[ee ee 
they fupplicd the * later bar"s and Keating with materials for en- 
larging the Milefian tale, which they adorned with poetical 
feraps and inventions of their own. Of found judgment, un- 
warped by falfe patriotifin ‘or national prejudice, the learned 
Bartholine defires his readers to be extremely } cautious in ftudy- 
ing the Icelandic hiftorians, and ‘not to be impofed on by 
their Fornum Bokum, or old books, nor by their Fornum Sagum, 
or antient traditions, for he found both ftuffed with abfurdities 
and fictions. Let us with the fame caution examine our fe- 
nachies, elfe we may embrace puerile ftories and idle fiCtions, 
rivalling the Fornum Bokum or Fornum Sagum of Iceland. 
Wuar a deplorable inftance then is it‘of mental debility and 
mifapplied erudition to defend fictions, confefled tobe fuch by 
“‘thofe who record them ? Nennius, though he gives us the Milefian 
tale, and is the oldeft relater of it, yet tells us, there was no cer- 
tain hiftory of the { origin of the Scots. ‘How can the effet of 
this candid confeffion be evaded? He confulted peri- 
tifimos Scotoruam ——-— the moft {kilful Irifh Antiquaries, and 
they told him the ftory of Pharoah’s fon in-law, his expulfion 
from Egypt, his travels through Africa to Spain, and from thence 
to Ireland, and all this two thoufand years. after the deftruc- 
tion of the Egyptians in the Red fea, If this was the ftate of 
Irifh hiftory in the ninth century, and fuch the materials for 
it, was time or inquiry likely to improve either, particularly 
as 
* O’Flaher. Ogyg. vind. p. 257. 
+ Plurima itaque cautela in libris veteribus Iflandicis utendum eft, neque abiis protinus 
nobis imponi patiamur, &c. De contemp. Mort. p. 191. 
+ Nulla tamen certa hiftoria osiginis Scotorum reperitur. Nenn. p. 102. Edit. Bertram. 
