Читать книгу History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne - Andrew Lang, Robert Kirk - Страница 76

Between Barbour and the first true Scottish disciple of Chaucer, James I, comes the author of a Chronicle in rhyming octosyllabic couplets "The Orygynale Cronykil". This is Andrew Wyntoun, who was a canon of St. Andrews Cathedral, and prior of St. Serfs on a little island in Loch Leven, the loch of Queen Mary's captivity. Wyntoun appears to have been an old man when, in 1413, the first Scottish university was founded at St. Andrews, by a bull of the Anti-Pope, Pedro de la Luna. The place must, with its Augustinian canons, have been a seat of learning before 1413, but the new university was very poor, and a thing of small beginnings.

Wyntoun's book commences with Adam and Eve, and is at fifth hand and fabulous till the author approaches his own time.

Mythical as is his work when he approaches his own date he, with Fordun, the really industrious author of the prose "Scotichronicon" (died about 1384), is one of our few sources of information about Scottish affairs. Wyntoun is amusing, but does not pretend to high poetic merit.