sible 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, wild-boars 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.]

ARTICLE XIII.

ANCIENT HISTORY OF SCOTLAND.

["Annals of the Caledonians, Picts, and Scots; and of Strathclyde, Cumberland, Galloway, and Murray. By JOSEPH RITSON, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh, 1828." From the Quarterly Review for 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 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 Verimundus, 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 obstimacy, 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 no

table forger put forth his regular pedigree of Scot tish 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 true-born native would suffer to be impugned or challenged. To render their individual stories more diversified, they follow each other arrayed successively in