What more can an author say to satisfy his reader of the purity of his intentions, as well as of the genuineness of the source from whence he has drawn his materials? Without reward, or promise of reward, he appears to have undertaken his task from the purest feelings of patriotism, and finished it before he experienced any of the fostering influence of patronage. That the transactions he relates are substantially correct, or at least such as were generally believed to be so at the time he wrote, we have the evidence of one nearly cotemporary. Major thus expresses himself:[3] “Henry, who was blind from his birth, in the time of my infancy composed _the whole Book of William Wallace_; and committed to writing in vulgar poetry, in which he was well skilled, the _things that were commonly related of him_. For my own part, I give only partial credit to writings of this description. By the recitation of these however, in the presence of men of the highest rank, he procured, as he indeed deserved, food and raiment.” Though Major says nothing of Blair’s Memoirs, yet he frees Henry from the charge of relating any thing that was not previously believed by his countrymen. Thomas Chambers, in his History of the House of Douglas, says, “These things fell out in the year 1298; which passages, as the most part of actions done in the time of Sir William Wallace, are either passed over, or slenderly touched by the writers of our chronicles, although the truth thereof be unquestionable, being related by those eyewitnesses who wrote the diary or history of Sir William Wallace in Latin, which is paraphrastically turned into English rhyme, the interpreter expressing the main body of the story very truly; howsomever, missing or mistaking some circumstances, he differeth therein from the Latin.”[4] From the manner in which this is expressed, it may be supposed that Chambers had seen the original. If this could be established, his testimony would be of considerable importance. Nicholson, Archdeacon of Carlisle, in his Scottish Historical Library, says, that the names of the great northern Englishmen, whom Henry represents Wallace as having been engaged with, such as Sir Gerard Heron, Captain Thirlwall, Morland, Martindale, &c. are still well known on the borders of Cumberland and Northumberland. The reader may also find, by the Statistical Account of Scotland, that the localities mentioned in the poem, are given with a precision beyond the reach of one labouring under the infirmity of blindness.