commit errors; and hence, it is customary for the emperor to reprieve them for a while, that they may redeem themselves by acts of merit." "But in that case," remarked one of the judges, "somebody must be surety; will you venture to be answerable for him?" "If Howheaou be restored to his command,” replied he, "I entreat that my own head may answer for his misconduct, as the just punishment of such rashness." The other two judges now turned to Teihying, and said, "Since your lordship's son thus publicly tenders his personal responsibility, it befits us to make a formal representation, and request his majesty's pleasure." Teihying was compelled, under the circumstances of the case, to assent to this: the leader was accordingly remanded to prison; and Teihchoongyu, being called upon to enter into a written engagement on the spot, was placed in custody for the time being.' We think the attention of the public cannot fail to be powerfully excited towards the Oriental Translation Fund, which has, in the course of a little more than one year, published five works, is carrying many more through the press, and has a long list of others in preparation. The Royal Duke, who lately presided at its annual meeting, very truly observed, that this association had established, e converso, the truth of the old English proverb, by saying little, and doing much. The Travels of Ibn Batuta, the Marco Polo of the east, by Professor Lee of Cambridge; and the Autobiography of Shah Jahangueir, by Major Price—a work which may be placed side by side with the Memoirs of the Emperor Baber, are worthy fruits of such an institution; and we hold the gratitude of the learned world to be not a little due to those whose activity and zeal have procured it substantial support in the highest quarters-but especially to that accomplished and zealous orientalist Lieut.-Col. FitzClarence, to whose exertions, as Dr. Lee says, the institution owes almost entirely its origin and its efficiency.' ART. V.-Annals of the Caledonians, Picts, and Scots; and 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 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 extravagancies 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 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 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 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, 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's 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 Saint 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 subtract 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 anything 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 reconcileable 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 inhabited by the Meatæ, or Midland Britons-a species of borderers, who alternately acknowledged the Roman 400. See the Works of Sir George Mackenzie, in two volumes folio, vol. ii., pp. 399, yoke, |