Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 5.djvu/123

Rh ing effect: "We have thankfully received your letter, by which you inform us that you are in possession of the abstruse books of the Sound Philosophy; which, as certain most deserving persons have begged them of you, you with difficulty preserve for our use, having heard that we are addicted to the study of that art." Of the ballads and plays composed by Inglis, not a vestige now remains, unless a poem attributed to him in the Maitland MS. and as such printed by Hailes and Sibbald, entitled "A General Satire," be held as a specimen of one of those kinds of composition, and be really a production of his pen.

In a charter of 19th February, 1527, Inglis is styled chancellor of the royal chapel of Stirling; and he appears to have been soon after raised to the dignity of abbot of Culross, a promotion which, if we may believe his friend Lindsay, spoiled him as a poet. It was eventually attended with still more fatal effects. Having provoked the wrath of a neighbouring baron, William Blackater of Tulliallan, the abbot of Culross was by that individual cruelly slain, March 1, 1530. The causes of this bloody deed do not appear; but the sensation created by it throughout the community was very great. Sir William Lothian, a priest of the same abbey, who was an accomplice of the principal assassin, was publicly degraded on a scaffold at Edinburgh, in presence of the king and queen, and next day he and the laird of Tulliallan were beheaded.

It would hardly be worth while to advert so minutely to a person, who, whatever was his genius, is not certainly known as the author of any existing composition, if the name were not conspicuous in works of Scottish literary history, and must therefore continue to be inquired for in such compilations as the present. Inglis, if the same individual as this abbot of Culross, could have no pretensions to the honour put upon him by some writers, of having written the "Complaynt of Scotland;" for that curious specimen of our early literature was undeniably written in 1548, eighteen years after the death of the abbot. In the obscurity, however, which prevails regarding the subject of the present notice, we cannot deny that he may have been a different person, and may have survived even to the date assigned for his death by Mackenzie—1554; in which case he could have been the. author of the Complaynt. That a Sir James Inglis existed after 1530, and had some connexion with Culross, appears pretty certain from the passage in the Testament of the Papingo, which is understood to have been written in 1538. But, on the other hand, there is no authority for assigning the authorship of the Complaynt to any Sir James Inglis, except that of Dr Mackenzie, which rests on no known foundation, and, from the general character of that biographical writer, is not entitled to much respect. Some further inquiries into this subject will be found under the head.

INNES,, an historian and critical antiquary, known to the students of early Scottish history by the title of "Father Innes," was a priest of the Scottish college at Paris, during the earlier part of the 18th century. It is not creditable to the literature of our country during the period just mentioned, that the meritorious labours of this highly acute investigator have been so little noticed, and that no one has thought it worth while to leave memorials sufficient to enable posterity to know any thing of his life and character. His labours to discover the true sources of Scottish history proved an ungrateful task; they were unacceptable to the prejudices of the time, and have hardly been appreciated until the memory of the individual who undertook them had quietly sunk into oblivion. In these circumstances any scrap of information which we can procure on the subject is peculiarly valuable. We perceive from a few words in the preface to his Critical Essay, that he received the rudiments of education in Scotland, and that he must have left his native country early in life for a per-