The Cambridge MS. bears witness that it was completed on August 18, 1487, by the hand of “John de R., chaplain”; the Edinburgh MS. that it was “hurriedly written” by “John Ramsay” in 1489, for a Fife vicar; and the latter signature is attached to the only MS. of _The Wallace_, which accompanies that of _The Bruce_ but was transcribed two years earlier. Skeat immediately pronounces that the names signify but one person, that “John de R.” is also “John Ramsay,” apparently on the logic of Wonderland, because both surnames begin with the same letter.[13] Mr. Brown, however, points out that this equation of alternative forms was highly improbable for fifteenth-century Scotland, and substitutes a reading of his own whereby the scribes are still merged in one personality as “John Ramsay” otherwise “Sir John the Ross,” one of Dunbar’s _makars_, the real author of _The Wallace_, and the wholesale redactor of _The Bruce_. The details of Mr. Brown’s argument and all that flows therefrom must be read in _The Wallace and The Bruce Restudied_.[14] Mr. Brown (if I may say so) never fails to be suggestive and interesting, and even the light which led him astray was real critical illumination; but John Ramsay, who, “as a chaplain”--which _he_ does not claim to have been--“was entitled to the courtesy title of _Sir_,”[15] and took his alternative name from his office as “Ross Herald or Ross Secretary”;[16] who lightened the toil of transcribing Acts of Parliament by dropping into verse on the margin--an unjustifiable accusation;[17] and who, from the seed of Blind Harry’s “gests,” raised the prickly bloom of _The Wallace_, and grafted enough borrowed material on to the rough stock of the original Bruce to make it something substantially different, and did all this without leaving even a cipher as a hint to posterity--of this complex and composite personage Mr. Brown is the only begetter, and his brief and inglorious career may be followed in _The Athenæum_, November 17-December 8, 1900, February 9, 1901. Mr. Brown, of course, can still claim that the problem of late redaction remains, whoever the guilty one may have been.[18] On this understanding I deal with it elsewhere.[19] [13] The Bibliography of the _Cambridge History of English Literature_, vol. ii., recklessly says: “As the colophon informs us (!) all three MSS. were written by John Ramsay” (p. 447). [14] Bonn, 1900. [15] Brown, p. 82. [16] _Ibid._, p. 68. [17] See _Athenæum_, November 17, 1900. [18] _Athenæum_, December 8, 1900. [19] Appendix F.