form however terrible, to one who was to be so remembered nearly five centuries later by Scotland's greatest bard? We are accustomed to regard the name of Bruce as the intensest expression of a Scottish nationality, and of its aspirations {264} toward liberty. But it had no such meaning at this time. The ancestor of the family was Robert de Bruis, a Norman knight who came over with the Conqueror. His son, Robert, was one of those hated foreign adventurers at the Court of David I., and received from that King a large grant and the Lordship of Annandale. The grandson of this first Earl of Annandale married Isabel, the granddaughter of David I., and so it was that the house of Bruce came into the line of royal succession. It was Robert, the son of Isabel, who competed with Baliol for the throne of Scotland. Robert Bruce, who stands forth as the greatest character in Scottish history, was twelve years old when his grandfather was defeated by Baliol in this competition. No family in the vassal kingdom was more trusted by England's King, nor more friendly to his pretensions. The young Robert's father had accompanied King Edward to Palestine in his own youth, and he himself was being trained at the English Court. His English mother had large estates in England, and, in fact there was everything to bind him to the King's cause. He and his father, {265} and the High Steward of Scotland, together with other Scottish-Norman nobles, had been with the King in his triumphal march through Scotland when Baliol was dethroned, and at the time of the rising under Wallace, Robert Bruce had not one thing in common with him or his cause. And as for the people in the Highlands, if he ever thought of them at all, it was as troublesome malcontents, who needed to be ruled with a strong hand. Wallace was in rebellion against an established authority, to which all his own antecedents reconciled him. How the change was wrought, how his bold and ardent spirit came to its final resolve, we can only surmise. Was it through a complicated struggle of forces, in which ambition played the greatest part? Or did the splendid heroism of Wallace, and the spirit it evoked in the people, awaken a slumbering patriotism in his own romantic soul? Or was it the prescience of a leader and statesman, who saw in this newly developed popular force an opportunity for a double triumph, the emancipation of Scotland, and the realization of his own kingship?