strangely enough, appears to have been a priest; he is called in the old dry chronicles, which are the only ones to be depended on, Duncan the son of Trini, or Trivi, abbot of Dunkeld. Now the Kenneth IV. of the rival line, who had been slain by Duncan's grandfather, left behind him a son, and that son left a daughter, whose name was Gruach, and in whom the reader, though certainly in an unusual shape, must welcome Lady Macbeth herself. There being thus two rival races, alternately seizing the throne: while Duncan was the son of a daughter of one king, _she_ was the daughter of the son of another. This gave her no contemptible title to the throne, and when she married Macbeth, or Machaboedth, as he is called by the chroniclers, she had a husband who, possessing the almost independent principality of Ross, might be able to fight her battles. It is somewhat remarkable that, in an ecclesiastical record still preserved, in which a royal grant is made to a religious house, dedicated to St Servanus, Macbeth's wife appears along with himself, as granter of the deed; and they are called, "Machabet filius Finlach, et Gruach filia Bodhae--Rex et Regina Scotorum;"[L] an equal juxtaposition, only to be accounted for by the supposition that Macbeth was king in right of his wife. As to Macbeth himself, his origin, save in the supernatural legend we shall hereafter notice, appears not to have been known; but Fordun seems to intimate, that he was a descendant of that same Fenella who had so curiously murdered Duncan's great-grandfather. If we were disposed, indeed, to take a proper antiquarian partisanship of the one dynasty against the other, we might speak of Duncan as a treacherous usurper, and Lady Macbeth as an injured and insulted queen, whose cause is heroically adopted and vindicated by a true knight, who, while redressing her wrongs, wins her heart and hand. [L] _Registrum Prioratus Sancti Andreæ_, 114. Let us now look to the manner in which the death of Duncan is spoken of by the most ancient authorities. Old Andrew Wyntoun, Prior of St Serfs on Lochleven, who has never yet, to our great wonder, been upheld as one of the greatest poets of his own or any other age,--perhaps we may undertake the task some day, let our readers judge by the extracts on the present occasion with what prospect of success:--Wyntoun narrates the event with the true simplicity of genius, in these two lines:-- "He murthrified him in Elgyne, His Kynrik he usurped syne."