ging their emigration, try to get rid of
the breed."

This fervency is all along of the question whether the Picts, or Piks,
as Pinkerton chooses to call them, were Celts or Goths. If we turn to
the books of his opponent on this question, Joseph Ritson, we find him
paid back in his own coin, and that so genuine, that, on reading about
gross ignorance, falsehood, and folly, one would think he was still
enjoying Pinkerton's own flowers of eloquence, were it not that the
tenor of the argument has somehow turned to the opposite side. I drop
into the note below a specimen from the last words of this controversy,
as characteristic of the way in which it was conducted, and a sample of
the kind of dry fuel which, when ignited by these incendiaries, blazed
into so much rage.[72]

[Footnote 72: "See Pinkerton's Enquiry, i. 173, &c., 369. He explains
the _Vecturiones_ of Marcellinus, '_Vectveriar_, or _Pikish_ men, as,'
he untruly says, 'the Icelandic writers call them in their Norwegian
seats _Vik-veriar_,' and, either ignorantly or dishonestly to
countenance this most false and absurd hypothesis, corrupts the Pihtas
of the Saxons into Pihtar, a termination impossible to their language.
It is true, indeed, that he has stumbled upon a passage in Rudbeck's
Atlantica, i. 672, in which that very fanciful and extravagant writer
speaks of the _Packar_, _Baggar_, _Paikstar_, _Baggeboar_, _Pitar_, and
_Medel Pakcar_, whom he pretends '_Britanni_ vero _Peiktar_ appellant,
et _Peictonum_ tam eorum qui in Galliis quam in Britannia resident
genitores faciunt.' He finds these Pacti also in the Argonauticks, v.
1067; and his whole work seems the composition of a man whom 'much
learning hath made mad.'"--Ritson's Annals of the Caledonians, &c., i.
81.]

Ritson was a man endowed with almost superhuman irritability of temper,
and he had a genius fertile in devising means of giving scope to its
restless energies. I have heard that it was one of his obstinate
fancies, when addressing a letter to a friend of the male sex, instead
of using the ordinary prefix of Mr or the affix Esq., to use the term
"Master," as Master John Pinkerton, Master George Chalmers. The
agreeable result of this was, that his communications on intricate and
irritating antiquarian disputes were delivered to, and perused by, the
young gentlemen of the family, so opening up new little intricate
avenues, fertile in controversy and misunderstanding. But he had another
and more