securing from destruction the fishery out of which these gains arise. Or, indeed, if the proprietors of the lower fisheries took a more expanded view of their own interests, and judged it worth while to make a partial sacrifice to preserve the whole, it might still be found difficult or impossible to reconcile their tenants, whose interest is of a temporary character, to submission to a loss which should affect their profit immediately, in order to secure the prosperity of the fisheries at a period when they might be let to other persons.

We are happy, therefore, that a sport which we have admired is recorded in Salmonia-where the descendants of those who have witnessed or shared it will read of it with the same feelings wherewith the present generation peruse accounts of the chase of red or fallow deer, wildboars or wild-cattle,

"All once our own."

We must now conclude with the parting address of the Coryphæus of Salmonia to his party, p. 270.

"I have made you idlers at home and abroad, but I hope to some purpose; and I trust you will confess the time bestowed upon angling has not been thrown away. The most important principle perhaps in life is to have a pursuit-a useful one if possible, and at all events an innocent one. And the scenes you have enjoyed-the contemplations to which they have led, and the exercise in which we have indulged, have, I am sure, been very salutary to the body, and, I hope, to the mind. I have always found a peculiar effect from this kind of life; it has appeared to bring me back to early times and feelings, and to create again the hopes and happiness of youthful days."

[Sir Humphry Davy died at Geneva, on the 30th May, 1829, in his 51st year. Shortly after his death appeared his Consolations of Travel, or Last Days of a Philosopher.]

ANCIENT HISTORY OF SCOTLAND.*

[Quarterly Review, July, 1829.]

THE situation of Scotland, in respect to her early history, was, till of late years, extremely odd. Her inhabitants believed themselves, and, by dint of asseveration persuaded others to believe them, one of the most ancient nations in the world, possessed of clear and indisputable documents authenticating their history up to the very earliest era of recorded time. This error was no mere transitory ebullition of vanity, but maintained and fostered by reference to divers respectable tissues, entitled Histories of Scotland,—all ringing the changes upon a set of fables which had been ingeniously invented to prevent the disgrace of avowed ignorance. Thus do

"Geographers on pathless downs

Place elephants instead of towns."

Hector Boece, or Boethius, in his Scotorum Historia ab illius Gentis Origine, first printed at Paris in 1526, is the artist to whose pencil the flourishes in the blank leaves of Scottish story are chiefly to be ascribed. He was certainly a person of learning and talent, since he was the friend of Erasmus, and is described by him as vir singularis ingenii et facundi oris. But when Erasmus tells us that even the thought of a falsehood was unknown to him, we can hardly suppose he ever read that work in which friend Hector "in imposition strong,

Beats the best liar that e'er wagg'd a tongue."

For materials, he had before him the Rhyming Chronicle of Wynton, Prior of Lochleven, the Chronicle of John

"Annals of the Caledonians, Picts, and Scots; and of Strathclyde, Cumberland, Galloway, and Murray. By JOSEPH RITSON, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh, 1828."

Fordun, and his continuator, Bower, and similar worthies. There was little information probably to be gained from public records, which were not then, as now, accessible to every student; and this, indeed, is some apology for the gross errors of Hector's predecessors, and his credulity in adopting them; but it affords none for the various additions with which it has been his pleasure to embellish the elder figments; bolstering them out with plausible circumstances, and issuing absurd family legends, bardic traditions, and all the crazy extravagances of popular report, under the authority of a grave Principal, for such he was, of the University of Aberdeen. Still less was he entitled to rest upon such evidence as that of Verimundas, Cornelius Hibernicus, John Campbell, and others, whom no author save himself ever saw, or heard of-men of straw-mere names. Thus we may pardon his repeating, as a tradition occurring in Wynton, and other early historians, how Gathelus, the son of Cecrops, king of Athens, son-in-law to Pharaoh, king of Egypt (having married his daughter Scota),—this couple, terrified by the plagues inflicted on Pharaoh for his obstinacy, left Egypt in search of a more quiet residence in some distant land;-how, in their exploratory voyage, they founded the cities of Compostella and Lisbon;-how they discovered Ireland and peopled it, and, finally, how they and their followers, the Scots, so called as being the subjects of Scota, obtained possession of North Britain. The anxiety of every nation is as great as that of Falconbridge, to have some proper man for their father; and Boethius, in his day, could not have well avoided retailing what his predecessors had left upon record about Gathelus and Scota. But he is totally without excuse, when he augments the falsehood with a circumstance devised by himself; and assures us that when King Ptolemy sent abroad a mathematical mission to enlarge the knowledge of geography, they were entertained hospitably at the court of Ruether, an imaginary king of Scotland, and returned delighted at having found, in so remote a region, the language, manners, and government of Egypt. In this, as in other cases, Hector dressed up and adorned the rude fictions of early times, and gave wings to the bug which would otherwise have crawled unnoticed in its native obscurity. Upon such principles, this notable forger put forth his regular pedigree of Scottish kings, some

few of whose names are to be found, unquestionably, in a brief and doubtful catalogue of Irish authorities, but most are individually indebted to himself for their very existence, and all of them for their lives, characters, and the respective events of their respective reigns.

A much more eminent man condescended to take him for his guide and authority during this early period, and repeat his fabulous narrative in language equal, for spirit and emphasis, to that of the silver age of Rome-George Buchanan. Lesley, the celebrated bishop of Ross, who had done and suffered so much in the cause of Queen Mary, indited, also, a history of Scotland (published at Rome in 1578), in which he saw no cause to reject the ready, convenient, and creditable list of ancient monarchs drawn up by Boece. A prelate and royalist, he scorned not to see as far into a millstone as Buchanan, a heretic and opposer of the divine right of the sovereign; and accordingly adopted, without hesitation, the history of Gathelus and Scota, which the classical taste of the latter historian had thrown somewhat into the background.

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 trueborn 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, &c. &c. 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 Britannica; 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 Mackenzie, who, at that time (in the reign, namely, of Charles II) 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