The infancy of all written history is necessarily involved in fable. Long ere the scattered families have conjoined their patriarchal unions into tribes and clans, acknowledging some common chief, and submitting their differences to the rude legislation of the arch-priest or civil head of the commonwealth, treacherous tradition has converted the story of their birth into the wildest admixture of myth and legendary fable. To unravel the complicated skein, and recover the pure thread divested of all its extraneous acquisitions, is the impossible task of the historian. This period past--so momentous in the influence it exercises on all the years that follow--the historian finds himself among materials more manageable in some respects, though not always more trustworthy. He reaches the era of chronicles, records, and, still better, of diplomas, charters, deeds of gift, and the like honest documents, which being written with no thought of posterity by their compilers, are the only really trustworthy chronicles that posterity has inherited. This historic epoch of Scotland is involved in even more obscurity than that which clouds the dim and fabulous morning of most nations. We have indeed the few but invaluable allusions of Roman authors supplying important and generally trustworthy data. But it is only a momentary glimpse of sunshine. For the era succeeding we have little better than the perplexing admixture of traditions, facts, and pious legends of monkish chroniclers, furnished with a copiousness sufficiently characteristic of the contrast between the literary legionary of imperial Rome, and the cloistered soldier of her papal successor. Amid these dusty acres of parchment must we glean for older dynasties and monarchical pedigrees--not seldom tempted to abandon the weedy furrows in disgust or despair. It is with no lack of zeal or courage, however, that these soldiers of the Church have encountered the oblivious past into which we still peer with no less resolute inquisitiveness. Bede, Fordun, Wyntoun, Boece, and the other penmen of the cloisters who, more or less accurately, chronicled contemporary history, all contributed their quota to the thick mists of fable which obscure the earlier annals of the country. Wyntoun, the best of our Scottish chroniclers, following the example of other monkish historians, begins his work as near _the beginning_ as may be, with a treatise on angels, before proceeding to "manny's fyrst creatoune!" In the sixth chapter he gets the length of "Ye Arke of Noe, and of the Spate," and after treating of _Ynde_, _Egype_, _Afryk_, and many other lands with an enviable and leisurely composure, he at length reaches the threshold of his legitimate subject, and glances, in the thirteenth chapter of his Scottish Chronicles, at "how Bretanne and Irlande lyis." This, however, is a mere passing notice; nor is it till after the dedication of many more successive chapters of his first five books to