Scottish Text Society publications > Old series > Pieces from the Makculloch and the Gray mss

INTRODUCTION.
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\&cobo Belft), who left it as a legacy to Mr James
Blackwod,1 sub-dean of Dunblane (ff. I 8l b).
The handwriting of the longer poems in the vernacular,
Nos. Hi., iv., v., and vi., may be confidently ascribed to
Gray. Even the additional verses of No. iv., written in a
larger and coarser hand, may also be in Gray’s script.2
Nos. i. and ii. are in a different hand, probably of the later
years of the first half of the sixteenth century.
In the early eighteenth century the MS. was in posses¬
sion of John Ker, Professor of Greek in King’s College,
Aberdeen, who communicated its contents to Thomas
Innes, then engaged in writing his Critical Essay (2 vols.
1729).3 Ker was appointed Professor of Humanity in the
University of Edinburgh in 1734, and in 1740 he presented
the MS. to the Advocates’ Library.
The volume, measuring 4^4" x 3|4", is bound in dark
crimson leather, and is lettered “GRAY’S MST.” The press-
mark is 34. 7. 3.
The Chepman and Myllar Prints.
This unique volume of tracts, most of them fragments,
is fully described in Dickson and Edmond’s Annals of
Scottish Printing, Cambridge, 1890, pp. 49-83, where there
is also an account of the printers, Walter Chepman and
1 Between 1533 and 1539 Sir James Blackwod occurs as vicar of Strowane.
—Reg. Mag. Sig., ii. 1257, 1372, 1476, 1879, 2042.
2 This is also the opinion of Mr R. K. Hannay, Curator of the Historical
Department, H.M. General Register House, Edinburgh, who compared the
handwriting in the MS. with that of a charter in the Register House, written
by Gray. Mr Hannay also kindly furnished the references to the Register of
the Great Seal.
3 Hist, of Scot., viii. p. 340. Innes discusses the genealogical tables.
His references (1729 edn.) are noted, probably in an eighteenth century hand,
in the MS.