Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 6.djvu/332

126 gling into being as a literary man. The work, however, procured to Pinkerton an introduction to Horace Walpole, who made him acquainted with Gibbon. The proud spirit of that great historian seems to have found something congenial in the restless and acrid Pinkerton. He recommended him to the booksellers as a person fit to translate the "English Monkish Historians." In an address which Gibbon had intended to prefix to the work, his protegé was almost extravagantly lauded: but the plan as then designed was never put in practice. The friendship of Walpole continued till his death; and, light and versatile in his own acquirements, he seems to have looked on the dogged perseverance, and continually accumulating knowledge of Pinkerton with some respect. After Walpole's death, Pinkerton sold a collection of his "Ana" to the proprietors of the Monthly Magazine, and they were afterwards published under the title "Walpoliana." In 1786, Pinkerton published "Ancient Scottish Poems, never before in print, but now published from the manuscript collections of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, Knight, Lord Privy Seal of Scotland; comprising pieces written from about 1420 till 1586: with large Notes and a Glossary." Pinkerton maintained that he had found the manuscript in the Pepysian library at Cambridge, and in his correspondence he sometimes alludes to the circumstances with very admirable coolness. The forgery was one of the most audacious recorded in the annals of transcribing. Time, place, and circumstances were all minutely stated—there was no mystery. Among Pinkerton's opinions as to character, that of literary impostor was of the most degraded order. The whole force of his nature and power over the language were employed to describe his loathing and contempt. On Macpherson, who executed the task with more genius, but certainly much less historical knowledge than himself, he poured the choice of his denunciations. In 1787, he published "The Treasury of Wit; being a Methodical Selection of about Twelve Hundred of the best Apothegms and Jests, from books in several languages." This work is not one of those which may be presumed to have been consonant with Pinkerton's pursuits, and it probably owed its existence to a favourable engagement with a bookseller; but even in a book of anecdotes this author could not withstand the desire of being distinct from other men, and took the opportunity of making four divisions of wit and humour, viz., "serious wit, comic wit; serious humour, and comic humour." During the same year, he produced "A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, being an Introduction to the Ancient and Modern History of Europe." In the compilation of this small treatise, he boasts of having employed himself eight hours per day for one year in the examination of classical authors: the period occupied in consulting those of the Gothic period, which he found to be "a mass of superfluity and error," he does not venture to limit. This production was suggested by his reading for his celebrated account of the early "History of Scotland," and was devised for the laudable purpose of proving that the Celtic race was more degraded than the Gothic, as a preparatory position to the arguments maintained in that work. He accordingly shows the Greeks to have been a Gothic race, in as far as they were descended from the Pelasgi, who were Scythians or Goths—a theory which, by the way, in the secondary application, has received the sanction of late etymologists and ethnologists of eminence—and, by a similar progress, he showed the Gothic origin of the Romans. Distinct from the general account of the progress of the Goths, which is certainly full of information and acuteness, he had a particular object to gain, in fixing on an island formed by the influx of the Danube in the Euxine sea, fortunately termed by the ancient geographers "Peuke," and inhabited by Peukini. From this little island, of the importance of which he produces many highly respectable certificates, he