chroniclers supply the country with a complete list of kings, reaching to a very distant period. It has been customary to accept the list as genuine, from Drust, who reigned when the Romans abandoned Britain, downwards. This gives, from the middle of the fifth century to the middle of the eighth, when Pictland ceased to be a separate state, forty-three kings. It is a bare catalogue, connected with but one or two isolated events; and thus, whether it affords the names of persons who were real kings, or was made to meet the demand of the old chroniclers that every state must have its regular dynasty of kings, is a matter of small

moment.

The chief event in the separate history of Pictland is the missionary visit of Columba in the reign of King Brud, already twice referred to. There were wars between the Picts and their neighbours, the most formidable of whom were the aggressive Saxons. Their kingdom of Northumbria extended over the Lothians, and was separated from Pictland by the Forth. The great conqueror Ida, and his successor Ella, seem both to have had too much on their hands otherwise, and to have been shy of a contest with the Picts. Edwin, the reputed founder of Edinburgh, and his successors, Oswald and Osway, are spoken of as drawing tribute from the king of the Picts, as well as from the other northern sovereigns. The extent of the power thus spoken of is not very distinct; but it is certain that the next king, Egfrid, resolving to try the game of conquest, passed the Forth and marched into Pictland. He crossed the Tay, and penetrated inland as far as a

1 See the list given in a chronological table in Chalmers's Caledonia, i. 207.

place called sometimes Dun-nechtan, and sometimes Nechtans-mere. It has been identified as Dunnichen, where a rising-ground with a fort on it answers to the one name, and a small adjoining lake answers to the other.

Of the details of the battle we know nothing. It has almost escaped the notice of the fabulous historians, so that we are spared the embarrassment of dealing with fictitious enumerations of troops and imaginary military operations. There can be no doubt, however, that, to carry the decisive results given to it with common consent in the early authorities, there must have been a mighty battle on the 20th of May, in the year 685. The Saxon invaders were defeated. Their general, King Egfrid, was slain. It has been said that great honour was paid to the dead king, and that he was buried in Iona, where Adamnan, the biographer of St Columba, reigned as abbot. The Saxon army was destroyed; the frontier of the Forth was abandoned; and the kingdom of Northumbria, taking its limits at the Tweed, foreshadowed the boundaryline between the England and Scotland of later times. The Saxon kings of Northumbria had established a bishopric, or, if not a bishopric, a great monastery, in the old Roman province. The centre of its influence. was at Abercorn, near the Forth, and a short way westward of Queensferry. But after the battle of Nechtans-mere this ecclesiastical establishment shifted for safety to Whitby, in Yorkshire."

1 The battle of Nechtans-mere is mentioned by the chroniclers generally, but its political influence is best laid down by Bede (iv. 26), who says it was a judgment on Egfrid for making a raid on the harmless people of Ireland, and wasting even their churches and monasteries.

This affair of Nechtans-mere is, in a confused list of battles, the one that comes out in history as leaving a marked territorial influence. It is held by some to have permanently severed the country between the Tay and the Forth from the influences that would have made it part of England. Of other fights, sometimes with the Saxons and sometimes with the Scots, we have only the ancient names, leading sometimes, but not always, to the places where they were fought. The Vikings, or black strangers, would occasionally pounce upon the coast of Pictland, as elsewhere; and in the fugitive notices of their raids there is an impression that there they met a tougher enemy than they were accustomed to, and had to engage in more serious conflict.

But we have notices of other conflicts, more suggestive of hard-fought battles, within the territory of the Picts, where both armies, by name at least, were Picts. The historians, with nothing to found on but the names of the conqueror and conquered in the brief record of the chronicles, had yet to give the proper conventional harmony to their picture, and to speak of civil wars, weak and strong governments, and the suppression of rebellions. But the impression left by looking only to the materials they had to work upon is a doubt that the country of the Picts was the established kingdom it is represented to have been-a doubt not only extending to the question whether it may not have had a variety of rulers and methods of government, but whether the country was inhabited by people of one race and language. In the midst of this dimness and confusion the Pictish kingdom drops out of history, and Kenneth, the king of the Scots, is found reigning over its people in the middle of the ninth

century. The name of Picts continued to be applied to the inhabitants of Galloway, but through the northeastern districts, where it had predominated, it rapidly faded out of use.

Such a phenomenon has naturally puzzled historians. Those of the patriotic and fabulous class-whose rise we shall afterwards have to consider as part of the history of national feeling in Scotland-naturally found a shape for it which suited the nationality of their narrative. There was but one way in which, of two hostile nations, the one should disappear from history, and that one way was conquest. The Irish origin of Scot and Scotia had then been forgotten or repudiated. The great object was, in rivalry with England, to take for Scotland the position of a great and ancient nation. There had no doubt been among them intruders called Picts, with whom they had an obstinate contest; but the might of Scotland at last prevailed, and the Picts were not only vanquished, but absolutely extirpated-not one of them left to hand down the memory of the race, save some who fled into England.1

In times still later, when the idea of the total extir

1 The Picts have left traditions of their existence. The great Roman wall was called "the Picts' Wall." There is "the Picts' Work Ditch," and "the Picts' Houses." In Orkney, the Picts or Pechts are believed in as an uncanny or elvish race-small black creatures, living underground, like the Kobolds of Germany. The late Mr Robert Stevenson, the lighthouse engineer, when sojourning in Orkney, was told by some people that they rejoiced to have met with a man of his learning and experience, who could decide for them a delicate question. They thought they had caught "a Pecht." If it was so, he must be put to death; but a mistake would be unpleasant. Mr Stevenson was taken to see the captive, and found sound asleep an old school-companion of his own, named Campbell, small and swarthy, afterwards celebrated as a missionary. Scott mentions this incident in his journal.

pation of a people was not thought an event so very likely that it was to be believed on the authority of tradition, when contemporary authorities said nothing about it, other theories were devised to account for the disappearance of the Picts. A favourite among these is that a union came about through royal marriages, and the opening of a united succession to the two thrones in the person of Kenneth. To prove this laborious genealogical inquiries have been made, and specialties in the Pictish principles of succession have been sought for and established to the satisfaction of the seekers. They started on a fanciful story by Bede, who sometimes gave himself to idle gossip, though not often, at least on secular matters. "The Picts," he said, "came to Scotland without wives, and on their earnest solicitation the Scots gave them wives, on a condition that when any difficulty arose in a succession to the throne, the female should have a preference to the male line." It is in vain, however, to seek a principle of succession in those times it was a thing not discovered for centuries to come. The War of Succession in Scotland, the Wars of the Roses in England, the Hundred Years' War in France, all arose from the problem of a principle of succession not having been solved.1

1 It admits but of one solution, and that is the law of primogeniture. This may be in two shapes, either by absolute primogeniture, without regard to sex, or exhausting the one sex in the first degree before the other sex in the same degree is drawn on. The succession to the crown of England is in the latter form, male taking precedence of female descendants. This is the only principle of succession, because it is as uniform and self-acting as a law of nature-as the mechanical laws of gravitation and hydrostatics. The degree of relationship being once established as a fact, there never can be any doubt of the extent of right it confers, and we at once know a claimant to be in bad faith if he has any