"For God's sake, turn ye back again,
And give yon southern folk a fray!

Why should I lose the right is mine?
My doom is not to die this day.'

*

"Yet turn ye to the eastern hand,
And woe and wonder ye sall see;
How forty thousand spearmen stand,
Where yon rank river meets the sea.

"There shall the lion lose the gylte,

And the libbards bear it clean away; At Pinkyn Cleuch there shall be spilt Much gentil blude that day."

Enough, enough, of curse and ban;

Some blessing shew thou now to me,

* The uncertainty which long prevailed in Scotland concerning the fate of James IV. is well known.

Or, by the faith o' my bodie," Corspatrick said, "Ye sall rue the day ye e'er saw me!"

"The first of blessings I shall thee shew, Is by a burn, that's call'd of bread ;* Where Saxon men shall tine the bow,

And find their arrows lack the head.

"Beside that brigg, out-ower that burn,
Where the water bickereth bright and sheen,
Shall many a falling courser spurn,

And knights shall die in battle keen.

"Beside a headless cross of stone,

The libbards there shall lose the gree;

* One of Thomas's rhymes, preserved by tradition, runs thus:

"The burn of breid

Shall run fow reid."

Bannock-burn is the brook here meant. The Scots give the name of bannock to a thick round cake of unleavened bread.

The raven shall come, the erne shall go,
And drink the Saxon blood sae free.
The cross of stone they shall not know,
So thick the corses there shall be."

"But tell me now," said brave Dunbar, “ True Thomas, tell now unto me,

What man shall rule the isle Britain,

Even from the north to the southern sea?"

"A French queen shall bear the son,
Shall rule all Britain to the sea:

He of the Bruce's blude shall come,
As near as in the ninth degree.

"The waters worship shall his race,

Likewise the waves of the farthest sea;

For they shall ride ower ocean wide,

With hempen bridles, and horse of tree."

246

THOMAS THE RHYMER.

PART THIRD-MODERN.

THOMAS THE RHYMER was renowned among his contemporaries, as the author of the celebrated romance of Sir Tristrem. Of this once admired poem only one copy is known to exist, which is in the Advocates' Library. The author, in 1804, published a small edition of this curious work; which, if it does not revive the reputation of the bard of Erceldoune, is at least the earliest specimen of Scottish poetry hitherto published. Some account of this romance has already been given to the world in Mr Ellis's Specimens of Ancient Poetry,

vol. I. p. 165, 3d. p. 410; a work, to which our predecessors and our posterity are alike obliged; the former, for the preservation of the best selected examples of their poetical taste; and the latter, for a history of the English language, which will only cease to be interesting with the existence of our mother-tongue, and all that genius and learning have recorded in it. It is sufficient here to mention, that, so great was the reputation of the romance of Sir Tristrem, that few were thought capable of reciting it after the manner of the author ;a circumstance alluded to by Robert de Brune, the annalist:

I see in song, in sedgeyng tale,
Of Erceldoun, and of Kendale.
Now thame says as they thame wroght,
And in thare saying it semes nocht,
That thou may here in Sir Tristrem,
Over gestes it has the steme,

Over all that is or was;

If men it said as made Thomas, &c.

It appears, from a very curious MS. of the thirteenth century, penes Mr Douce of London, containing a