is significantly similar to the argumentation on astrology in _The Bruce_, Bk. IV. 706 to end.[41] Faced with the plain statement of the fifteenth-century scribe, Skeat can only suggest that the poem was not by our Barbour, but by another person of the same name--surely the extremity of destructive literary criticism. And every argument of the German scholars against the _Troy_ fragments would clinch the case for Barbour’s claims on the _Alexander_, with which I deal elsewhere. The garrulous and dreary _Legends of the Saints_ probably contain, at least, contributions by Barbour; even Buss admits peculiar features in the _St. Ninian_,[42] and _St. Machar_ is a purely Aberdeen worthy, in whom the poet, too, professes a special interest; these may well have come from Barbour’s pen as the uncongenial but meritorious labour of his old age. Such, at any rate, was the normal progress of a poetic clerk, from translation to original work, to decline at the close upon versions of saintly biographies. [37] The editor of _The Exchequer Rolls_, vol. ii. p. cv., says: “Bower accuses Barbour of misrepresenting the origin of the Stewarts.” That is not so. According to the summary in Bower, Barbour had it that they came from Wales, and in fact the family was settled in Shropshire on the Welsh March. It had its origin, he said, from one who was called “Le Fleanc de Waran,” who may equate with Alan FitzFlaald, who, however, apparently did not marry a daughter of Warine, the sheriff of that county (Round, _Studies in the Peerage_, p. 116). He affirms, rightly enough, that the first of them in Scotland was Walter, in the days of King William (twelfth century). Where he goes wrong genealogically, according to Bower, is in saying that Walter’s son, Alan, was in the First Crusade, which was obviously impossible; but Alan FitzAlan, uncle of Alan FitzFlaald, was in that expedition. Barbour was dealing with remote personages through family tradition, and whatever his errors as represented by Bower, he does not appear, as is too lightly assumed, to have been the source of the myths of later historians in this connection. Bower’s language does not admit of a Banquo. See _Cupar and Perth MSS._, in _Scotichronicon_, Lib. IX., chap. xlviii. [38] _The Wallace and The Bruce_, pp. 88-90. [39] Preface I., xlix-lii. [40] Edit. Horstmann, ii., p. 226. [41] See further, Neilson’s _John Barbour_, p. 2. [42] _Anglia_, as cited. 3. HISTORIC VALUE OF “THE BRUCE.”