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.
When the Romans garrisoned rather than occupied southern Scotland, and made reconnoitring expeditions into the north, its fastnesses were stoutly defended by fierce Caledonians, woodland savages, and Picti, painted warriors, who may or may not have been the same people. If the same, they may well have split into hostile tribes, warring against each other like the kindred Mohawks and Hurons, sometimes amalgamated by conquest, sometimes uniting to make raids on richer Lowland clearings. After the false dawn of Roman annals ceases to throw a glimmer on those hardy barbarians, darkness again falls over mountain and forest, lit only by the twinkling lamp of adventurous missionaries. Then the twilight of middle-age history shows a Pictish kingdom seated in Charlemagne’s age on the Tay and its tributaries, but there presently overthrown by pushful invaders.
These were the Dalriad Scots from Ireland, who began their independent career by getting precarious foothold on the nearest coastland promontory of North Britain. Baffled, as it seems, in an attempt thence to master the country of their origin, then driven, perhaps, from their coast settlements by a stronger swarm of Scandinavian hornets, this stirring race shoved their way across the western Highlands to take a firmer stand in the heart of Scotland, when Kenneth MacAlpine overthrew the Pictish kingdom at Scone, its capital. Buchanan reports two successive battles, the scene of the former a few miles off, at Forteviot, where he makes Kenneth act on the motto of the Celtic Society, _Olim Marte, nunc arte_. His chiefs, we are told, not being very keen for the encounter, while they lay snoring off their drink, the king worked upon them by means of a young cousin of his, disguised as an angel in phosphorescent fish-skins, and equipped with a sort of primitive megaphone, through which he roused the sleepers by a promise of victory, then slipped off his celestial raiment to disappear in the darkness before these heavy-headed warriors were wide awake. It is not often we are taken so well behind the scenes of a miracle.