SCOTLAND HAD POSSESSED a talented community of historians since at least the fourteenth century. This was the firm belief of most early modern Scottish historians. It was also one which was apparently without respect to the spirit of bigotry and dissension which otherwise seems to have scarred the acrimonious scholarship of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Not until the middle years of the eighteenth century, and even then not completely, was the glory of this older Scottish tradition of historical writing finally obscured by the triumphal modernism and polished sensibilities of what presented itself as a self-consciously new and enlightened age. Hitherto, it had been clear to Scottish historians of all affiliations that they were collectively the inheritors of a proud and distinguished national tradition of scholarship. This had begun as early as 1370 with John Fordun and his Scotichronicon. It had been sustained by a lineal succession of historians like Hector Boece, John Major and George Buchanan, unsurpassed, it was invariably claimed, in the field of European letters. In the eyes of William Nicolson, a perceptive and widely read Bishop of Carlisle writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it seemed ‘very strange and unaccountable ‘ that ‘ such mighty Heroes in Learning, to whom the old Romans or Athenians would have erected Altars, should want even the cheap Acknowledgments of a Paper-Monument’. Likewise, George Mackenzie, his contemporary and a voracious student of his own nation's literary heritage, lamented that Scotsmen had been ‘so unjust to their Memories and to our Posterity’. These wistful reflections, however, seem to have been only a more devious attempt to win wider recognition for Scotland's literary achievements ; or else, perhaps, a crude device to stir up public enthusiasm for their own bibliographical activities. There is in fact no sign that Scottish authors themselves, at least until the middle of the eighteenth century, were at all reticent in lavishing praise on their scholarly forebears. Indeed the pompous Earl of Cromarty was probably typical with his defiant claim in 1695 that ‘our Scots Writers’ were of outstanding quality, and ‘justly placed in the first Rank’.