Thus, thanks to the goodly correspondence amongst these grave authors, the annals of Scotland continued to be garnished with a comely catalogue of kings, whose existence no true-born native would suffer to be impugned or challenged. To render their individual stories more diversified, they follow each other arrayed successively in light and darkness-a moderate and worthy prince being as regularly succeeded by a profligate and oppressive tyrant, as the squares of a chess-board are alternated with black and white. According to the universal belief introduced upon such foundations, Fergus I., descended from Gathelus and Scota, in the year before the coming of Christ 330, took possession of the kingdom of North Britain, and bestowed on it the name of Scotland, in which his posterity ever since have reigned.

The Scottish people continued to enjoy their dream of antiquity, and of the immense length of their royal line, for more than half a century, though not without challenge on the subject by the Welsh and Irish, two nations as proud, and one by nature, and the other by mismanagement, very nearly as poor as themselves. The publication of O'Flaherty's "Ogygia" gave rise to much resentment among Scottish antiquaries. Mr Roderick O'Flaherty did much more than out-herod Herod-he out-hectored Hector Boethius. He did not, indeed, pretend to dispute the arrival of Gathelus with his Egyptians or Milesians. On the contrary, he is more particular in noticing the exact day of their arrival than Boethius himself-to wit, the kalends of May, the fifth day of the week, and the seventh of the moon, in the year of creation 2934. But he scorned to allow that Irish chronology was confined by so recent a date as this; and, after giving some account of Cappa, Lagne, and Luafat, three' primeval inhabitants of the Green Isle, who had been driven from Spain to Ireland only to be drowned in the deluge, he narrates how Partholane, with a colony of Scythians, took possession of Ireland by a descent on Inver-suegene, in Kerry, in the month of May, the fourteenth day of the moon, and of all days in the week, of a Wednesday, in the year of the world 1969, etc. etc. A more formidable assailant was William Lloyd, bishop successively of St Asaph, Coventry, and Worcester, who, in his history of the Government of the Church in Great Britain and Ireland, lopped from Boethius' catalogue no less than forty-four kings, supposed to have existed between the arrival of Fergus I. and the fifth century. The bishop was backed and defended by Stillingfleet, in his "Origines Britannice;" and the painful Welsh antiquary, Humphry Lhuyd, entered the lists to impugn formally the authority of Boethius, Buchanan, and their brethren.

These assailants were not without an antagonist. Sir George

held the office of Lord Advocate, and who is termed, by Dryden, "that noble wit of Scotland," stepped forward, ex-officio, as defender of the antiquities of the royal line. The reasons which he alleges for lifting the gage of battle, as well as the arguments by which he endeavours to support a very feeble cause, show a singular mixture of the spirit of ultra-loyal chivalry with the forensic habits of a king's counsel.

“I leave it,” he says, "to all indifferent men whether I, as king's advocate, was not in duty obliged to answer a book written by the late reverend and learned Bishop of St Asaph, to prove that King Fergus, and twenty-four posterior kings, were merely fabulous and idle inventions, since that assertion did not only give the lie flatly to two of our most just and learned kings, but overturned the foundations on which they had built the duty and kindness of their subjects; and since precedency is one of the chief glories of the crown, and since for this not only kings but subjects fight and debate, how could I suffer this right and privilege of our crown to be stolen from it by this assertion. which did expressly substract about eight hundred and thirty years from their antiquity?” *

Sir George Mackenzie's defence of the royal line, is, as might be expected, a specimen of the merest special pleading. It had, however, considerable effect in Scotland, where all good Tories of the day were disposed to believe what was, in their idea, a proof of the inalienable right of the monarch, and where every Whig would have thought it sinful to discredit any thing which Buchanan had asserted. There was to both parties a noli me tangere in the question; and though Sir Robert Sibbald and others faintly hesitated their doubts, Hector Boethius remained lord of the ascendant, and Fergus I., and his two score of descendants, were swallowed by his readers as they might have bolted a poached egg.

The first step to a calm investigation of the early and obscure parts of Scottish history, occurs in the Dissertation of Father Innes, a Benedictine priest in the Scottish college of Paris. He has collected with labour, and published with considerable accuracy, the ancient chronicles and fragments of Scottish history. By comparing these with the more specious and highly-manufactured narratives of Boethius and Buchanan, it appears that the more ancient authorities for Scottish history consist-firstly, in a few notices occurring in the Roman writers, which, as might be expected, are casual, and not easily reconcilable with each other; as the remarks of men not very solicitous to be accurate concerning barbarous tribes, frequently, no doubt, changing their situation, manners, and even names,—and secondly, one or two meagre lists and chronicles, concerning the Scottish and Pictish kings, preserved in Christian convents.

At the time when Severus made his march into the northern part of this island, we can plainly discover two distinct nations inhabiting the country since called Scotland. 1. Between the wall of Severus, which was finally fixed as the barrier of the Roman empire,

extending from the Solway to the mouth of the Tyne, and the ancient and more northern wall built by Hadrian betwixt the Firths of Clyde and Forth, the provinces of Berwick, Roxburgh, Selkirk, Dumfries, and Clydesdale, with the three Lothians, were inh bited by the Meatæ, or Midland Britons-a species of borderers, who alternately acknowledged the Roman yoke, or shook it off, as they perceived the necessity of submission, or the opportunity of resistance. 2. Beyond the wall of Hadrian and amidst the rude mountains called the Grampian range, were situated the powerful and unconquered race, who are termed by the Romans Caledonian Britons; and who. favoured by the strength of the country, left grounds for the boast of their descendants, still cherished in history and song, that "When the Romans endeavoured their country to gain, Their ancestors fought, and they fought not in vain.”

Thus far is tolerably plain sailing; but in the end of the third century (A. D. 296) occurs the mention of a third people, the Picts. In A. D. 306, these are again spoken of by Eumenius the Rhetorician, in an oration delivered at Augustodunum (Autun) in Gaul, before Constantine, the son of Constantius Chlorus, in praise of the exploits of the latter. The turn of expression here would seem to inser, that the Caledonians were, in those later days, classed with other tribes under the general name of Picts-"Caledonum aliorumque Pictorum." Elsewhere the same orator talks of the Britons, the Picts, and the Irish, as inhabiting and waging war with each other in the isle of Britain.—It is tolerably clear, then, that in the beginning of the fourth century, there were no Scots in the northern part of Britain, any more than there were, at the same period. English, or Angles, in its southern division.

The Scots were, in the mean while, an existing people, although they had not as yet been distinguished in the country which now bears their name.* They seem to have made their first descent on Ireland during the third century, and proba. ly towards the end of it; for none of the authors before that period, namely Cæsar, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Mela, Ptolemy, Tacitus, Pliny, or Solinus, mention their existence. The Irish tradition infers their having come from Spain; and seas and climate considered, the west of that peninsula seems as natural a point for emigrating to the south of Ireland as any part of the north of Europe. Others, however, are captivated with

• One of the fiet times they are mentioned (if indeed they are not confounded with a tribe called the Attacotti nhabiting a part of Monteith and the Lennox) s by t Jerome, in the character of cannibals "When a very young boy," says he "I myself beheld in Gaul a tribe of "rit sh descent. called the cots, devouring human flesh " Qu d loquar de cæteris nation bus cum ipse adolescentulus in Gallia vider m Scotos. gentem Britannicam. humanis vesci carnibus." i he assertion is positive; but it is e sy to suppose how even a saint, adhuc adolescentulus, may have been imposed upon respecting the materials of the banquet There was a grand controversy, now forgotten, on this passage, arising out of a note in Gibbon, in which Lr Parr cut a principal figure. Some MSS for Scotus read Attacottos.

the resemblance between the words Scot and Scythian, and insist, at all risks, on holding them to be synonymous. Be that as it may, to Ireland came the Scots-and, to the great confusion of history, conferred on the Green Isle the name of Scotland.

The "first gem of the sea" had already been occupied by the Hiberni, or Hiberniones, of whom nothing is known save that they were probably a colony from Britain-perhaps the same people whom O'Flaherty, assigning to them an indefinite antiquity, distinguishes by the name of Firhomraigh, Fermorians, and affirms to be genuine Autochthones.* Over these Hiberni, however, the invading Scots appear to have obtained, for the time, a complete superiority. In the very ancient work called "St Patrick's Confession", they are uniformly distinguished as lords of the soil, while the old inhabitants figure as common people or vassals. It was evidently no single invasion which could give the strangers such an ascendence.

A restless, a wandering, and it would appear a conquering race, the Scots of Ireland soon extended themselves into the north-western extremity of Great Britain, where, after having occupied several of the western islands, they at length possessed themselves of Argyll, -the country, that is, of the Gael or Gauls. The Irish Scots, who accomplished this settlement, are usually termed Dalriads, or Dalreudini. This first descent of the Scots on the land to which they were afterwards to give a permanent name, was made, it is said, under the command of Cairbar Riadah, who had been forced to fly from Ulster by the arms of Fin M'Coul, the Fingal of Macpherson. The plausible date assigned to this event is about the year 258, The Scots no doubt found Argyll and Cantire thinly peopled, as well as abounding with strong defiles; the one circumstance enabling them easily to obtain possession of the country, and the other assisting them in maintaining it. This Dalriadic colony, however, seems at length to have drawn on themselves the enmity of the Picts-a much more numerous and powerful nation-by whom they were expelled from Scotland, about the middle of the fifth century. They appear, however, to have remained united; at least, the Irish authorities give one catalogue, and the Scottish a similar, though not an exactly corresponding list, of the chiefs succeeding to Cairbar Riadah, by whom the Dalriads were governed, from their first entrance to Argyll to the expulsion from thence-and continuing the genealogy, during their exile, down to Fergus the son of Erch or Eric. This Fergus, according to our later and more sound antiquaries, is the founder of the Scottish line. He led back the Dalreudini to the shores of Argyll, established them in the settlement from which their fathers had been driven by the Picts, and was the first king of the

Scots in North Britain, though his kingdom was limited to little more than one county of what is now termed Scotland. This second arrival of the Scoto-Irish seems to have been about 503.

After having thus achieved their final settlement in Britain, the Scots or Scoto-Irish invaders are very frequently named in history -often as combining their forces with those of the Picts in making the furious inroads by which the Roman province of South Britain was long infested and at length totally overrun; and, perhaps, more frequently as engaged in contests with each other. These last became more incessant and deadly after the arrival of the Saxons: these two nations were now compelled to exhaust on each other the warlike spirit which no longer found a vent at the expense of their southern neighbours. At length, the Scots becoming decidedly superior in the struggle, the Picts, A.D. 840, were defeated by Kenneth M'Alpine, the twenty-fourth prince in descent from Fergus, the son of Eric; and the Scots improving their victory, it is said, with exterminating cruelty, the Picts sustained such loss, that their name is afterwards scarce mentioned in history-where, amid the darkness of a barbarous age, they had hitherto made a rather conspicuous figure. This phenomenon, the vanishing of a whole people from the page of history, reminds us of those accidents in natural scenery, where, upon tracing some fine stream with the degree of pleasure which such occupation usually excites, we arrive at the spot where it is swallowed up by

"Caverns measureless to man,

And sinks in silence to a sunless ocean."

But we shall be called upon to consider this remarkable fact ere we finish our article.

Father Innes, it must be observed, was an antiquary, not an historian. His Essay was of a negative nature, merely showing what parts of the apocryphal history of Scotland could not possibly be true. He conjured down at once almost one-half of the sceptred shadows, which had kept their fantastic stand in the misty porch of Scottish history. He had ventured into the mure incognitum, and ascertained one half of the islands of former navigators, to be, in sailor's language, Cape Flyaways; but he had not pretended to survey the shores and islets of which the dim region actually afforded traces.

The more important part, though not the whole of this research, was left to Sir David Dalrymple, Bart., a Scottish judge, by the title 2474.1 of Lord Hailes. There was never, perhaps, an author better qualified, from habits and qualities, to become the father of national his-tory, in a country where the real springs had been in a great measure choked up and destroyed, and where fanciful authors had hewn out