HE early part of the Literary History of Scotland is involved in much oh scurity, and has not been investigated with a due share either of care or of candour. Many eminent writers who adorned the reigns of the Stuarts du ring the fifteenth and sixteenth centu ries, are now in a great measure unknown or forgotten. The difficulties these early writers had to encounter, from the limited sources of information which they possessed, — the absence of authentic records to guide them in their researches, — the romantic and fabulous times of which they wrote, — and the want of science to operate as a check up on credulity, seem entirely to have escaped those critics by whom their labours have been depreciated, and their claims to the gratitude of posterity denied.