of political forgeries of our own, which have
been sometimes referred to as genuine, but which are the inventions of
wits and satirists! Bayle ingeniously observes, that at the close of
every century such productions should be branded by a skilful
discriminator, to save the future inquirer from errors he can hardly
avoid. "How many are still kept in error by the satires of the sixteenth
century! Those of the present age will be no less active in future ages,
for they will still be preserved in public libraries."

The art and skill with which some have fabricated a forged narrative
render its detection almost hopeless. When young Maitland, the brother
to the secretary, in order to palliate the crime of the assassination of
the Regent Murray, was employed to draw up a pretended conference
between him, Knox, and others, to stigmatise them by the odium of
advising to dethrone the young monarch, and to substitute the regent for
their sovereign, Maitland produced so dramatic a performance, by giving
to each person his peculiar mode of expression, that this circumstance
long baffled the incredulity of those who could not in consequence deny
the truth of a narrative apparently so correct in its particulars! "The
fiction of the warming-pan enclosing the young Pretender brought more
adherents to the cause of the Whigs than the Bill of Rights," observes
Lord John Russell.

Among such party narratives, the horrid tale of the bloody Colonel Kirk
has been worked up by Hume with all his eloquence and pathos; and, from
its interest, no suspicion has arisen of its truth. Yet, so far as it
concerns Kirk, or the reign of James the Second, or even English
history, it is, as Ritson too honestly expresses it, "an impudent and a
bare-faced lie!" The simple fact is told by Kennet in a few words: he
probably was aware of the nature of this political fiction. Hume was
not, indeed, himself the fabricator of the tale; but he had not any
historical authority. The origin of this fable was probably a pious
fraud of the Whig party, to whom Kirk had rendered himself odious; at
that moment stories still more terrifying were greedily swallowed, and
which, Ritson insinuates, have become a part of the history of England.
The original story, related more circumstantially, though not more
affectingly, nor perhaps more truly, may be found in Wanley's "Wonders
of the Little World,"[86] which I give, relieving it from the
tediousness of old Wanley.

A govern