the breaking up of the tribes, and the complete establishment of the clan system; and this likewise was the period of the manipulation of the Chronicles, and the gradual formation of that spurious system of national history which, originating in the ecclesiastical pretensions of St. Andrews, was developed during the great controversy regarding the independence of Scotland, and based upon a Scottish nationality and the supposed colonisation of the country long before the Christian era by Scota and her Scottish descendants, till it was finally reduced to a system by John of Fordun. Its leading features were the colonisation of the Highlands by Scots in the third century before Christ, their conversion in the second century by the relics of St. Andrew, the occupation of the mountain region of the north by the Picts entirely ignored, and that people relegated to the plains of the Lowlands, when they were finally exterminated by the Scots in the ninth century. [Sidenote: First change in Clan pedigrees. Influence of legendary history of Scotland.] It is hardly to be expected that the clans should not have claimed their share in these legendary glories, or that they should have lost the wish to maintain a separate descent with the gradual disappearance of its tradition, and thus this new and preponderating influence would naturally produce the first great change in the clan pedigrees. This change is very clearly exposed in the remarkable letter already quoted of John Elder, clerk, a Reddeshanke, to King Henry the Eighth. In that letter he thus gives the origin of ‘the Yrische Lords of Scotland, commonly called the Reddshanckes, and by historiographers, Picts.’ ‘Scotland,’ he says, ‘before the incoming of Albanactus, Brutus’s second son, was inhabited, as we read in ancient Yrische stories, with giants and wild people, without order, civility, or manners, and speaks none other language but Yrishe, and was then called Eyryn veagg, that is to say, Little Irland, and the people were callit Eyrynghe, that is to say, Irland men. But after the incoming of Albanactus, in reducing them to order and civility they changed the foresaid name Eyryn veagg, and called it Albon, and their owne names also and called them Albonyghe; which two Yrische wordes, Albon, that is to say Scotland, and Albonyghe, that is to say Scottish men, be derived from Albanactus, our first governor and king.’ At the time John Elder wrote, Yrishe, afterwards corrupted into Erse, was currently used for Gaelic; and deducting the nonsense about Eyryn veagg, which seems a fancy of his own, this is the legendary story contained in our earliest documents before the Chronicles were tampered with; but then he gave in to say, ‘which derivation the papistical cursed spirituality of Scotland will not hear in no manner of wise, nor confess that ever such a king, named Albanactus, reigned there. The which derivation all the Yrische men of