Barclay is historically significant for two reasons:
1. He was the first English poet to choose a German subject. His Ship of fools is a translation from a German poet, and it enjoyed immediate and immense popularity. The poet is a fellow- passenger in a ship full of fools, and in this way he enabled to review very kind of folly. The humor is lively and pleasant.
2. He was the first to write Eclogues – pastoral poems in which shepherds are introduced conversing with each other-in England. He thus introduced a genre which was to reign supreme in times to come.