Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/349

 kneeling, by failing to attend; but excused himself on the ground that he was examining witnesses by direction of the lords at the time of the preparation sermon, and his excuse was accepted (Reg. P. C. Scotl. xi. 595–6;, vii. 383). ‘Some, however,’ says Calderwood, ‘ascribed his not conforming, not to conscience, but to the dissuasions of his mother-in-law and her daughter, a religious woman’ (ib.) His wife was Janet Johnston, daughter of Sir John Johnston of Hilton. On 14 Feb. 1626 he succeeded Thomas, earl of Melrose, as president of the court of session, and on 16 Jan. 1630 he was created by Charles I a baronet of Nova Scotia. He died on 25 Oct. 1633 at his own house in Edinburgh, and was buried in the church of the Grey Friars.

(d. 1644), second son of Sir John Skene, lord Curriehill, is mentioned in 1612 as one of the ordinary clerks of the exchequer (Reg. P. C. Scotl. ix. 344), and on 2 July 1616 he was appointed deputy to the clerk-register (ib. x. 556). He died in December 1644. He was, in all likelihood, the compiler of a very important manuscript collection of so-called Scottish tunes preserved in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh. The manuscript, which bears on the first leaf the signature ‘Magister Johannes Skeine,’ was at one time attributed to the father, but must have been written either by the son or a later Skene. It was published in 1838 under the title ‘Ancient Scottish Melodies, from a manuscript of the reign of King James VI. With an Introductory Enquiry, illustrative of the History of Music in Scotland, by William Dauney, esq., F.S.A. Scot.’

 SKENE, WILLIAM FORBES (1809–1892), Scottish historian and Celtic scholar, was second son of [q. v.] of Rubislaw, near Aberdeen, by Jane, daughter of Sir [q. v.], sixth baronet, of Pitsligo, Aberdeenshire. Born on 7 June 1809 at Inverie Knoydart, the property of Macdonell of Glengarry, William was educated at the High School of Edinburgh, and there began on his own account to study Gaelic, of which he had some opportunity of learning the rudiments through his maternal relationship with Macdonell, the chief of Glengarry in the West Highlands, but still more through his being boarded for a time at Laggan, Inverness-shire, with the parish minister, [q. v.], on the recommendation of Sir Walter Scott. In 1824 he went with his elder brother, George, to Hanau, near Frankfort, where he acquired German and a taste for philology, which he afterwards turned to account in Celtic studies. On his return to Scotland he spent a session at St. Andrews University, after which he served an apprenticeship under his uncle, Sir Henry Jardine, W.S., and passed writer to the signet in 1832. Soon afterwards he became a clerk of the bills in the bill chamber of the court of session, an office he held till 1865. He practised as a writer to the signet for about forty years.

While never neglecting official and professional duties, his discharge of which was highly appreciated by his clients and the court, he had his eye from earliest manhood on highland history and Celtic scholarship. In 1837 he published a book on ‘The Highlanders of Scotland, their Origin, History, and Antiquities,’ for which he received a prize from the Highland Society—a work of great ingenuity and learning, though further research altered some views expressed in it. Constant occupation in his profession did not allow of his publishing anything further till 1862, when he contributed an introduction and notes to the Dean of Lismore's ‘Collection of Gaelic Poetry,’ edited by Dr. McLachlan. In this introduction Skene took his stand against the older school of Irish antiquaries by asserting, in carefully chosen language, that ‘prior to the battle of Ocha in 483 A.D. the Irish have, strictly speaking, no chronological history.’ That battle established the dynasty of the HyNeill on the Irish throne, and ‘the order of things which existed subsequent to that date is the chronological era which separates the true from the empirical, the genuine annals of the country from an artificially constructed history.’ He also took the position, since almost universally adopted by scholars, as to the Ossianic controversy, admitting the claims of Ireland to Fenian legends and their attendant poems, yet maintaining it had ‘not an exclusive possession of them,’ but that ‘Scotland possessed likewise Fenian legends and Ossianic poetry derived from an independent source, and a Fenian topography equally genuine.’

In 1868 he published ‘The Four Ancient Books of Wales,’ an attempt to discriminate what was truly historical from what was imaginative or artificial in Welsh-Celtic historic poetry. He had made himself by this time a sufficiently good scholar of the written Irish and Welsh dialects for historical purposes. In 1869 he printed an ‘Essay