The objection raised to claiming Barclay as a Scotsman, founded on the ground that he nowhere mentions his nationality, though it was a common practice of authors in his time to do so, especially when they wrote out of their own country, appeared to me, though ingenious and pertinent, to be of so little real weight, as to be dismissed in a parenthesis. Its importance, however, may easily be overrated, and it may therefore be well to point out that, apart from the possibility that this omission on his part was the result of accident or indifference, there is also the probability that it was dictated by a wise discretion. To be a Scotsman was not in the days of Henry VIII., as it has been in later and more auspicious times, a passport to confidence and popularity, either at the court or among the people of England. Barclay's fate having led him, and probably his nearest relatives also, across that Border which no Scotsman ever recrosses, to live and labour among a people by no means friendly to his country, it would have been a folly which so sensible a man as he was not likely to commit to have displayed the red rag of his nationality before his easily excited neighbours, upon whose friendliness his comfort and success depended. The farther argument of the Biographia Brittannica, that "it is pretty extraordinary that Barclay himself, in his several addresses to his patrons, should never take notice of his being a stranger, which would have made their kindness to him the more remarkable," is sufficiently disposed of by the succeeding statement, that the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Kent, Barclay's principal patrons, "are known to have been the fiercest enemies of the Scots." Surely a man who was English in everything but his birth could not be expected to openly blazon his Scottish nativity, without adequate occasion for so doing, in the very face of his country's chiefest enemies, who were at the same time his own best friends. His caution in this respect, indeed, may be regarded as an additional proof of his Scottish origin. [2] BARCLAY'S VOCABULARY Some of the words, stated in popular fashion to be Scotch--they are of course of Saxon origin--the usage of which by Barclay is adduced as an evidence of his nationality, are also to be found in Chaucer, but that does not invalidate the argument as stated. The employment of so many words of northern usage must form at least a strong corroborative argument in favour of northern origin. [3] THE CASTLE OF LABOUR It ought to be stated that the modesty of the young author prevented him from affixing his name to his first production, The Castle of Labour. Both editions are anonymous. Bale, Pits, Wood, &c., all include it in the list of his works without remark. [4] BULLEYN'S DIALOGUE