From the style of the verse, which is in general alliterative, as well as some of the allusions, it may be surmised that these prophecies were written in the minority of James V., on the basis of obscure popular sayings attributed to Merlin, Rymour, and other early sages. The special passage which Alexander Scott refers to was in Rymour’s prophecies, but also given in a slightly different form in those of Bertlingtoun: ‘A French wife shall bear the son, Shall rule all Britain to the sea, That of the Bruce’s blood shall come, As near as to the ninth degree.’ There can be no doubt that it is applicable to Queen Mary, who was a French wife, and in the ninth degree of descent from Bruce; and did we know for certain that it formed a part of the prophecies made up in the minority of her father, it would be remarkable. But the probability is, that the verse was a recent addition to the old rhymes, a mere conjecture formed in the view of the possibility and the hope that a child of Mary would succeed to the English crown at the close of Elizabeth’s life. What makes the allusion of Scott chiefly worthy of notice, is the knowledge it gives us of the public mind being then possessed by such soothsayings. It certainly was so, to a degree and with effects beyond what we now may readily imagine.[17] * * * * * [Sidenote: 1561-2.] While Scotland was noted in the eyes of foreigners as a barren land--Shakspeare comparing it for nakedness to the palm of the hand[18]--its own people were fain to believe and eager to boast that it was rich in minerals. In 1511, 1512, and 1513, James IV. had gold-mines worked on Crawford Muir, in the upper ward of Lanarkshire--a peculiarly sterile tract, scarcely any part of which is less than a thousand feet above the sea. In the royal accounts for those years, there are payments to Sir James Pettigrew, who seems to have been chief of the enterprise, to Simon Northberge, the master-finer, Andrew Ireland, the finer, and Gerald Essemer, a Dutchman, the melter of the mine. Under the same king, in 1512, a lead-mine was wrought at Wanlock-head, on the other side of the same group of hills in Dumfriesshire. The operations, probably interrupted by the disaster of Flodden, were resumed in 1526, under James V., who gave a company of Germans a grant of the mines of Scotland for forty-three years. Leslie tells us that these Germans, with the characteristic perseverance of their countrymen, toiled laboriously at gold-digging for many months in the surface alluvia of the moor, and obtained a considerable amount of gold, but not enough, we suspect, to remunerate the labour: otherwise the work would surely have been continued.