Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/427

 V.MAY 26, im] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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be sorry to give up the old division, pointed out by CANON TAYLOR, into the land of the invers and the land of theabers. I still think it correct, even though some Irish eccle- siastics may have carried their language into Fifeshire and left invers there in the very home of the Picts. Perhaps some one can say whether golf is a Pictish game. Caman, the Irish game, is very different. C. S.

"The Scots, who were an Irish sept, crossed in the fourth century to Argyle." These would be brave words from any pen other than that of CANON TAYLOR. Your amateur historian is oftentimes deterred from declar- ing " whatsoever things are true " by the bold destructiveness of modern history- making. But CANON TAYLOR'S is a sure and practised hand, which trembleth not when stating facts. And in this instance, even when raised against the weight and glamour of Gibbon's clarum et venerabile nomen, it manifests its accustomed steadiness. Gibbon is evidently the father of those who gainsay the fact so undoubtingly advanced by CANON TAYLOR. He says (' Decline and Fall,' vol. i. p. 743) :-

"It improbable that in some remote period of antiquity the fertile plains of Ulster received a

colony of hungry Scots it is certain that, in the

declining age of the Roman Empire, Caledonia, Ire- land, and the Isle of Man were inhabited by the

Scots They long cherished the lively tradition

of their common name and origin; and the mis- sionaries of the Isle of Saints, who diffused the light of Christianity over North Britain, established the vain opinion that their Irish countrymen were the natural as well as spiritual fathers of the Scottish race. The loose and obscure tradition has

been preserved by the Venerable Bede On this

slight foundation an huge superstructure of fable

was gradually reared The Scottish nation, with

mistaken pride, adopted their Irish genealogy

The Irish descent of the Scots has been revived,

Britons Asserted,' p. 154). Yet he acknowledges, 1. That the Scots of Ammian (A.D. 340) were already settled in Caledonia, and that the Roman authors do not afford any hints of their emigration from another country. 2. That all the accounts of such emigrations which have been asserted or received by Irish bards, Scotch historians, or English anti-

Juaries are totally fabulous. 3. That three of the rish tribes which are mentioned by Ptolemy (A.D. 150) were of the Caledonian extraction. 4. That a younger branch of Caledonian princes of the house of Fingal acquired and possessed the monarchy of Ireland. After these concessions, the remaining difference between Whitaker and his adversaries is minute and obscure."

Gibbon's distinction between probability and certainty in the two facts he adduces in his opening sentence is as undialectic as it is arbitrary. But logic was never his forte.

Those two facts are on a similar plane of certainty, with the addition that the former is not confined to one province. The Scots overran a wider area than Ulster. Then, again, curiously enough, the historian fails to see that a "lively [or living] tradition" could hardly be also "loose and obscure." Such confusion of epithets entirely in- validates the subsequent " loose and obscure " charges of " slight foundation," " huge super- structure of fable," "mistaken pride," and "last moments of its decay." This is all the more surprising as he has a keen eye for Whitaker's suicidal "concessions." For the rest these latter go for nothing in face of the simple fact so succinctly stated by CANON TAYLOR. The marvel is that it should need restating. Yet few facts need it more. The " mistaken pride " has faded into either a burning shame or a flat denial. Scotsmen, seemingly, resent the "Irish descent" with as much heat as they would an imputed one from the Hottentots. More than once, both in Scotland and out of it, I have emphasized the relationship by transmuting the adage " Scratch a Russian and find a Tartar " into 44 Scratch a Scotsman and find an Irishman," but the effort was invariably received with a cynical smirk of unbelief. urru " -**

The Scottish

nation " no longer " adopt the Irish genealogy " with " mistaken pride." Is there not something of the undutifulness of children disowning their parents in this? But, disown it as they will, the plain historic fact is there. Nomenclature and language alike proclaim it ; prejudice and obstinacy alone ignore it. The Goidelic races (kinsmen to the Irish Scots) may have wandered north of the Tweed, but they were not the parents of the Caledonian Scots ; those bracketed were, and the Ulster plantation under James was nothing short of a return of the descendants of the original Irish colonists to the mother country. Scot- tish and Irish character may, and does now, differ toto coelo, but it is the difference between parent and child prolonged through many generations, which in a family is confined to few. In neither case is it a severance of blood. J. B. McGovERN.

St. Stephen's Rectory, C.-on-M., Manchester.

It is fairly certain, as CANON TAYLOR ob- serves, that the north of Scotland (Caithness and Sutherland) remained largely Pictish, although under Gaelic rule, until the arrival of the Scandinavian races. It probably still contains a considerable infusion of Pictish blood. The language, however, must have become Gaelic, and has remained so, in part, to the present day. In the Orkney and