X THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF MICHAEL SCOT 



My study of the life and times of Scot thus 

 resumed its natural tendency towards an in- 

 dependent form, there being no text known to me 

 that could in any way supply the want of an 

 original biography. It is for the reader to judge 

 how far the boldness of such an attempt has been 

 justified by its success. The difficulties of the 

 task have certainly been increased by the want of 

 any previous collections that could be called satis- 

 factory. Boece, Dempster, and Naude yield little 

 in the way of precise and instructive detail ; their 

 accounts of Scot fall to be classed with that of 

 Baldi as partly incorrect and partly commonplace. 

 Schmuzer alone seems by the title of his work 1 

 to promise something more original. Unfortunately 

 my attempts to obtain it have been defeated by the 

 great rarity of the volume, which is not to be found 

 in any of the libraries to which I have access. 



This failure in the department of biography 

 already formed has obliged me to a more exact and 

 extensive study of original manuscript sources for 

 the life of Scot than I might otherwise have thought 

 necessary, and has proved thus perhaps rather of 

 advantage. It is inevitable indeed that a work of 

 this kind, undertaken several ages too late, should 

 be comparatively barren in those dates and intimate 

 details which are so satisfactory to our curiosity 

 when we can fall upon them. In the absence of 

 these, however, our attention is naturally fixed, 

 and not, as it seems to me, unprofitably, on what 



1 De Michaele Scoto Veneficii injuste damndto, Lipsiae, 1739. 



