The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

Notes. 447
NOTES.
The death of Dr Skene has removed from our midst our greatest
Scottish historian. His special merit lay in his frank recognition
of the important ])art played by the Celtic population in the history
of Scotland, and his intelligent sympathy with everything Celtic.
This distinguished him greatly from previous historians of greater
genius than himself, like Burton and Pinkerton, who were blinded
with anti-Celticism. Dr Skene has done more than auy one else to
unravel the puzzle of early Scottish history; his use of Irish
materials greatly conduced to this. His work, the Chronicle of the
Picis and Scots, is simply invaluable to the student of Scottish
history. His Celtic Scotland gives in the fullest degree and in
their ripest form all his views and discoveries in the early history
of Scotland and in the development of the Highland clans.
Especially valuable is his second volume on the history of the
early church.
Dr Skene died on the 29th August last. He was born at
Inverie, Kincardineshire, in 1809. His father was a friend of Sir
Walter Scott's, at whose suggestion young Skene was sent to the
Highlands to study Gaelic. This Skene did, under Dr Mackintosh
jMackay, the most famous Gaelic scholar of his day, who was
located in Laggan at the time. Skene's first work was The High-
landers of Scotland, in 1837, written as a prize essay, at the
instigation of his father. It has never been reprinted, and Skene's
riper views may be found in Celtic Scotland. ^Ir Skene became
W.S. in 1831, and has been for the most of his life the head of a
large legal firm. In 1881, he was, on Dr Burton's death^
appointed Historiographer Royal for Scotland.
It was Dr Skene who did most to preserve the Gaelic MSS. in
the Advocates' Library. These MSS. were getting fewer in the
process of unchecked borrowing that was allowed, and the most
valuable of them disappeared fifty years ago— the one where a full