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OF THE DUtJlDS. 151chair, was thought to emit a sound under therij^htful candidate (a thing easily nianag'd by theDruids), but to be mute under a man of none ora bad title, that is,of those priests.one who was not for the turnEvery one has read of Memnon'svocal statue in Egypt. This fatal stone was superstitiouslysent toconfirm the Irish colony inthe north of Great Britain, where itcontinued asthe coronation-seat of the Scottish kings, evenf^ince Christianity; till, in the year 1300, EdwardThe Irish pretend to have memoirs concerning it for above 2003years : nay Ireland itself is sometimes, from this stone, by thepoets call'd Inis-fail. But how soon they begun to use it, orwhence they had it, lyes aUogether in the dark. What's certainis, that after having long continued at Tarab, it was, for thepurpose I have mentioned, sent to Fergus, the first actual kingof Scots ; and that it lay in Argile (the original seat of the Scotsin Britain) till, about the year of Christ 842, that Keneth the 2d,the son of Alpin, having inlarg'd his borders hy the conquest ofthe Picts, transferr'd this stone, for the same purpose as before,to Scone. So great respect is still paid by christians to a heathenprophesy ! not onely false in fact, as I have this moment prov'd ;but evidently illusory and equivocal, it being a thing most difficultto find any prince in Europe, who, some way or other, maynot claim kindred of every other princely race about him, andconsequently be of that blood. This is the case of our presentsoverain King Gtorge, who is indeed descended of the Scottishrace, but yet in propriety of speech is not of the Scottish line ;but the first here of the Brunswick line, as others begun the Brif«.tish, Saxon, Danish, Saxo-Danlsh, Norman, Saxo-Norraan, andScottish lines. Yet this not being the sense in which the Irishand Scots understand the oracle, they ought consequently at thisvery time to loc>k upon it as false and groundless.