrem before the discovery of the Auchinleck MS. De Brunne began his Chronicle in 1303, about seven years after the death of Thomas, and may therefore be considered a contemporary, and, from the ecclesiastical intimacy between the

south of Scotland, may be supposed to be well acquainted with Scottish affairs. His reference is as follows :—

This now famous romance was discovered in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, by Ritson, the well-known antiquarian, and forms part of a vellum manuscript volume presented to the Library in 1744 by a judge of the Court of Session, Alexander Boswell of Auch-churches of the north of England and the inleck, father of James Boswell, Johnson's biographer, and thence called the Auchinleck MS. It contains upwards of forty poems, and fragments of poems, an account of which is given by Scott as an appendix to the introduction to Sir Tristrem. The volume has been much mutilated from the cutting out of the illuminated initials; and the concluding stanzas of Sir Tristrem are lost, but have been supplied, in the published copy, by Scott, after a French romance of the same name, with which it corresponds.

The subject, it is admitted, was a favourite one with the romance writers, and appears to have occupied the pens of the early poets of France, Germany, Denmark, and Iceland, before the time of Thomas; and in 1821 a German professor, in a work on the literature of the Middle Ages, has produced a Greek poem on the Knights of the Round Table, of which Sir Tristrem is a conspicuous member. But for the unsupported evidence of Robert Mannyng, an

"I see in song, in sedgeyng tale
Of Erceldoun and of Kendale,
Non tham says as thai tham wroght,
And in ther sayng it semes noght.
That may thou here in Sir Tristrem ;
Ouer gestes it hes the 'steem,
Ouer all that is or was,

If men it sayd as made Thomas;
Bot I here it no man so say,
That of som copple som is away.
So thare fayre saying here beforne
Is thare trauayle nere forlorne.
Thai sayd it for pride and noblye,
That non were suylk as thei,
And alle that thai wild ouerwhere,
All that ilk wille now forfare.
Thai sayd in so quainte Inglis
That manyone wate not what it is."

There is considerable obscurity about some parts of this, and, consequently, some diversity of opinion as to its exact meaning; but it may be taken as establishing the fact, that the author was acquainted with a romance of Sir Tristrem that was held in higher esteem

than any other known to him; that its author's name was Thomas; and that the minstrels, the reciters of it, were in the habit of repeating it imperfectly, and with omissions, on account of its quaint English. That he heard no man say it as Thomas made it, implies that he must have seen it as made, in writing, or have heard Thomas himself recite it by no means an impossibility, as he became a monk in 1288, eight years before the death of Thomas.

But the principal difficulty lies in the manner in which the names, Erceldoune and Kendale, are coupled. Warton, in referring to the matter, remarks, that they are written as if they were names of romances, and adds, "that of the latter he finds no traces in our ancient literature." The former, he supposes, may refer to Thomas of Erceldoune, or Ashelington, who wrote prophecies like Merlin, and refers to the MS. romance in the library of Lincoln Cathedral, entitled Thomas of Erceldown, the introduction of which is as follows:

'Lystnys, lordyngs, bothe grete and small,
And takis gude tente what I will say:
I sall yow telle als trewe a tale,

Als euer was herde by nyghte or daye.
And the maste meruelle fforowttyn naye,
That euer was herde byfore or syen,
And therefore pristly I yow praye,
That ye will of youre talkyng blyn.

It es an harde thynge for to saye,

Of doghety dedis that hase been done; Of felle feghtyngs and battels sere;

And of batells that done sall bee;

In what place, and how and whare ;
And wha shall have the heghere gree;

And whethir partye sall hafe the werre.
Wha sall take the flyghte and flee;
And wha sall dye and byleue there;
But Ihesu Christ, that dyed on tre,
Saue Inglysche men whare so they fare."

Ritson also failed to find any trace of Kendale; but Sir Frederick Madden, who ranges himself on the side of those who consider the claims of Thomas of Erceldoune to Sir Tristrem as apocryphal, says, in his notes to Sir Gawayne, &c., Bannatyne Club, 1839, that a passage in the unedited portion of De Brunne shows Kendale's Christian name was also Thomas, and that he wrote a tale about Flayn, the brother of the giant Skardyng, the lord of Scarborough Castle; "a piece of information," he adds, "which I believe to be new to all writers on the subject." It would have been more satisfactory had he given the passage; but since he has withheld it, we may conclude that it does not help his side of the controversy. Instead of stating his belief that Sir Tristrem is not the work of a native of Scotland, it would have been more ingenuous to have given the grounds on which he came to this conclusion. Besides, his great authority is here much weakened by the way in which, in his notes and glossary, he exhibits his animus against Dr Jamieson. Mr Price, the editor of Warton's History of Eng

And how that knyghtis hasse wonne thair lish Poetry, has shown that Scott was

schone.

But Thesu Christ, that sittis in trone,
Safe Inglysche bothe ferre and nere;
And I sall telle yow tyte and sone,

Of batells done sythen many a yere ;

in error in claiming, unwittingly, for his Thomas a fame on the continent which belongs to Thomas of Brittany; but that does not affect the authorship of the

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