Alban appears to have extended above Perthshire, taking in at least the headwaters of the Spey and other streams flowing north. It certainly included the basin of the Tay and the upper waters of the Forth. And as Lowland and Highland scenery are finely mingled on these rivers, so here met and blended the confluent torrents of blood and language swelling into a steady stream of national life. What may be called a Scottish kingdom first took shape on the banks of Tay, where long was fixed its chief seat. Something like a pattern spun by the shuttle of war comes at last to light on a torn web of blood-dyed, mist-dimmed checks and stripes, hitherto a puzzling blur for the most erudite spectacles. The Muse of early history seems like that chameleon, whose fate was explained by a Highland soldier: “I put it on my bonnet and it went black; I put it on my coat and it turned red; but when I let it oot on my kilt, the tartan fairly bursted it.” It is an old reproach against us that every Scot looks on himself as descended from “great and glorious but forgotten kings.” If, indeed, we calculate by geometrical progression how many millions of ancestors each of us can claim in the last thirty generations or so, the chances seem to be against any Briton not having some strain of quasi-royal blood in his veins. Scotland had, at least, many kings to be descended from, several apocryphal dozens of them, as named and numbered by George Buchanan, before he comes down to chronicles that can be verified. But to our critical age, the long row of early royal portraits exhibited at Holyrood, painted by a Dutchman at so much the square foot, seem worth still less as records than as works of art. The most ardent Scottish patriot no longer sets store by such fables as historians like Hector Boece wove into their volumes; nor is it necessary to examine so fond imaginations as that of descent from a Pharaoh’s daughter, Scota, or from a Ninus king of Nineveh. Finn and Fergus, Oscar and Ossian, we must leave in cloudland, looking downwards to pick our steps over slippery rock and boggy heather, among which there is no firm footing upon traces of an aboriginal pre-Celtic stratum of humanity.