A Scottish minstrel, blind from his birth, who lived by telling tales, and in 1490–92 was at the court of James IV., receiving occasional small gratuities. His poem on Wallace exists in a MS. of 1488, copied by John Ramsay. This MS. does not ascribe the work to Blind Harry, nor is his name given to it in the earlier printed editions. The poem, which contains 11,861 lines, is written in rhyming couplets. The language is frequently obscure, but the work is written with vigour, and kindles sometimes into poetry. The author seems to have been familiar with the metrical romances, and represents himself as indebted to the Latin Life of Wallace by Master John Blair, Wallace’s chaplain, and to another by Sir Thomas Gray, parson of Liberton. The poem was at one time regarded as a work of fiction, but authentic documents have shown that, in spite of many mistakes or misrepresentations, it is on the whole a valuable narrative. It is believed to have been printed in Edinburgh in 1520, but no perfect copy is known of any earlier edition than that of 1570. “The Actis and Deidis of the Maist Bluster and Vailyeand Campioun Schir William Wallace, Knicht of Ellerslie.” Good editions are by Jamieson (1820) and by Moir for the Scottish Text Society (1885–89). The work was for 200 years one of the most popular in Scotland, but as its language ceased to be understood, its place was supplied by a modernised version by Hamilton of Gilbertfield (1722).

  During my infancy, Henry, a man blind from his birth, composed a separate work on the exploits of Sir William Wallace; collecting such accounts as were then preserved by popular tradition, he exhibited them, in popular rhyme, which he had cultivated with success; but writings of this kind I only credit in part: the author was a person who, by the recitation of stories before men of the highest rank, earned his food and raiment, of which he was worthy.

  The story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins, which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.

  That a man born blind should excel in any science is sufficiently extraordinary, though by no means without example; but that he should become an excellent poet is almost miraculous; because the soul of poetry is description. Perhaps, therefore, it may be easily assumed, that Henry was not inferior in point of genius either to Barbour or Chaucer, nor indeed to any poet of any age or country; but it is our present business to estimate the merits of the work rather than the genius of the author. The similarity of the subject will naturally induce every reader to compare the life of Wallace with Barbour’s life of Bruce; and on such a comparison, it will probably be found that Henry excels his competitor in correctness of versification, and, perhaps, in perspicuity of language (for both of which he was indebted to the gradual improvements which had taken place during near a century); but that in every other particular he is greatly inferior to his predecessor.

  I must express a doubt whether, as a biography, it deserves the unmeasured neglect or contempt with which it has been treated. Of this neglect I plead guilty, amongst the rest of my brethren, for I have scrupulously avoided consulting him as an historical authority; but some late researches, and an attentive perusal of his poem, comparing it as I went along with contemporary documents, have placed the “Life of Wallace” in a different light. I am persuaded that it is the work of an ignorant man, who was yet in possession of valuable and authentic materials…. The work cannot be treated as an entire romance—still less is it to be regarded as a uniformly veracious chronicle: but it exhibits the anomalous and contradictory appearance of a poem full of much confusion, error, and absurdity, yet through which there occasionally runs a valuable vein of historic truth.

  In general poetical capacity the Scottish minstrel is incomparably inferior to Homer; but it was owing doubtless to the entireness and intensity of his patriotic devotion to Scotland and to Wallace, that his book was for centuries “the Bible of the Scottish people,” and that it profoundly affected the boyish imaginations of Robert Burns, of Walter Scott, and of Hugh Miller. The fiery patriotism of this book inspired those national songs of Burns, and those magical tones occurring at intervals in all his poems, which will thrill readers to their inmost hearts so long as love of country endures. Its effect on Hugh Miller was to make him a Scottish patriot to the finger-tips. Affection for his country was from that time a ruling passion in his breast, and his ideal of a great man was a great Scotchman…. He who, as a boy, is indifferent to his own country, will, as a man, be indifferent to all countries. Hugh Miller, we need not doubt, owed much of that home-bred vigor, that genial strength, racy picturesqueness and idiomatic pith, which characterize his writings, to the early influence of Blind Harry.

  One does not like to say severe things about a poor old wandering minstrel. Like many other bygones that were interesting to bygones, he and his heroic verse, once an acceptable arrival at many a lively feast and proud residence, would be considered a terrible visitation in modern society. Blind Harry has not the elements of perennial interest. Only strong patriotism could have composed, and only strong patriotism could have listened to, his strains. Till very recently, however, he was popular among the Scottish peasantry, circulating no longer in oral recitation, but in printed copies, often boardless and well-thumbed. Of late he has been superseded by Miss Porter’s “Scottish Chiefs.”

  It is difficult from our point of view to approach Blind Harry’s poem seriously; but it would certainly be a mistake to consider it a mere fabricated romance of a peasant minstrel. It is much more than that. It is the garner into which has been gathered all that harvest of popular legend about Wallace which had been ripening for nearly two centuries. We do not suppose that the author was at all scrupulous in his treatment of traditions, or that he shrank from contributing his quota to the general sum of patriotic fiction. Everywhere in the work there is evidence of more than poetical license; but we are convinced that in the main it recites and re-echoes the “Gests” that had enraptured and amazed successive generations of his countrymen.

  About the poetic merits of the poem opinions have widely differed, some critics placing it above Barbour’s “Bruce,” and others treating it as chiefly valuable for the ardent love of liberty it displays. If Blind Harry had not high poetical gifts he had a modest and simple style, and a natural eloquence more telling because never overstrained. Like Barbour, who in this he probably followed, his poem is an early example of rhymed heroic metre, and is singularly free from alliteration. The effect of its popularity can scarcely be over-estimated. Next to the deeds of their heroes the poems of Barbour and Blind Harry created Scottish nationality, and spread through all classes the spirit of independence.

  Where does our whole idea of Wallace in the first instance come from except from the pages of Blind Harry himself, or rather Hamilton’s version of him? But for this poem, Wallace would never have occupied a prominent place in the popular imagination, for the simple reason that so little would have appeared about him in history, to say nothing of the impossibility of writing such books as the “Scottish Chiefs” and other more or less inspiring works, whereby Wallace’s fame has been spread.

  The presence of indignation and the absence of information combine in him to make an exceedingly spirited romance, which was naturally and deservedly popular in Scotland from the very first, but which, of course, has the slightest—if the slightest—pretence to historical importance. The ghostly apparition of Fawdone, in the finest passage of all, is not more a thing of the imagination than the still more famous fishing story with which the poem opens, or the stock incident (very freshly and excellently told) of the visit of the Queen of England to Wallace, and her mediation with her no less cowardly than ferocious husband. But it was all perfectly right and proper, according to the laws of the class of composition to which Blind Harry’s work belongs; and it is a compensation for the extreme lateness and comparative scantiness of Scottish literature that it was thus able to produce the latest, and very far indeed from the worst, example of the national folk-epic which blends traditions of all sorts, adds commonplaces from the general stock of fiction, and makes the whole thick and slab with original sauce, in order to exalt and consecrate the deeds of a popular hero.