Very few kings of so remote a period have attained to the undying celebrity of Macbeth. As long as the English language endures, his name will be as widely known as that of the great Alfred, his character will retain the familiar features impressed on it by the magic genius of Shakspeare, and it will be as impossible to disentangle the historical personage from the weird being of romance, as to picture “the meek and hoary Duncan,” a young and inexperienced prince, meeting his untimely fate in the flower of youth. The quaint verses of the prior of Lochleven have embodied some of the tales and traditions handed down by the partizans of the rival families; and it will create little surprise to find that in a state of society in which “the rights of blood” were paramount, the stigma of illegitimacy was freely cast upon both competitors for the crown. Wyntoun has recorded how Duncan, wearied with the chase, and separated from his usual attendants, found rest and shelter within the humble mill of Forteviot; how love bade the king return where chance had shown the way; and how Malcolm, whose blood has flowed in the veins of every English and Scottish king but Stephen, from the days of Henry Beauclerc, sprung from this intrigue with the “milnare’s dowchtyr of Fortewyot.” As the taint upon the blood of Malcolm was supposed to be inherited from his mother, so the stain upon the pedigree of Macbeth was attributed to the Mormaor’s father; and in the same old verses it may be read how the mother of the Moray chieftain, wandering by chance in the woods, met with “ane fayr man, nevyr nane sa fayre as scho thowcht than,” and how Macbeth was born “the Dewil’s sone,” and the inheritor of all his father’s evil propensities. As the talisman of success was eventually upon the side of Malcolm, so the tales of the tyranny and crimes of his antagonist increased and multiplied, until they assumed the well-known form in the pages of Boece, which, copied into the chronicle of Holinshed, attracted the notice of the master-mind that has stamped the fiction with immortality.[142]