5

OF THE DRUms. 151
chair, was thought to emit a sound under the
rightful candidate (a thing easily manag'd by the
Druids), but to be mute under a man of none or
a bad title, that is, one who was not for the turn
of those priests. Every one has read of Memnon's
vocal statue in Egypt, This fatal stone was superstitiously
sent to
confirm the Irish colony in
the north of Great Britain, where it
continu'd as
the corOnation-seat of the Scottish kings, even
since Christianity; till, in the year 1300, Edward
The Irish pretend to have memoirs concerning it for above 2000
years: nay Ireland itself is sometimes, from this stone, by the
poets call'd Inis-fail. But how soon they begun to use it, or
whence they had it, lyes altogether in the dark. What's certain
is, that after having long continu'd at Tarab, it was, for the
purpose I have mentioned, sent to Fergus, the first actual king
of Scots ; and that it lay in Argile (the original seat of the Scots
in Britain) till, about the year of Christ 842, that Keneth the 2d,
the SOB of Alpin, having inlarg'd his borders by the conquest of
the Picts, transferr'd this stone, for the same purpose as before,
to Scone. So great respect is still paid by christians to a heathen
prephesy ! not onely false in fact, as I have this moment prov'd j
but evidently illusory and equivocal, it being a thing most difficult
to find any prince ia Europe, who, some way or other, may
not claim kindred of every other princely race about him, and
consequently be of that blood. This is the case of our present
soverain King George, who is indeed descended of the Scottish
raccj but yet in propriety of speech is not of the Scottish line;
but the first here of the Brunswick line, as others begun the Brit,
tish, SaxoD, Danish, Saso-Danish, Norman, Sazo-Norman, arid
Scottish lines. Yet this not being the sense in which the Irish
and Scots understand the oralcle, they ought consequently at this
very time to look upon it as false and groundjess.