Bishop Elphinstone. It was to this study, apart from his engrossing duties as first principal, that Boece devoted himself. A manuscript of John of Fordun, the earliest extant chronicler of Scotland, presented by him to the college, is still preserved, and it was on Elphinstone’s collections that his own history of Scotland was based.
The first publication of Boece was the lives of the Bishops of Mortlach and Aberdeen, printed at Paris in 1522 by Iodocus Badius, with the well-known imprint of his press. The most interesting portion, the memoir of his patron, Elphinstone, who had died eight years before, unable to survive Flodden, gives many incidental notices of Boece’s own life and studies. The lives are written in a simpler and (purer style than his history, and the legendary element so conspicuous in his history is almost absent. The next and only other printed book of Boece was his history of Scotland from the earliest times to the accession of James III, published by Badius in 1527, and of which a second edition, with the continuation of Ferrerius down to the death of that king, was printed at Lausanne, and published at Paris in 1574. Prior to this no history of Scotland had been printed except the compendium of Major. The chronicles of Wyntoun and John of Fordun were in manuscripts widely dispersed, but not widely known; and now for the first time the annals of Northern Britain could be bought by any one who could afford the comparatively cheap price asked by the Parisian printers of that day. They were related in a style which the admirers of Boece compared to Livy, and followed the model of the earlier books of the great Roman historian in sacrificing accuracy to a Rowing narrative adapted to the public for whom it was written. This accounts for its rapid popularity. It was translated, at the request of James V, between 1530 and 1533, into Scottish prose by John Bellenden, archdean of Moray, employed about the same time in the translation of Livy, and printed in 1536 at Edinburgh by Thomas Davidson. A metrical version of Boece’s history in the Scottish dialect was also made at the same time, but not published until recently, from the manuscript in the university of Cambridge. In 1577 it was done into English for Holinshed’s chronicles by William Harrison, who naïvely excuses himself as a divine for applying his time to civil history: ‘This is the cause wherefore I have chosen rather only with the loss of three or four dayes to translate Hector out of the Scottish (a tongue verie like unto ours) than with more expense of time to devise a newe or follow the latin copy.’ In the next generation Buchanan, not unwilling to cavil at Boece, used his history as material for his own more elaborate work. The English, Welsh, and Irish historians, who had a special quarrel with Boece for the antiquity which he ascribed to the Scots by adopting as historic the myth of Scota the daughter of Pharaoh, attacked his credit even before it began to be weighed in the scales of criticism. The epigram of Leland still sticks:-
Hectoris historici tot quot mendacia scriprit
Si vis ut, numerem, lector amics, tibi,
Me jubeas etiam fluctus numerare marinos
Et liquidi stellas connumerare poli.
That apart of his narrative prior to the reign of Malcolm Canmore is as unreliable as the early books of Livy, and even when he comes to times nearer his own he is apt to follow tradition without examination of its probability. Father Innes in the last century and Mr. Skene in this have done the work of Niebuhr, and traced the origin of the mythic and traditional Scottish story. By the aid of the earliest sources, the chronicles of the Picts and Scots of Wyntoun and Fordun, they have deciphered at least a part of the true history.
The gravest charge against Boece, that he invented the authorities on whom he relies—Veremundus, a Spaniard, archdeacon of St. Andrews, and John Campbell, whose manuscripts, originally preserved in Iona, he says he procured access to through the Earl of Argyle and his kinsman, John Campbell of Lundy, the treasurer-though long accepted, must now be deemed at least not proven, and probably unfounded. These manuscripts no longer exist, but his statement as to them could have been contradicted by persons living when he wrote, if it was untrue; and Chambers of Ormond, a Scottish historian of the reign of Mary, makes independent reference to Veremundus, possibly one of the unnamed earlier chroniclers to whom Wyntoun frequently alludes. The two other authorities he specifies are Turgot, the bishop of St. Andrews, author of the ‘Life of Queen Margaret,' and the abbot of Inchcolm, who is known to be Bower, the continuator of Fordun, in whose pages many of the statements for which Boece has been censured are to be found. Of the credulity shown in his history the story of the stranded trees on which the clack or barnacle geese (see Max Müller's Lectures, &c., ii. 584) grew, is only one of many samples. Boece was always more ready to believe than to doubt, and a striking contrast to his contemporary Major. Dr. Johnson probably gives a fair verdict,
