tion_, 1581 A.D.--F.

[127] See Chaucer, description of his Monk, Prologue to _Canterbury
Tales_, lines 165-207, and my _Ballads from Manuscripts_, vol. i. pp. 193,
194.--F.

[128] See _Ballads from Manuscripts_, vol. i. pp. 59-78.--F.

[129] Long side-note here in edition of 1577, as follows:--"The very cause
why weauers pedlers & glouers haue been made Ministers, for _th_e learned
refuse such matches, so that yf the Bishops in times past hadde not made
such by oversight friendship I wote not howe such men should haue done
wyth their aduousons, as for a glouer or a tayler will be glad of an
augme_n_tatio_n_ of 8 or 10 pou_n_d by the yere, and well contented that
his patrone shall haue all the rest, so he may be sure of this
pension."--F.

[130] Such a classical expert as Harrison makes a curious error here.
Caesar, in his _Commentaries_, tells of the way in which the Britons
instantly apprehended his weakness, perceiving during the truce his army's
lack of corn, and thereupon plotting to secretly break the truce and
annihilate the Mightiest Julius and his little following (teaching all
future invaders a lasting lesson to beware the chalk cliffs of Albion).
Caesar also notes how he himself quietly neutralised these efforts by
gathering in corn from the country thereabouts. The Britons, just as much
as himself, understood corn as the staff of life, the mainstay of war as
well as of peace. The fact is that Harrison thought with two brains, his
Welsh one and his Latin one, and, lost in the mists of Welsh fictions,
sometimes forgot the most incontrovertible of Latin authorities. Man's
written records of things British start with Caesar.--W.

[131] By omitting a comma (upon which the fate of empires may sometimes
turn), our brother printers of 1587 (for this Scotch paragraph is not in
the edition of 1577) have made pope Harrison bestow a mitre upon Hector
Boece. That remarkable native of Dundee (who may be said to have invented
Macbeth as we moderns know him) was a doctor of theology, and learned in
every art, as becomes the first implanter of the tough fibres of
Aberdonian scholarship (for, when one has the rare fortune to overcome the
capacious skull and strong brain of a son of Aberdeen, the victor well may
cry--

"Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain"),

but was never much of an ecclesiastic, although he held a canonry. Note,
by the way, that Harrison (and not John Bellendon, as generally stated)
was the ch