HARRY, Blind, or Henry the Minstrel, author of a poem in twelve books, entitled The Actis and Deidis of the illuster and vailzeand campiouη, Schir William Wallace, Kniclνt of Ellerslie. All that is known of Henry’s personal history is contained in the following quotation from Major: —“Henry, who was blind from his birth, composed in the time of my youth the whole book of William Wallace, and embodied all the traditions about him in the ordinary measure, in which he was well skilled. By the recitation of these in the presence of the great, he procured, as indeed he deserved, food and clothing.” Major was born about 1469, and the only MS. copy of Henry’s works is that in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, dated 1488. It was first printed at Edinburgh in 1570. In his Lives of Scottish Worthies, P. F. Tytler claims for it a certain historical worth, as “the work of an ignorant man, who was yet in possession of valuable and authentic materials.” On account of its glorification of the national hero it has enjoyed a long popularity among the Scottish peasantry, but it possesses no poetical merit except a certain rude fire and energy, and as a literary production its place must be reckoned a very humble one.
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