Some defensive wars stand out in history the issues of which were momentous in striking disproportion to what at the time appeared to be the interests directly at stake. Such was the resistance of the Greek Republics to Persia-such too the repulse of Athens in the harbour of Syracuse. Such in other times was the struggle of the Lombard Republics against Barbarossa, in which liberty first showed herself to modern Europe. Little of this interest attaches to the Scotch War of Independence. The case of Switzerland approaches it most nearly. But even there a more complete success rewarded virtue, and the effects of the contest were more widely felt. The victors of Sempach gained for their country a more enduring liberty than the victors of Bannockburn; and in a later generation the triumphs of Granson and Morat accomplished the overthrow of the power of Burgundy, and raised Switzerland to a conspicuous place in Europe. The Scottish patriots secured for their country only a protracted struggle; and so far as they brought her into European politics at al, they made her little more than an outlying battle-field between France and England. Yet not on that account do the? lose their title to our sympathy. Keeping the results steadily in view, we may doubt the expediency of the resistance; it is impossible to withhold our admiration from the spirit which inspired it. Not for glory,' wrote the Scotch Parliament to the Pope, riches or honours did we fight, but for liberty alone, which no good man abandons but with his life.' If only they had really achieved that liberty for which they endured so much!

Mr. Burton is the first historian, so far as we know, who has brought out the real nature of this struggle. It was not in any sense a struggle for national independence by a united Scottish people. In fact, the Scottish nation, as we use the words now, can hardly be said to have had then any existence at all. It was simply the last desperate stand made by the Saxon against the advancing wave of Norman aggression, differing only in point of time and eventual success from the stand made by Hereward or Robin Hood; perhaps even more closely resembling the stand made some hundred years later by the Scottish Celt against the power of the Scottish Lowlander.

The first fruit of the Norman Conquest in Scotland was a steady migration of the Saxon people northwards. 'Angles was the name these refugees bore among the motley races which then inhabited our country, and, taken together with those of the same race previously established there, they pro

bably formed the bulk of the population of all Lowland Scotland except Galloway. These refugees knew the expansive power of the tyranny from which they had fled, and could tell their kinsmen strange and cruel tales of Norman oppression. Every year was widening the difference between the people subject to Norman oppression and the people free from it, and was teaching the latter what they might expect should this heavy yoke be ever laid upon them. While such feelings were gaining ground among the Saxons of Scotland, Norman adventurers came trooping into that country just as they had into England in the days of Edward the Confessor. Welcome at Court, they were not popular throughout the country. At the death of Malcolm III. the prevailing desire for their expulsion had nearly occasioned a change of dynasty. Hence when the dispute as to the crown broke out, the middle class' -if we can with propriety apply that expression to those times -at all events a strong peasant and burgher class, for the most part of Saxon race, saw their danger.

"Historical conditions had made the Lowland Scots the very pick of the hardy northern tribes. They were made up of those who had left their homes whenever they found tyranny, or, as it may be otherwise called, a strong government pressing on them. Thither came those who had successively swarmed off before the pressure of Varus, of Charlemagne, of Gorme the Old, and of Harold the Fairhaired. And the last, and perhaps the stoutest and truest of all, were the Saxon peasants who had sought refuge from the iron rule of the Normans among a kindred people still free.' (Vol. ii. p. 281.) It mattered little to these men whether they were ruled by the Norman Edward or by some Norman baron who held estates in Scotland; in any case it was Norman rule with all its varied wickedness which was impending over them. To this they would never submit, and hence the War of Independence. The national instinct, therefore, which has made Wallace the hero of that war is justified by historical truth. He was the impersonation of the feeling we have described, the very type of the class among whom that feeling was supreme. Bruce, Norman as he was, could never have succeeded had he not broken from his Norman compeers and his Norman King; and we doubt whether he could have succeeded at all had not Wallace gone before, rousing the people by an appeal to the feelings which stirred so strongly within them-fear and hatred of Norman tyranny.

Mr. Burton has not only brought into due prominence the true causes of this war, but he is the first Scottish historian, so far as we know, who has done justice to the motives of

Edward. We quote the following comment on the ordinance for the Government of Scotland, issued by Edward in 1305, not only as enforcing powerfully the writer's views, but as a favourable specimen of his style :

The ordinance is not a logical or methodical document. It mixes up the broadest projects of legislation and administration with mere pers onal interests and arrangements. But it bears the impression of a high intelligence and a far foresight, mellowed by beneficence and even kindliness. The author of it sees that, once brought together, without violence or goadings to national antipathy, the two nations would naturally co-operate and fuse into one compact empire; and no one could be more alive to the mighty destinies that such an empire might have to look to. Had he begun in this spirit, there are many things to render it credible that he might have been successful. A nationality distinct from and antagonistic to that of the English people had not been made before the death of Alexander III. The Scots looked to King Edward with a paternal feeling, and had a leaning to the English institutions. Of these they were never afraid; and if they could have felt assured of retaining such freedom of action as these or their own native institutions gave, they would not have been apprehensive of innovation. What they dreaded was the prerogative power, royal and baronial, which the Normans brought by innovation on the original laws and customs of England. In the discussion of the succession, and in the military occupation of the country, these were set in their most offensive shape, face to face with the people of Scotland. Throughout the twelve years' contest, too, they were reminded over and over again of those innovations, with which their neighbours were still at war. They knew that when the King of England found difficulty in gathering a sufficient force for crushing them, it was because he was haggling with his own people about demands for the renewal of the Great Charter and the limitation of the forest laws; and these reiterated demands were nothing but the lamentation and denunciations of the people of England for the rights and liberties of which they deemed they had been robbed.' (Vol. ii. pp. 342-3.)

In a well-known passage of his history, Lord Macaulay comments on the singular lot of the Scottish Highlander-but a short while ago detested by all civilised Scotland as a barbarian and a thief, now hailed as the true type of Scottish nationality. Mr. Burton did something towards exploding this romantic folly in his History of Scotland since the Union.' He dealt it a severe blow by his discovery, that the picturesque kilt was the invention of an ingenious trooper in General Wade's army. In his present history he has gone yet farther and shown, not only that the Highlander was all along alien and hostile to the Scot in the modern sense of the word, but that he did what in him lay to prevent the existence of Scotland

altogether. It may be true, though Mr. Burton does not think so, that at least in the beginning of the 11th century, Scotland as a whole was a Gaelic-speaking country. However this may be, it did not long continue so. The tide of Saxon immigration then began to flow steadily; settled in the lowlands, and, uniting with those of the same race already there, created what we now mean when we speak of the Scottish nation. The Celt driven back to his hills allied himself with the Norman. Edward derived from them important aid, and entered into treaties with their leading chiefs. And this antipathy to the Saxon race lasted throughout the whole of Scottish story. From the days when they assailed Bruce at Loch Awe to the days when they butchered the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge, the Celts were the pests of Scotland. As Mr. Burton says, we shall fail to gain a true estimate of the history of our country, unless we realise the truth that by the Scottish people the battle of Harlaw was hailed as a not less memorable deliverance than the battle of Bannockburn. It was the spirit of the Saxon middle class which achieved Scottish independence: exhausted by misery and poverty, overmastered by turbulent nobles, it sank down powerless for long years, to be roused again at the second great awakening of national life-the Reformation.

We have dwelt thus long upon the causes and effects of the War of Independence, both because it is a point of Scottish history not perfectly understood, and because Mr. Burton in his account of it has achieved his greatest triumph. Partyspirit could hardly here have influence; but national prejudice might be, and in many instances has been, very powerful for evil. Of this disturbing, and in these times unworthy element, we find, in Mr. Burton's clear and impartial argument, no trace. His view of the War of Independence is not, of course, absolutely new; but we have nowhere else seen it urged with the same knowledge and convincing force. Originality is in fact the marked characteristic of the whole book. And while here and there doubtless, especially in the antiquarian discussions, a lurking love of paradox may be discovered, as a rule this originality is not disfigured by a restless craving after novelty. We have sometimes ventured to doubt whether or no the new sources of information recently opened with such profusion to the world, have after all been of much use in advancing historical truth. It seems questionable whether historians really profit by the mass of materials now hurled upon them; or whether, unable to grasp the whole, they do not too readily embrace the new, neglectful of the old. Men are so prone to over-estimate what they have themselves disinterred,

especially if it be in manuscript; to under-estimate what has been long before the world, especially if it is in print. From this inordinate affectation of novelty Mr. Burton is free. Of all writers we know he is about the last to be led by others; he forms his own opinions, and expresses them with unmistakeable distinctness; but in the formation of those opinions he is not carried away by a vague admiration of new discoveries, he gives no undue weight to some recently dug-up despatch filled with the gossip of the day, the work of an ambassador, if not, according to Wotton's sarcastic definition, a man sent abroad to lie for the benefit of his sovereign, at least a man sent to report all manner of tittle-tattle for his benefit and his amusement. Not that Mr. Burton neglects such sources of information. On the contrary, so far as we can judge, he is well acquainted with the results of the most recent investigations; but he rates them at their proper value, and no higher. To this sedateness of judgment it is mainly owing that the philosophy of Scottish history has never been so clearly set forth as in these volumes.

It would, on the other hand, be idle to deny that in some respects the varying aspects of the War of Independence might have found a more congenial chronicler. Mr. Burton possesses but in a slight degree the art of the story-teller; and he wants, if not the feeling of romance, at least the power of expressing the romantic. Nor, though this may be the rashness of ignorance, do we esteem very highly those dissertations on military tactics of which he is extravagantly fond. He is very jealous of the military fame of Wallace, and claims for him the merit of the great discovery of the power of infantry. But then he fails to show us how, if this were so, the battle of Falkirk was lost, and that of Bannockburn won. Still more entirely does he fail to present the noble and picturesque aspects of the contest. To have the heart stirred with that sympathy for courage and resolution, to which no one, English or Scotch, would willingly be dead, and which the desperate struggles of Wallace, the wild adventures of Bruce and the good Lord James so surely evoke, we must after all go back to that chosen friend of boyhood the Tales of a Grandfather.'

The third volume of Mr. Burton's history is, to our thinking, the least interesting of the four. This is in part attributable to the nature of the subject; in part to the writer's inability to make the best of the subject such as it is. Doubtless no theme could be less attractive. The period embraced is from the accession of David Bruce to the death of James V., and the annals of few countries can furnish a more dismal record.