Bahu, bahu, little nursling—

Oh! so tender now and weak;

I fear the day will never brighten

When revenge for him you’ll seek.

Ochan, Ochan, Ochan uiri,

Though I cry, my child, with thee—

Ochan, Ochan, Ochan uiri

Yet he hears not thee nor me.

We pass by the few existing lines of Bishop Carsewell and Sir John

Stewart of Appin, who both lived in the sixteenth century, and forthwith

emerge upon the new time, the era of modern Gaelic poetry. Almost

simultaneously in Scotland and Ireland, a great change took place in the

form and complexion of this vernacular poetic literature. From the early

part of the seventeenth century, the intricate metres and technicalities

of the old bardic system, which had been in vogue for a thousand years,

began to be discarded and superseded, and more freedom in versifying

introduced. Dr. Douglas Hyde sums up the principles of this new

departure in two sentences: first, the adoption of vowel rhyme in place

of consonantal rhyme; second, the adoption of a certain number of

accents in each line in place of a certain number of syllables. And in

consequence of these changes, he holds that the Gaelic poetry of the

last two centuries is probably the most sensuous attempt to convey music

in words ever made by man. He who has once heard it and remains deaf to

its charm can have little heart for song or soul for music. It is

absolutely impossible, he says, to convey the lusciousness of sound,

richness of rhythm, and perfection of harmony in another language. The

sweetest creation of all Gaelic literature, this new outburst of lyric

melody was a wonderful arrangement of vowel sounds, so placed that in

every accented syllable, first one vowel and then another fell upon the

ear in all possible kinds of harmonious modifications. Some verses are

made wholly on the à sound, others on the ò, ù, è, or ì sounds, but the

majority on a unique and fascinating intermixture of two, three, or

more; as, for example, in Mary Macleod’s vowel-rhyming over the drowning

of Mac-Ille Chalum in the angry Minch between Stornoway and Raasay:—

Mo bhèud, ’s mo bhròn,

Mar dh’eirich dhò

Muir beucach, mòr,

Ag leum mu d’bhòrd,

Thu féin, ’s do shèoid

’Nuair reub ’ur seòil,

Nach d’fhaod sibh treòir

A chaitheadh orr.

’S e an sgeul’ craiteach

Do’n mhnaoi a d’fhag thu,

’S do t-aon bhrathair,

A shuidh na t’aite,

Diluain Càisge,

Chaidh tonn bàit ort,

Craobh a b’aird’ de’n ubhal thu.

To give the effect in English the original has been somewhat freely,

though not quite accurately, rendered thus:—

My grief, my pain,

Relief was vain

The seething wave

Did leap and rave

And reeve in twain,

Both sheet and sail,

And leave us bare

And foundering.

Alas! indeed,

For her you leave.

Your brother’s grief

To them will cleave.

It was on Easter

Monday’s feast

The branch of peace

Went down with you.

It has been acknowledged even by Dr. Hyde, one of our greatest Irish

authorities of the present, that the Scottish Gaels led the way in this

great change that transformed the Celtic poetry of both Islands, and to

Mary Macleod, popularly known as “Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh,” has

been assigned the honour of being the first of the modern Highland bards

to inaugurate the new system.

Before her day most of the Gaelic poetry was Ossianic, or of uncertain

authorship; fugitive, and generally in the ancient style. The poets were

bound by the rules of their order, and to excel within the very narrow

limits of the old-world prosody, hedged about as it was with so many

technicalities, required years of severe bardic study and preparation.

Mary, apparently without any tuition, without even the power to read or

write, suddenly burst these unnatural bonds asunder, and gave to the

spirit of her poetry the freedom of the elements, unhampered and

unfettered by the intricate metres of the Schools. She invented rhythms

of her own, often making the music of sound an echo of the sense. And

from her time scores of new and brilliant metres have made their

appearance.

Only a few biographical details of this remarkable woman are known, but

they are characteristic, and extremely interesting, revealing a

personality outside the common order of Highland intellect. Born in

Roudal, Harris, in the year 1569, she was the daughter of Alexander

Macleod, son of Alasdair Ruadh, a descendant of the chief of that

distinguished clan; and at an early age, apparently, she became a nurse

in the family of the Macleods at Dunvegan Castle. Though otherwise

illiterate, the poetic Mary must have derived some culture,

independently of book learning, from her association with the chiefs and

their following in the ancestral home where, nearly 200 years

afterwards, Dr. Johnson and his friend were so hospitably entertained.

In the course of her long career, for she lived to be 105 years old, she

nursed no less than five lairds of the Macleods,[32] and two of the

lairds of Applecross.

There is no evidence that she was much addicted to the making of poetry

until somewhat advanced in life. It was then at least that she composed

those pieces that have survived and made her name illustrious in

Highland literature. Most of them have reference to events that happened

in the Macleod family.

Thus the song, “An Talla ’m bu ghna le Mac Leoid,” was produced

extempore during the last illness of one of the lairds. Happening to ask

Mary facetiously what kind of a lament she would make for him after he

was gone, she declared in response that it would be a very mournful one.

“Come nearer me,” said the aged chief, “and let me hear part of it,”

whereupon the clever bardess sang this pathetic dirge. The power of

extemporising poetical compositions still lingers in the Highlands.

Again, “Hithill, uthill agus hò,” owes its existence to the gift of a

snuff-mull bestowed on Mary by a son of Sir Norman.

All her barderie, however, did not suit the proud chief of Dunvegan, who

objected to the scope of the publicity he and his menage received at the

hands of the family nurse, exercising, as she freely did, the privileges

of the poet. And therefore he banished her to the island of Mull, under

the care of a relative.

But if one song sent her away, another brought her back. It was hard to

be exiled from Eilean-a-Cheo, and the castled seat of the clan, and so

seizing the opportunity which the advent of the young laird’s birthday

offered, she composed the now well-known “Luinneag Mhic Leoid,” or “Ode

to Macleod,” in which she presented a portrait so flattering that the

stubborn chief relented and sent a boat to bring her back, on condition

that henceforth she should no more exercise her gift of song. The

delighted poetess readily assented.

Yet even on the way from Mull to Skye she could not restrain the poetic

afflatus, and though for a time after her return she kept her word, as

Blackie says, “a bird is a bird and will sing”; and Mary Macleod, this

irrepressible daughter of the red-haired clansman, once more incurred

the displeasure of her chief by composing a new poem on the recovery of

his son from some illness; and in extenuation of the charge laid against

her, she naively maintained, “It is not a song; it is only a crònan,”

that is, a crooning.

The ode she produced in Mull in the days of dreary exile is one of the

finest of her poems; wild and beautiful, with a very peculiar charm. It

generally appears in all the best collections of Gaelic songs, and has

been translated into English verse both by Pattison and Blackie. The

rendering of the latter is, perhaps, the more euphonious, and brings out

better the repetition at the beginning of each stanza, as:—

I sit on a knoll,

All sorrowful and sad,

And I look on the grey sea

In mistiness clad,

And I brood on strange chances

That drifted me here,

Where Scarba and Jura

And Islay are near.

Where Scarba and Jura

And Islay are near;

Grand land of rough mountains,

I wish thee good cheer,

I wish young Sir Norman

On mainland and islands

To be named with proud honour,

First chief of the Highlands!

To be praised with proud honour

First chief of the Highlands,

For wisdom and valour,

In far and nigh lands;

For mettle and manhood

There’s none may compare

With the handsome Macleod

Of the princeliest air.

And the blood through his veins,

That so proudly doth fare,

From the old Kings of Lochlann

Flows richly and rare.

Each proud earl in Alba

Is knit with his line,

And Erin shakes hands with him

Over the brine.

And Erin shakes hands with him

Over the brine;

Brave son of brave father,

The pride of his line,

In camp and in council

Whose virtue was seen,

And his purse was as free

As his claymore was keen.

· · · · ·

With my heart I thee worship

Thou shapeliest Knight,

Wellgirt in the grace

Of the red and the white;

With an eye like the blaeberry

Blue on the brae,

And cheeks like the haws

On the hedge by the way.

With a cheek like the haws

On the hedge by the way,

’Neath the rarest of locks

In rich curly display;

And the guest in thy hall

With glad cheer shall behold

Rich choice of rare armour

In brass and in gold, etc.

It needs some of Mary’s own imagination to picture her going about in

after days wearing a tartan _tonnag_, fastened in front with a large

silver brooch, and carrying a silver-headed cane. Hardy to a degree in

mind and constitution, the venerable nurse and poetess, when long past

the natural span of years, was much given, we are told, to gossip,

snuff, and whisky. After her death, which took place at Dunvegan in

1674, she was buried in her native isle of Harris.

Mackenzie of “The Beauties” appraised this quaint personage as the most

original of all our poets, who borrowed nothing. Her thoughts, her

verse, and rhymes were all equally her own; her language simple and

elegant; her diction easy, natural, and unaffected. There is no

straining to produce effect; no search after unintelligible words to

conceal the poverty of ideas. Her thoughts flow freely, and her

versification runs like a mountain stream over a smooth bed of polished

granite. She often repeats her rhymes, as in the above instance, yet we

never feel them tiresome or disagreeable, for, more than most of her

Gaelic compeers, Mary was mistress of the poetic lyre.

After her came another striking figure in the history of Highland bardic

literature. This was John Macdonald, the Lochaber poet, popularly known

as Iain Lom, probably from lack of hair either on his head or face, and

sometimes styled Iain Manntach, from an impediment in his speech.

Singular in these physical respects, he was no less remarkable for his

mental characteristics. A man of great force of character, he combined

in his personality the ardent poet and the keen politician, the

intuitive dreamer and the restless man of action.

Macdonald belonged to the Keppoch family, lived through the stirring

times of Charles I., Charles II., James II., the Revolution, and

subsequent reign of William and Mary, dying at an advanced age in 1710,

when Anne was on the throne.

This is the wonderful schemer whom some regard as the real genius of the

Montrose Campaign during the Civil War. Were it not for him, it is

certain, events could not have developed so favourably and so

brilliantly for the victorious Marquis as they did. Keen Jacobite as he

always was, he accompanied the latter on most of his marches, and it is

marvellous that the great Border minstrel, Sir Walter Scott, especially

in his account of the battle of Inverlochy in the _Legend of Montrose_,

makes no reference to him.

The Keppoch bard first came into prominence as a man to be reckoned

with, in connection with the murder of his chief, which, it is said he

foresaw, but was unable to avert. Sent abroad as a minor to be educated,

the heir of Keppoch was supplanted in his absence by his own faithless

and intriguing cousins, who murdered both him and his brother on their

return home. The dastardly crime rankled in the bosom of the fiery bard.

Among the faithless clansmen he alone remained fearlessly true to the

stricken family, and he determined to have revenge. “The Vow of Iain

Lom,” published in Mrs. D. Ogilvy’s _Highland Minstrelsy_, graphically

depicts his state of mind at the time. He went from house to house, and

castle to castle, calling for vengeance on the assassins, and having at

last obtained a commission from Government to take them dead or alive,

he first addressed himself to Glengarry, who declined the dangerous

task, and then to Sir Alexander Macdonald, who put a company of chosen

men at his disposal, the “Ciaran Mabach,” poet and soldier, at their

head.

Under the Keppoch bard’s directions the murderers were summarily

attacked and beheaded in their own barricaded house. A gruesome monument

of seven heads, representing those of the father and six sons, now marks

the well on Loch Oich side, known as _Tobar-nan-ceann_, where these

bleeding trophies are said to have been washed on their way to Glengarry

Castle, whence they were carried to Skye as a tribute to the Knight of

Sleat.

The bard has a poem on “Mort na Ceapach,” the murder of Keppoch; and

another entitled “A Bhean Leasaich,” in which he begins by praising Sir

Alexander Macdonald of Sleat and his son Sir James, evidently with the

intention of provoking Glengarry for his remissness in the matter of

retribution upon the usurpers. His own persecution by the traitors

furnished the poet with another theme. From this time he became a man of

mark in the Highlands, feared and respected. Though not a soldier

himself, when the Civil War broke out he identified himself with the

cause of the Stuarts, and was the means of bringing the armies of Argyll

and Montrose into deadly conflict at Inverlochy on February 2nd, 1645.

The wily John, a willing spectator, evaded taking a personal hand in the

encounter by the following ruse. When asked to make ready to march to

the fight, by the Macdonald commanding the Irish contingent, he slyly

replied, “If I go along with thee to-day, and fall in battle, who will

sing thy praises to-morrow? Go thou, Alasdair, and exert thyself as

usual, and I shall sing thy feats, and celebrate thy prowess in martial

strains.”

The result was that the bard feasted his eyes from a safe distance on

the disaster of the Campbells, with whom he was ever at feud, and moved

by all the passion and prejudice of the event composed the heroic

stanzas entitled, “The Battle of Inverlochy.” So realistic and graphic

is the description given in the original Gaelic that it seems to

photograph many of the details just as they happened. “The spirit of

poetry, the language, and boldness of expression,” says Mackenzie, with

perhaps the Celtic leaning to hyperbole, “have never been equalled.” Yet

to-day we read these vindictive strains with different feelings from

those that animated the bard.

A few verses may be quoted from the rendering of Professor Blackie,

which, though they lack the fire and intensity of the original, give a

good idea of the gist of the poem:—[33]

Did you hear from Cille Cummin

How the tide of war came pouring?

Far and wide the summons travelled,

How they drave the Whigs before them!

From the Castle tower I viewed it

High on Sunday morning early,

Looked and saw the ordered battle

Where Clan Donald triumphed rarely.

Up the green slope of Cuil Eachaidh

Came Clan Donald marching stoutly;

Churls who laid my home in ashes,

Now shall pay the fine devoutly!

· · · · ·

Many a bravely mounted rider,

With his back turned to the slaughter,

Where his boots won’t keep him dry now,

Learns to swim in Nevis water.

On the wings of eager rumour

Far and wide the tale is flying,

How the slippery knaves, the Campbells,

With their cloven skulls are lying!

O’er the frosted moor they travelled,

Stoutly with no thought of dying;

Where now many a whey-faced lubber,

To manure the fields is lying!

From the height of Tom-na-harry

See them crudely heaped together,

In their eyes no hint of seeing,

Stretched to rot upon the heather!

Warm your welcome was at Lochy,

With blows and buffets thickening round you,

And Clan Donald’s groovèd claymore,

Flashing terror to confound you!

Hot and hotter grew the struggle

Where the trenchant blade assailed them;

Sprawled with nails on ground Clan Duiné,

When the parted sinew failed them.

Many a corpse upon the heather,

Naked lay, once big with daring,

From the battle’s hurly-burly,

Drifting blindly to Blarchaorainn.

· · · · ·

If I could, I would be weeping

For your shame and for your sorrow,

Orphans’ cry and widows’ wailing,

Through the long Argyll to-morrow.

All this to the weird and exulting chorus:—

H-i rim h-ŏ-rò, h-ò-rò leatha,

H-i rim h-ŏ-rò, h-ò-rò leatha,

H-i rim h-ŏ-rò, h-ò-rò leatha,

Chaidh an la le Clann-Dòmhnuill.

His dangerous strategy and stinging sarcasm at length roused the Marquis

of Argyll to offer a reward for his head, and it is characteristic of

the impetuous John that he appeared in person in the audience-hall of

this mighty chief to claim it, relying for safety, no doubt, on the

sacred regard in which Highlanders always held the professional bard.

The Marquis received him courteously, and as they passed through a room

hung round with heads of moor-fowl, he asked him, “Have you ever seen,

John, so many black-cocks together?” “Yes,” he replied. “Where?” “At

Inverlochy.” “Ah! John,” muttered Argyll, “will you never cease gnawing

at the Campbells?” “I am only sorry,” added the implacable bard, “that I

cannot swallow them.”

For his services in the Stuart cause he was created Gaelic

poet-laureate, and received from Charles II. a yearly pension. Iain Lom

thus holds the unique distinction of having been the first and only

Gaelic poet-laureate. Altogether his poems would occupy a considerable

volume, though they have never been so issued.[34] Pattison has not

translated any, but Iain Lom has nevertheless obtained a well-merited

niche in Messrs. Blackie, the publishers, _Poets and Poetry of

Scotland_, 1876, compiled by James G. Wilson; and the romantic side of

his character is charmingly represented incidentally in Neil Munro’s

novel, entitled _John Splendid_.

Long after his death his Jacobite effusions still exercised a powerful

influence over his countrymen, counteracting in no small degree the

efforts of the Government to suppress the Stuart factions. “Children

were taught to lisp them,” says the _New Statistical Account of

Scotland_. “They were sung in the family circle on winter nights, and at

weddings, lykewakes, fairs, and in every company. They attributed to the

Stuarts and their adherents the most exalted virtues, and represented

their opponents as incarnate fiends. In 1745, Moidart and Kilmonivaig

were called ‘The Cradle of the Rebellion,’ and they were the very

districts where the songs of Iain Lom leavened the whole mass of society

with Jacobite sentiments.”

Mightier was the verse of Iain

Hearts to nerve, to kindle eyes,

Than the claymore of the valiant,

Than the counsel of the wise.

Contemporary with Iain Lom, and his confederate in bringing retribution

upon the Keppoch traitors, was a minor bard, known as Archibald

Macdonald, or “An Ciaran Mabach,” an illegitimate son of Sir Alexander

Macdonald, sixteenth baron of Sleat. In after life he lived in easy

circumstances, well adapted for the cultivation of his poetic tastes, on

an estate granted him in North Uist by his influential father, in return

for numerous services rendered as a sagacious and practical man of

affairs. Otherwise his life was uneventful and his poetry limited in

amount.

But the field held various other less prominent bards, for to this

period belonged several of those whose productions appear in the Fernaig

MS. of Duncan Macrae. Nor was the Highlands then lacking in poetesses.

Two at least figure in the record of the remembered.

Dorothy Brown, a native of Luing Island, Argyllshire, composed many

poems, of which perhaps that to Alasdair Maccolla is the only one now

extant, yet as a poetess she alone of women in that age approached the

standard of Mary Macleod.

Cicely Macdonald, her contemporary, was daughter of Ronald of Keppoch,

in youth a frolicsome maiden and clever at epigrams. Marrying a

gentleman of the Lovat family, she lived with him farther north, and

came to be known for her bardic gifts. Songs and laments were her chief

productions, but after her husband died at Inverness in a fit of

inebriety, she took to hymn-making. The names of her earlier pieces are

suggestive, such as: “Moràghach Mhic Shimidh,” “Slan gu bràth le ceòl na

clarsaich,” and “Alasdair a Glinne-Garaidh.” The latter beautiful one,

Mackenzie assures us, has served as a model for many Gaelic songs.

The next name in the succession is that of Nial Macvurich, family bard

and historian of Clanranald, distinguished also as a descendant, through

a long line of bardic ancestors, from the ancient and historic Muireach

Albannach, whose poetry figures in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. To

Nial we are indebted for the history of his illustrious clan, written in

Gaelic and preserved in the Red Book of Clanranald. But it is to be

regretted that of his own poems none is now extant, except two pieces

treasured in “The Beauties.” Solicitous to perpetuate the history and

ancient poetry of others, it appears that Nial took no thought for his

own to have them written down, and so they have mostly disappeared. He

lived to a great age, like the majority of these early Highland bards,

and was an old man living on his farm in South Uist at the time of the

first Jacobite rising in 1715.

Still another poet of Clanranald fame, John Macdonald, or Iain Dubh Mac

Iain ’Ic-Ailein, born about 1665, and resident in Eigg; and then we

reach the Aosdan Matheson, who was bard to the Earl of Seaforth in the

seventeenth century. Appurtenant to this post he held free lands in

Lochalsh, Ross-shire, and composed as many poems as would fill a large

volume, but most of these, like Nial Macvurich’s, and for the same

reason, have long been forgotten. One of those preserved has been very

freely rendered or imitated in English by Sir Walter Scott, under the

title “Farewell to Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail,” 1815.

The original verses are arranged to a beautiful Gaelic air, of which the

chorus is adapted to the double pull upon the oars of a galley, and

which is therefore distinct from the ordinary boat-songs. They were

composed on the occasion of the embarking at Dornie, Kintail, of the

Earl of Seaforth, who was obliged to take refuge in Spain, after an

unsuccessful effort in favour of the old Chevalier in 1718. Sir Walter’s

version runs thus:—

Farewell to Mackenneth, great Earl of the North,

The Lord of Lochcarron, Glenshiel, and Seaforth;

To the Chieftain this morning his course who began,

Launching forth on the billow his bark like a swan.

For a foreign land he has hoisted his sail,

Farewell to Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail!

O swift be the galley, and hardy her crew,

May her captain be skilful, her mariners true,

In danger undaunted, unwearied by toil,

Though the whirlwind should rise, and the ocean should boil;

On the brave vessel’s gunnel, I drank his bonail,

And farewell to Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail!

Awake in thy chamber, thou sweet southland gale!

Like the sighs of his people, breathe soft on his sail;

Be prolong’d as regret, that his vassals must know,

Be fair as their faith, and sincere as their woe;

Be so soft, and so fair, and so faithful, sweet gale,

Wafting onward Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail!

Be his pilot experienced, and trusty, and wise,

To measure the seas and to study the skies;

May he hoist all his canvas from streamer to deck,

But oh! crowd it higher when wafting him back—

Till the cliffs of Skooroora, and Conan’s glad vale,

Shall welcome Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail!

Hector Maclean, of the same period, was bard to Sir Lachlan Maclean of

Duart, from whom he had a small annuity. Two poems of his, the “Chief’s

Elegy” and “Song,” are reckoned among the beauties of Gaelic poetry, and

have also attracted the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who translated or

imitated in the abrupt style of the original a fragment of the latter,

entitled “War-Song of Lachlan, High-Chief of Maclean.” This song, like

many of the early Gaelic productions, makes a rapid transition from one

subject to another. From the situation of a forlorn maiden of the clan,

who opens with an address to her absent lover, it passes finally to an

eulogium over the martial glories of the chieftain. Thus:—

A weary month has wandered o’er

Since last we parted on the shore;

Heaven! that I saw thee, Love, once more,

Safe on that shore again!

’Twas valiant Lachlan gave the word;

Lachlan, of many a galley lord;

He call’d his kindred bands on board,

And launched them on the main.

Clan Gillian is to ocean gone,

Clan Gillian, fierce in foray known;

Rejoicing in the glory won

In many a bloody broil;

For wide is heard the thundering fray,

The rout, the ruin, the dismay,

When from the twilight glens away

Clan Gillian drives the spoil.

Woe to the hills that shall rebound

Our banner’d bagpipes’ maddening sound;

Clan Gillian’s onset echoing round,

Shall shake their inmost cell.

Woe to the bark whose crew shall gaze

Where Lachlan’s silken streamer plays!

The fools might face the lightning’s blaze

As wisely and as well!

Lachlan Mackinnon of Strath, Isle of Skye, is the next to figure in this

succession. Unlike so many of the others, he was not unlettered, nor

ignorant of such knowledge of the language as may be gleaned from a

critical study of its structure. Hence his Gaelic is wonderfully pure

and correct. In early life he filled the rôle of a strolling musician,

carrying his violin about with him from place to place, till certain

personal considerations obliged him to desist.

After him came a blind harper and a blind piper, both famous in Highland

minstrelsy. The harper was Roderick Morrison, son of an Episcopal

clergyman in the island of Lewis. He was born in the year 1646, and in

his boyhood had been sent along with his two brothers to be educated at

Inverness, all three having been destined by their father for the

ministry of the Church. But, unhappily, while there the youthful

islanders were seized with smallpox, which was then epidemic in the

town. His two brothers recovered from the effects of the dread scourge,

and afterwards became ministers, one at Contin, the other at Poolewe in

Ross-shire. Roderick himself was the chief sufferer, for not only was

his face disfigured and contracted, but he also lost the use of his

eyes. Incapacitated thus for a profession, he turned his attention to

music, and in addition to the skill he acquired in playing other

instruments, became an adept at the harp. Hence the name “An Clarsair

Dall,” by which he was generally known throughout the Highlands.

Visiting Ireland, it is thought he profited by tuition from his

fellow-harpers there, who had achieved fame in that form of minstrelsy;

and on his return to Scotland he took occasion to call at every baronial

residence on the way to exhibit his art. It so happened at the time that

many of the Scotch nobility and gentry were at the Court of King James

in Holyrood, Edinburgh, and thither the blind musician wended his way,

where he found an excellent friend in the person of the Highland

chieftain, John Breac Macleod of Harris, who readily engaged him as his

family harper.

While holding this office Morrison composed several beautiful tunes and

songs, living the life of a farmer at Totamòr in Glenelg, on a piece of

land which his patron granted him rent-free. On the death of the latter

he returned to his native island, and died there in a good old age, and

was buried in a country churchyard near Stornoway.

Morrison was a poet of power and culture. His elegy, “Creach nan

Ciadan,” on the chieftain who befriended him, is reckoned one of the

most pathetic, plaintive, and heart-touching of Highland laments.

The blind piper, John Mackay of Gairloch, was a contemporary, though

twenty years his junior. Like his father before him, who hailed from the

Reay country, this Mackay was born blind. Taught music first of all

under the paternal roof, he was sent later on to the Isle of Skye to

perfect his studies under the direction of the celebrated Mac Crimmon.

There he excelled all other pupils, and soon learned to compose

pipe-music himself. In fact, it is recorded that one of the Mac

Crimmons, jealous of his powers as a pipe-music composer, bribed some of

the youths to throw him over a precipice, which they did one day, the

blind stripling falling a distance of twenty-four feet, but without

physical hurt. The rock is still known as “Leum an Doill,” or “The Blind

Man’s Leap,” since he had the good fortune to land on his soles.

After seven years’ tuition in Skye he returned to his native parish,

succeeding his father as family piper to the Laird of Gairloch, and

subsequently marrying. Numerous pibrochs, strathspeys, reels, and jigs

are placed to his credit. When at length he was superannuated on a small

but competent annuity, the old man used to pass his time visiting

gentlemen’s houses in the Reay country and the island of Skye. On one of

these peregrinations in Sutherlandshire he composed the beautiful

pastoral “Coire an Easain,” lamenting Lord Reay. Of this poem Mackenzie

says, “It is not surpassed by anything of the kind in the Celtic

language—bold, majestic, and intrepid, it commands admiration at first

glance, and seems on a nearer survey of the entire magnificent fabric as

the work of some supernatural agent.” Could Highland admiration go

farther?

The “Piobaire Dall” lived till he was about ninety-eight years of age,

and sleeps with his father Ruairidh Dall within the clachan of his

native parish in the west.

Other minor bards of the period were, John Whyte, William Mackenzie,

John Maclean, Malcolm Maclean, the poet Macdonald of Muck, who composed

the “Massacre of Glencoe,” Angus Macdonald, Hector Macleod, Archibald

Macdonald, and Zachary Macaulay.

Archibald Macdonald excelled as a comic bard—one of the few that

Highland Gaeldom has produced. His “Elegy” on Roy while living—a piper

and favourite companion of his own—and his “Resurrection” of the same

individual, are counted very clever. He it was who composed the famous

satire, “Tha biodag air Mac Thomàis,” which, when played at a wedding

memorable in Highland history, ended so tragically for the player, and,

indeed, for Mac Thomàis himself, the alleged heir to the Lovat estates,

who had to fly from the country, and whose descendants have on more than

one occasion in recent times contested the right of the present Lovat

family to the ancient inheritance.

Tradition still pathetically relates how on that occasion, enraged at

the playing of the piece which so cleverly satirised himself, this young

Master of Lovat stabbed the bag of the piper, to silence it, with his

biodag, but the weapon entered the player’s heart also, and bag and

piper both collapsed with a mournful groan.

Zachary Macaulay is worthy of note on another account. From his family

was descended the brilliant Lord Macaulay, so famous in letters, and it

may very well have been from this source that the gifted essayist and

historian derived his vivid pictorial style. Zachary was born in the

island of Lewis early in the eighteenth century, and was the son of an

accomplished Episcopalian clergyman there. His productions as a poet

exhibit true bardic power, though he is believed in his youth to have

been given to writing wanton songs. The air of one of his popular pieces

was in after days a great favourite with Burns.

Two major bards remain to be noticed, who lived partly before and partly

after the Forty-five—John Maccodrum and Alexander Macdonald. The latter,

the more distinguished of the two, claims fuller mention hereafter.

Meanwhile, no more fitting subject might be found wherewith to conclude

this chapter than an account of the original and witty Maccodrum, with

examples of his poems.

Born in North Uist, he became in manhood bard to Sir James Macdonald of

Sleat, who died at Rome in 1766. It was a curious circumstance that

first commended him to the notice of this nobleman. The poet happened to

make a satire on the tailors of the Long Island, who were so exasperated

that they refused one and all to make him any clothing. Consequently he

went about for a time in tatters, and meeting Sir James one day, the

latter naturally inquired the reason why his trousers were so ragged.

Maccodrum explained, and was asked to repeat the offending verses. On

complying he was there and then promoted to be bard to the family, and

obtained, as was usual in such circumstances, free lands on the estate

for his maintenance.

A lively wit and biting sarcasm seem to have been characteristics of

Maccodrum’s Muse. Yet he could be very tender, as on the occasion when

he laments the untimely death of his patron, at the early age of

twenty-five. Then was the bard unusually serious and even pious:—

As I awake it is not sleep

That strives with me in troubles deep;

My bed beneath the tears I weep

Is in disquiet;

My bed beneath, etc.

Of him, my patron bright, bereft,

I have no fair possession left;

While pain of loss my soul has cleft

In sight and hearing;

While pain of loss, etc.

Sore tears are ours; joy is no more,

No hope of smiles; no cheer in store;

We seem like the brave Fianns of yore

And Finn forsaken;

We seem like the brave Fianns, etc.

Ah! true it seems the tale to tell;

Our cup is filled with doings fell;

Provoking in a rage of hell

Bless’d God the Highest;

Provoking in a rage, etc.

Blest One, from Thee let us not swerve;

Above with Thee he goes to serve;

O Christ! do Thou for us preserve

Our loving brothers;

O Christ! do thou for us preserve, etc.

Maccodrum was deemed a witness of no mean weight in the Ossianic

controversy, on the strength of the following statement by Sir James

Macdonald, in a letter dated from Skye, October 10th, 1763. Addressing

Dr. Blair, on that occasion he writes: “The few bards that are left

among us repeat only detached pieces of the Ossianic poems. I have often

heard them and understood them, particularly from one man, called John

Maccodrum, who lives on my estate in North Uist. I have heard him repeat

for hours together poems which seemed to me to be the same with

Macpherson’s translations.”

The bard once met the hero of Ossianic fame when the latter had gone to

the Outer Hebrides to collect fragments of ancient poetry. From

Lochmaddy, Macpherson happened to be travelling across the moor towards

the seat of the younger Clanranald of Benbencula, and falling in with a

native, he took occasion to ask him if he had anything on the Feinn.

This man, who was none other than the quick-witted and sarcastic

Maccodrum, taking advantage of Macpherson’s badly expressed and

ambiguous Gaelic, retorted literally to the effect that the Feinn did

not owe him anything, and even if they did, it were vain to ask for

payment now. Unaware of the personality of the bard, and direly offended

at the character of the reply, which reflected on his own knowledge of

the language, the proud collector passed on his way without more ado.

Both men thus met and parted as ignorant of each other as ships that

pass in the night.

Maccodrum’s poems have never been published separately. A few appeared

in Alexander Macdonald’s collection. Many of the rest, entrusted to

memory, are now merged in oblivion. He had not the versatility either of

Mary Macleod or of Alexander Macdonald, for he sometimes imitates the

poems of bards more original than himself, yet in purity and elegance of

language he frequently approaches Macdonald. His satire on “Donald

Bain’s Bagpipe,” and his poems on “Old Age” and “Whisky,” are considered

excellent, witty, ingenious, and original. And “Smeorach

Chlann-Domhnuill,” or “The Mavis of Clan Donald,” which has been

rendered into English verse by Professor Blackie, is a delightful pæan

in praise of his own native Uist.

The Mavis of Pabal am I; in my nest

I lay long time with my head on my breast,

Dozing away the dreary hour,

In the day that was dark, and the time that was sour.

But now I soar to the mountain’s crest,

For the chief is returned whom I love best;

In the face of the sun, on the fringe of the wood,

Feeding myself with wealth of good.

On the tip of the twigs I sit and sing,

And greet the morn on dewy wing,

And fling to the breeze my dewy note,

With no ban to my breath, and no dust in my throat.

Every bird will praise its own nest,

And why shall not I think mine the best?

Land of strong men and healthy food,

And kindly cheer, and manners good.

A land that faces the ocean wild,

But with summer sweetness, mellow and mild,

Calves, lambs, and kids, full many a score,

Bread, milk, and honey piled in the store.

A dappled land full sunny and warm,

Secure and sheltered from the storm,

With ducks and geese and ponds not scanted,

And food for all that live to want it, etc.

The poet, apparently, made the most of his own rugged island, and now

lies buried in an old churchyard not far from the village of Houghary,

where a rough boulder of gneiss, of uneven, battered surface, spotted

with nodules, but without any inscription, marks his grave. He himself,

while living, had picked it out from the beach and destined it for this

purpose.

The Highland bards before the Forty-five were thus a goodly company, and

they had this in common, that they were independent for the most part of

writing, in some cases even of education; yet they had a wonderful

command of their native Gaelic, and an extraordinary ear for the

beauties of sound that may be expressed through the medium of language.

They were all more or less attached to chiefs, whose praises they sang,

and almost without exception these early bards lived into an extreme old

age, and died in the land they had never left, and among the friends

they had never forsaken.

CHAPTER XV

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH ON GAELIC LITERATURE

The origins of Celtic literature—Two streams—The Pagan—The

Christian—Influence of the early Celtic Church as patron of

letters—Originates a written literature—Attitude towards the

ancient sagas—Medieval obscurantism—The Dialogues between Ossian

and Patrick quoted and discussed—Their significance—Bishop

Carsewell and the Reformation—The rival influences of Naturalism

and the Church—Decline of Gaelic oral literature—The Nineteenth, a

century of gleaning rather than of great creative

work—Reasons—Present-day return to nature—Splendid services of

individual Churchmen.

As we work our way back through history towards the origins of Celtic

literature, we recognise two streams issuing from two very different

sources. One has its rise in pre-Christian times, welling up from the

pagan heart of the race from a remote antiquity. It is represented by

the sagas and the poetry that is mingled with them. These sagas breathe

the spirit of the Celtic people in the long past, and are the most

characteristic of all their literary products. So old are they, that

very few of them deal with events posterior to the eighth century, and

those that do are the less meritorious.

In this respect it may be said that the Celts produced their best

literature first. This literature was long in coming to the birth. It

took centuries to evolve. But when it did appear it proved a new

creation. The mind of a people lived in it, spoke through its tales.

Generations of ancestors, lost and speechless in the slumber of the

ages, found in it life and utterance.

So far as this stream has gained in volume through its course down the

centuries, it has done so by expansion. Each succeeding age harks back

to the past and draws from the original, imitating and transcribing,

until now in the great books of sagas and modern literature thereon, we

have a mighty river of Gaelic lore.

Yet nothing so original, nothing so characteristic in this line has ever

been added to the early contribution. The Celtic genius seems to have

found its fullest and most distinctive expression then, in the days

before writing, and before Christianity was introduced, and ever since

it has been drawing inspiration from its oldest creations.

Take away this stream, and the peculiar interest of Celtic literature is

gone. How many centuries the sagas were in the making before they took

final shape as we read them, can never be known. They passed from

generation to generation by oral delivery, and it was only in the

seventh or eighth century of our era that they ultimately found

embodiment in writing. This much can be inferred, though we have no

copies earlier than the end of the eleventh century and middle of the

twelfth, those from which these latter drew their texts having perished

long ago.

But as this stream flowed on from a past as remote and mysterious as the

sources of the Nile were in the days of Herodotus, suddenly a new and

independent one takes its rise. And this latter stream can be traced to

its source in the fifth century of our era. It emanated not, as in the

other case, from the pagan heart of the race in its more primitive

phase, but in that heart overtaken and surprised by the new doctrines of

Christianity.

This was really a new departure—a new beginning. The two streams had

little in common. In essence and colour they seemed as if they belonged

to two different worlds, which indeed was the case, in point of outlook

and underlying thought.

As literature the old was better. It represented the real quintessence

of the Celtic genius before it was diverted into new channels. And this

is what makes critics like M. Darmesteter, while fully admitting the

glorious significance of the new stream as a literary renaissance, yet

consider it a decadence in contrast with the earlier.

For all this, the far-reaching significance of the new creation must not

be lost sight of. It is probable that even then the ancient stream had

reached its full flood, and but for the advent of the latter, which came

with the new thought, it may have gradually subsided with the old order

and never have found a way to posterity.

Historically, then, it is with the introduction of Christianity that

Celtic literature first finds its embodiment, and when we consider the

condition of continental Europe at the time, this early beginning in the

writing of books is quite marvellous. It is to the Church, therefore, in

the person of its missionary pioneers, that we owe the initial force

that resulted in a written Gaelic literature.

In bringing Christianity to bear on the old pagan life and thought of

the race, the missionaries effected a reanimation, which brought latent

powers into action in a new direction. They furnished the people with

fresh ideas, new material for thought, and an entirely changed outlook.

The movement, indeed, might be described as the passage from Celtic

naturalism to Christian spiritualism. And when we consider what the old

paganism really was in many of its features, this emancipation cannot be

regarded in any other light than that in which history uniformly regards

it, as a salvation of the country, preparing the way for the realisation

of all those grand possibilities that lay in the future.

With the coming of St. Patrick Ireland entered upon a new epoch, and

with the advent of St. Columba the political and literary history of

Scotland may be said to have begun. Every credit is due to the Church,

therefore, as the importer and originator of a written literature, as

well as of a true religion. To it we owe the remarkable arrival of

letters which not only tapped a new fountain head, causing a new stream

of literary composition to flow, but which also secured for us the

preservation and continuance of the old to this day.

“Few forms of Christianity,” wrote Renan, “have offered an ideal of

Christian perfection so pure as the Celtic Church of the sixth, seventh,

and eighth centuries. Nowhere, perhaps, has God been better worshipped

in spirit than in those great monastic communities of Hy or Iona, of

Bangor, of Clonard, or of Lindisfarne.”

And it is this purity of motive and sincerity of purpose that led the

early missionaries, in contrast to the obscurantists of later ages, to

recognise the high value of literature and use it in the service of

religion. In the primitive Celtic Church we find no conflict between the

two, such as the sickly piety of some more modern periods has instituted

and maintained. Learning and culture were then never regarded as enemies

to religion. On the contrary, they were deemed not only helpful, but

even indispensable to the progress of Christianity in the land. And they

were encouraged as such. They were the most powerful agents for the

removal of racial ignorance, superstition, and prejudice.

All honour, therefore, to the Church that first kindled the lamp of

literature and the love of knowledge in these once dark islands.

The attitude of this early Celtic Church towards the original oral

traditions and compositions of the people was perfectly consistent, and

can be easily understood. It simply ignored them as far as that was

possible, offering in their stead a substitute infinitely better fitted,

as it thought, to elevate the life and character of these pagan peoples.

With a zeal that is entirely praiseworthy, it set itself to the

multiplication of copies of the Psalter, of the Gospels, and other parts

of Scripture. It is really marvellous, when we consider that these had

to be patiently and laboriously and beautifully handwritten, how much

was accomplished in this way by the early missionaries. St. Columba

alone was credited with having written “three hundred gifted, lasting,

illuminated, noble books,” all of them transcriptions of some portions

of the Bible, no doubt.

It is this which accounts for the fact that almost all the existing

literary monuments of the early Celtic Church are copies of the Gospels

or of the Psalter, with or without Gaelic or Latin glosses.

Thus the “Domhnach Airgid,” the “Cathrach,” the Books of Durrow, Dimna,

Kells, Molling, Armagh, Deer, the “Gospel of Maeielbrid Macdurnain,” the

“Psalter of Southampton,” with correlative books like the “Irish Canons”

and “Missal of Stowe,” in the British Islands, besides those on the

Continent.

It is significant that the missionaries used the Latin versions of the

Scriptures rather than Greek or Hebrew ones, with the reading and

writing of which latter they seemed to have been less familiar. They did

not attempt, so far as we know, to make a Gaelic translation of the

original, but contented themselves, no doubt, with rendering from Latin

into the Gaelic in course of their preachings and expositions.

One thing is evident, that these scholarly men had no aversion to

textual criticism or any fear of it, like so many of their Highland and

Irish successors to-day, for they freely indulged in it for their own

and the popular benefit. Thus the Celtic Church of Scotland and Ireland

had Jerome’s recension of the Vulgate almost as soon as it was issued,

and, to judge from the youthful Columba and his master St. Finnian’s

avidity for it, welcomed it with great enthusiasm. And more than that,

the Celtic Church appears to have collated Jerome’s text with older

native texts of their own, to make if possible even a better version,

such as they might use in all their monasteries, and such as we find to

this day in most of their great books of Gospel, as quoted above.

But in the same way that Knox unfortunately found it expedient to

destroy many beautiful buildings, books, and customs of the Roman

Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation, so the early Celtic

Church in conflict with an ancient and debasing paganism felt it

necessary, while tolerating many ancient customs and superstitions, to

resist the leaven of heathenism in every shade and form, and thus even

to ignore the compositions which breathed so freely its spirit and

atmosphere.

There is a high probability that the best minds felt the hardship of

having to turn their backs upon the most beautiful of these literary

products of their race. For example, in the “Dialogue of the Sages,”

found in the Book of Lismore, it is recorded that St. Patrick himself

felt rather uneasy at the delight with which he listened to the stories

of the ancient Feinn, and feared it might be wrong in him to enjoy or

show his appreciation of those pagan narratives, yet when he consulted

his guardian angels, they not only assured him that there was no harm in

listening to the tales, but even counselled him to have them written

down in the words of ollamhs, “for,” said they, “it will be a rejoicing

to numbers and to the good people to the end of time to listen to these

stories.”

The missionaries appear to have been too earnest and consistent in their

struggle with the gnarled roots of paganism to indulge their taste in

writing what they could not help admiring as tales of great literary

beauty, and very fascinating. And so for two or three centuries, though

the cultivation of writing and bardic compositions went steadily on,

none of the ancient pagan products found patrons sufficiently literary

to commit them to MSS.

The new school followed a style and trend of its own, and in addition to

endless transcribing, produced Latin prose works of its own, prominent

among which may be mentioned St. Patrick’s _Confession_, and “Epistle to

Coroticus,” Cummene’s and Adamnan’s _Lives of St. Columba_, Brendan’s

_Navigatio_ or _Voyaging_, each of which have had a wide vogue

throughout the Middle Ages, and since.

Among its Gaelic contributions are many beautiful poems, some of ancient

renown, on account of their theme or author, such as Dallan Forgaill’s

_Amra Choluimcille_, St. Columba’s own numerous lyrics—that on Derry, on

Cormac’s visit, his “Farewell to Ara,” all breathing love of nature and

affection for home.

Then we have the verses of Cennfaelad, who died in 678; Aengus the

Culdee’s “Feilire,” or Calendar, about 800; the poems in the Monastery

of St. Paul, Carinthia; and the verses in the Codex Boernerianus; the

“Saltair na Rann,” about the year 1000, a collection of 162 poems in

early middle Irish.

Of hymns and prayers, both in Gaelic and Latin—compositions of the early

Celtic Church—there is no lack. The most famous of the Latin ones are

those of Sechnall (on St. Patrick) and of Columcille (“The Altus,” “In

te Christo,” and “Noli Pater”); and of the Gaelic ones, St. Patrick’s

“Deer’s Cry,” Colman’s and Fiacc’s hymns, “Ninine’s Prayer,” Ultan’s and

Broccan’s hymns, both in praise of Brigit, “Adamnan’s Prayer,” and the

hymns of Sanctain and Mael-isu.

When to these we add specimens of homiletic literature and “Cormac’s

Glossary” (Cormac, King-Bishop of Cashel, 837–903), which is reckoned by

far the oldest attempt at a comparative vernacular dictionary made in

any language of modern Europe, and the same author’s “Saltair of

Cashel,” we have a very fair representation of what the new literature

initiated by the monks and missionaries contained.

It is mainly a religious literature, as contrasted with the purely pagan

war-stories and romances of the heroes. This ethical movement for a time

tended to supplant the natural spontaneous poetical output of the race,

yet it could not crush out these older creations, which were independent

of books and MSS., and as intense in feeling and true to nature as

anything which the classical literatures contain.

And so in course of time there came a reaction. The votaries of

naturalism so far triumphed in their zeal for the ancient sagas and

romances, that they began to have them written down. Zimmer thinks that

the earliest redaction of the “Táin Bó Chuailgné” dates from the seventh

century. But it is difficult to ascertain when the sagas first found

embodiment in ink. The interest in them appears to have been revived

immediately before or at the time when the Norsemen arrived and were

devastating the country. The devotion of the latter to the

characteristic sagas of their own race and nation may have quickened the

enthusiasm of the Gael for his own. And the new atmosphere which this

rough pagan element introduced to the land, breaking for a time the

influence and sway of the Church and of the men of learning in the

monasteries, may have conduced further to bring into popular favour the

old heroic war-poetry, nerving the heart of the people to withstand the

onslaught of the invader in the spirit of the dead heroes.

Christianity suffered eclipse for a while, and with it the interests of

learning and the religious literature, cultivated so assiduously in the

monasteries.

By the time that the sagas had come to be written down, the old feeling

which had prompted the early missionaries to ignore them was apparently

giving way, since there were scribes within the Church eager to commit

them to MS. This was a natural and inevitable reaction.

But monastic Christianity, ever on its guard against nature, was

constantly seeking after the strange and paradoxical. For it, abstinence

was worth more than enjoyment, happiness must be sought in its opposite.

And so there sprung up afresh, this time a more blind and uncompromising

orthodox antagonism to the early paganism and all its creations.

The Dialogues between Ossian and Patrick are our witness. These, while

professing to bring the spirit of paganism and of early Christianity

together in the person of the last great representative of the one and

the first of the other, were evidently the work of monkish scribes in

the twelfth century or earlier, and they throw a significant sidelight

on the situation. In reality they reflect the posture of affairs, not as

it was in the early days when Christianity was first introduced, but as

it existed later, when ecclesiastical doctrines had taken on their more

lurid, medieval colour.

In form and setting the Dialogues are the nearest approach to a drama

that the Gael has ever produced. And Miss Hull thinks that they were

designed simply to popularise the ancient tales. But such a view seems

to us to miss the whole aim and point of these compositions, which are

clearly the undisguised result of a reaction,—nay, even revolt in the

minds of thoughtful and patriotic men, monks or clerics or laymen,

against the narrow and captious spirit that can see no good in any form

of natural life and religion other than the contracted faith in which it

was itself reared.

Evidently the Church had descended from the high level of faith and

policy it had maintained in the days of St. Patrick and St. Columba, and

measures which the latter had found necessary as temporary expedients

till the need for them had vanished, smaller minds had elevated into

principles; and even the simple tenets of Christianity they had

distorted by casting them into an ecclesiastical mould, and opposing

them to the most natural instincts and enthusiasms of the human heart.

The writers of the Dialogues, we can see, are thoroughly in earnest, and

not sparing in their irony and banter of the grim theology which found

no place for the natural virtues of the Celts, or for the story of the

dreams and ideals of a thousand years. A mocking, derisive humour runs

through these pieces, but the humour is all on one side. There can be no

mistaking the sympathies of the writers, who themselves are

intellectually emancipated from the narrow tenets and intolerant spirit

that would consign the heroes without reflection and without scruple to

endless pain.

In these Dialogues paganism at its best is brought face to face with

ecclesiastical Christianity, and is made to appear more just, more

humane, and desirable in every way.

To the spirit of these conversations, or to the form in which they are

cast, no exception can reasonably be taken. In one respect only might

students of history dissent, and that is, to the selection of St.

Patrick as spokesman for the bigotry that is here pilloried.

Those who are familiar with the authentic records of his life and the

spirit of his teaching will feel that an injustice is done the apostle

of Ireland, by associating his name with such counterfeit sentiment. Had

a typical medieval monk or cleric been selected as advocate of the

repulsive theology represented here, the rôle would have been more true

to life and historical fact. As it is, one feels that a noble character

is traduced and put in a false setting. These Dialogues are profoundly

interesting, not only because of the struggle between nature and dogma,

between the cosmic process and the ethical, here brought into

irreconcilable antagonism, but also because the two original and

independent streams of Gaelic literature seem here to meet, and, like

the rushing together of contrary tides or of two confluent currents, to

mingle their waters together in a wild tumult of angry waves, which only

subsides as each again gradually finds its own channel.

One of the most interesting of the Dialogues is that which is known as

“Ossian’s Prayer,” and is about 150 lines in length. The bard begins by

asking the saint if the Feinn of Erin are in heaven. When he is informed

that his father, Gaul, and Oscar cannot be there, he not unnaturally

retorts, “If Erin’s Feinn are not in heaven, why should I Christian be?”

Thereupon the saint taunts him with irreverent fierceness of language,

adding “What are all the Feinn of Erin to one hour with God alone?” But

Ossian declares he would prefer to see one battle waged by the valiant

Feinn than to see the Lord of Heaven and his cleric (Patrick) chanting

sin.

The saint tries to impress him with God’s omniscience by telling him in

effect that it would be impossible for the smallest midge to enter

heaven without God’s knowledge. “How different from Finn,” exclaims the

bard, “thousands might enter, partake of his cheer, and depart without

notice.”

The argument throughout shows complete divergence in their thought.

“Finn is in hell in bonds,” says Patrick. “He is now in the house of

pain and sorrow, because of the amusement he had with the hounds and for

attending the (bardic) schools each day, and because he took no heed of

God.” And to an interpolation of Ossian, “Misery attend thee, old man,”

he continues, “who speakest words of madness; God is better for one hour

than all the Fenians of Erin.”

To which the bard retorts, “O Patrick, who makest me that impertinent

answer, thy crozier would be in atoms were Oscar present. Were my son

Oscar and God hand in hand on Knock-na-veen, if I saw my son down, it is

then I would say that God was a strong man.

“How could it be that God and his clerics could be better men than Finn,

the chief king of the Fenians, the generous one, who was without

blemish? All the qualities that you and your clerics say are according

to the rule of the King of the Stars, Finn’s Fenians had them all, and

they must be now stoutly seated in God’s heaven. Were there a place

above or below better than heaven, ’tis there Finn would go and all the

Fenians he had.”

Baffled in his attempt to initiate the pagan into his new doctrines, and

curious to hear, Patrick relents and calls for a tale. The following is

an example of the usual metre of the original mellifluous Gaelic:—

Ossian, sweet to me thy voice,

Now blessings choice on the soul of Finn,

But tell to me how many deer

Were slain at Slieve-na-man-finn.

And warming to the task, the bard recites the glorious character and

deeds of the vanished heroes. “The Fenians never used to tell untruth.

There never sat cleric in church, though melodiously ye may think they

chant psalms, more true to his word than the Fenians, the men who shrank

never from fierce conflicts.” And then when he adds, “I never heard that

any feat was performed by the King of the saints, or that _He_ reddened

his hand,” the exasperated and dogmatic Patrick stops him short with the

assertion, “Let us cease disputing on both sides, thou withered old man,

who art devoid of sense; understand that God dwells in heaven of the

orders, and Finn and his hosts are all in pain.” Ossian, pathetically,

“Great then would be the shame for God not to release Finn from the

shackles of pain; for if God himself were in bonds, my chief would fight

on his behalf. Finn never suffered in his day any one to be in pain or

difficulty without redeeming him by silver or gold, or by battle and

fight, until he was victorious.

“It is a good claim I have against your God, I to be among these clerics

as I am, without food, without clothing or music, without bestowing gold

on bards, without battling, without hunting, etc.” The idea of his

well-meaning instructors was to starve the bard into submission, in the

intolerant spirit of the Inquisition of later times, or of boycotting in

more modern days.

Elsewhere the bewildered Ossian laments as follows:—

“Alas, O Patrick, I did think that God would not be angered thereat; I

think long, and it is a great woe to me, not to speak of the way of Finn

of the Deeds.” To which Patrick: “Speak not of Finn nor of the Fenians,

for the Son of God will be angry with thee for it. He would never let

thee into his court, and He would not send thee the bread of each day.”

“I will, O Patrick, do his will. Of Finn or of the Fenians I will not

talk, for fear of bringing anger upon them, O cleric, if it is God’s

wont to be angry.”

Mingled with these arguments are passages which quiver with the Gaelic

enthusiastic love of nature. In _Finn’s Pastimes_, for example, we have

a lyric of extraordinary beauty. After a couple of verses addressed to

his opponent, ending, “Can his doom be in hell, in _the house of cold_?”

Ossian goes on to tell of his father’s delight in nature. The passage is

held to be in the very best style, rhyme, rhythm, and assonance, all

combined with a most rich vocabulary of words expressive of sounds,

nearly impossible to translate into English. But we quote from Dr.

Sigerson’s beautiful rendering of the original:—

The tuneful tumult of that bird,

The belling deer on ferny steep;

This welcome in the dawn he heard,

These soothed at eve his sleep.

Dear to him the wind-loved heath,

The whirr of wings, the rustling brake;

Dear the murmuring glens beneath,

And sob of Droma’s lake.

The cry of hounds at early morn,

The pattering deer, the pebbly creek,

The cuckoo’s call, the sounding horn,

The swooping eagle’s shriek.

These Dialogues are quoted at some length, because they bring into clear

outline permanent tendencies—the rival influences of naturalism and the

Church—Celtic literature struggling to be free, and the Church seeking

to saturate it with its own sentiment, and use it solely for its own

propaganda. That is the history down to this day. Nature, love, and war

on the one side, and religious themes on the other. The one timid of the

other, and each on its guard against the undue ascendency of its rival.

Thus it is assumed that James Macpherson ignored these ancient

compositions, namely, the Dialogues, as modern and counterfeit, because

of the intrusion of the ecclesiastical element into the purely pagan

domain. Into none of his own so-called translations did he admit any

flavour of Christianity, regarding that only as the genuine and original

Ossianic residuum which breathed the spirit of pre-Christian times.

But he lived in the days before textual criticism. We cannot credit the

Church as a whole with disinterested love of literature and its

encouragement. But in every age there have been men within its fold who

were passionately devoting themselves to authorship on their own

account, and to the preservation of books and MSS., and literary lore of

the past. Every monastery in the Middle Ages was thus more or less a

place in which reading and writing were cultivated, and some were active

centres of literary work. So that indirectly, and especially in

troublous times, we owe to the Church the splendid heritage of a Gaelic

literature continuous from the days of St. Patrick and St Columba to our

own. Down to very recent times, in fact, the men connected with

religious institutions have been the real custodiers, if not always

themselves the authors, of Gaelic productions. Thus it was Maelmuiri in

Clonmacnois that enriched posterity with the wonderful Leabhar Na

h’Uidhre, while his contemporary did for the hymns in the _Liber

Hymnorum_ what he so bravely and intelligently did for the sagas. From

their time the fatuous hostility to the sagas had evidently broken down.

Perhaps the Dialogues between Ossian and Patrick had been as effective

in their own way in pouring ridicule and contempt upon the opposing

faction as the poems of Burns in withering the hyper-orthodox tyranny of

later times. At any rate, from the monasteries of Ireland in these

Middle Ages came the great books of sagas and romance, such as the Books

of Leinster, Ballymote, Lecain, Lismore, etc.; and in Scotland in the

corresponding period we have the Glenmasan MS. of the thirteenth

century; MS. XL. of the fourteenth; and, besides others, the great Book

of the Dean of Lismore, which covers the period down almost to the

Reformation in Scotland.

But with the Reformation the old spirit of mistaken evangelical zeal

against the ancient heroic literature seems to have revived in an

aggressive form, for we find no less a man than Bishop Carswell, the

most representative Churchman in the Highlands of that age, inveighing

against the popularity of the sagas. In the epistle to the reader, which

he prefixed to Knox’s Liturgy, the first book printed in Gaelic, he

says:—

And great is the blindness and sinful darkness and ignorance and

perverseness of those who teach and write and compose in Gaelic, that

with the view of obtaining for themselves the vain rewards of this

world, they are more desirous, and more accustomed to preserve the

vain, extravagant, false, and worldly histories concerning the Tuath

de Dananns and Milesians, Fionn, the son of Cumhail, and his heroes

the Feinn, and many others, which I shall not here mention, nor

attempt to examine, than they are to write, and to teach, and to

compose the sincere words of God and the perfect way of truth. For the

world loves falsehood more than the truth, and as a proof of it,

worldly sinful men will pay for falsehood, and will not listen to the

truth though they have it for nothing.

A great portion of the darkness and ignorance of such persons arises,

too, from the aforesaid truths not being taught in good books,

understood by all who speak the general language or habitual Gaelic

tongue.

This was a volte-face from the sympathetic attitude of the Dean of

Lismore, and no doubt included him in its sweeping indictment. Yet we

may take it as representing the attitude of the leaders of the

Reformation towards the literature as well as the beliefs and cults

tolerated by the Latin Church. For a time the great evangelical

movement, which had spread from Germany over England and Scotland, had

little effect in the Highlands. The people remained widely indifferent

to religious influences of every kind, except such lingering influence

as the Roman Catholic Church continued to exert upon them; but when at

length they came once more under the influence of evangelical preachers,

like Robert Bruce and others, the precedent set by Carsewell and the

reformers seems to have been less or more uniformly followed; and with

every revival of clerical authority there appeared an unmistakable

tendency towards a revival of clerical intolerance, painfully

detrimental to wholesome literature, as well as to music, athletic

sports, and amusements of every kind.

Consequently since the Reformation Gaelic oral literature has been

gradually disappearing, until, in the words of Mr. Alexander Carmichael,

“it is now becoming meagre in quantity, inferior in quality, and greatly

isolated.”

In his own collection, which represents the latest gleaning in this

field of Gaelic lore, we see the influence of the Church and the old

pagan traditions strangely intermingled. The very title, “Hymns and

Incantations,” suggests the double influence, the two streams which have

been running parallel, approaching each other, mingling and separating

all through Celtic literature.

However much the Church may have gained the ascendency over rival

influences, it has never been able to stifle the heroic poetry of the

race. At periods when the latter seemed most to have gone under, and

disappeared beneath the ban of religion, it came to life again with

amazing vitality, as, for example, in the days of Maelmuiri and after,

when the ecclesiastical seemed to have conquered the pagan; and again in

the days of Macpherson, when the Reformation appeared to have made a

clean sweep of the heroic saga in the land, leaving neither name nor

memorial. And the MSS. had so completely disappeared that they were not

known to exist.

But forth they came to testify once more to the hidden and precarious

genius of the Celtic people, which produced such diverse characters as

Fergus and Ossian, Patrick and Columcille.

While the nineteenth century has been exceptionally brilliant in the

department of English literature, the same cannot be said of Gaelic

literature. In the former great works of creative genius have appeared,

which have added immense lustre to the language in which they were

conceived. In the latter the output by comparison has been very poor and

meagre, no lengthy sustained production of any originality having seen

the light either in prose or poetry. It would seem as if the genius of

the Gaelic language had found more congenial expression in English, for

not a few of those who have enriched the younger literature, from Sir

Walter Scott onwards to William Black and Robert Buchanan, have derived

their inspiration, and sometimes their themes, from Celtic sources. Of

native compositions we have nothing to show beyond elegies, songs, and

lyrics, some of them of great beauty, and as spontaneous and true to

nature as the beating of men’s hearts. But no epic, no heroic poetry, no

drama, no great prose work worthy to be classed with the masterpieces of

English literature, or even with the minor works, has appeared within

the last century. Instead of being a century of creative work, as in

English, it has rather been a century of gleaning. All the best works in

Gaelic are collections—gleanings from the past.

It would be difficult to assign the real reason for the barrenness of

production in recent times. Many causes seem to combine. The derelict

condition of the Highland and Irish populations in the beginning of last

century may have had something to do with it; the decline and limited

use of the language; the invasion of English and English literature, of

Lowland people and Lowland ways.

Gleaners and native lovers of Celtic literature generally ascribe a

large share of the decadence to the influence and attitude of the Church

in its local testimony. During the greater part of last century,

especially in the Highlands, that influence has been such that, had the

Dialogues been produced any time within that period, they would have hit

the mark quite as surely as in the age in which they were written, if we

conceived St Patrick as orthodox cleric and Ossian as the native genius

of the Celtic people.

But times have changed. The lights and shadows on the canvas have again

shifted. Our modern habits of thought are different. Like Ossian, men

look askance on morbid teaching, and have no great enthusiasm for

unnatural asceticism. The prevailing theory of life, impatient of

ethical dualism, objects to the identification of nature with evil quite

as much as the bard did. If nature is not evil, it asks, where, then, is

the necessity or the benefit of a renunciation which is incompatible

with the conditions under which men have to exist? And so, concurrent

with the decadence of ecclesiastical ideas and ecclesiastical authority,

there is a return to nature; and in many quarters a fresh interest is

being taken in the language, literature, and lore of the Gael. And new

writers have arisen who breathe the spirit of the race, and voice its

longings, yearnings, strivings, free from theological bias.

Their medium is no longer the Gaelic, but the English, into which they

have carried many quaint idioms, sentiments, and expressions. Indeed it

is doubtful if ever the Gaelic will again adapt itself to any great

literary work, since the gifted have adopted English as the more

comprehensive vehicle.

Yet now, looking dispassionately over the vicissitudes of Gaelic

literature from the time it was first cradled in the rough bosom of the

race, and nurtured by Christianity, we cannot forget the splendid

services rendered by monks and Churchmen in the early days and during

the Middle Ages down to the Reformation. Adverse periods of obscurantism

there have been, blighting enough and painfully retrograde. But for ages

the Church figured as the patron of letters, and even in later times

there have been enthusiastic literary workers within its pale. In

Scotland men like Sage, Macnicol, Smith, Maccallum, Drs. Norman Macleod,

Macdonald, Clerk, Maclauchlan, Cameron, Dowden, Henderson, and Macneill;

in Ireland Drs. Reeves, Todd, Wright, Stokes, and many others.

And taking the influence of the Church at its best, we may surely apply

to it, in its relation to literature, the remark of Dean Church in a

wider connection: “History teaches us this, that in tracing back the

course of human improvement, we come in one case after another upon

Christianity as the source from which improvement derived its principle

and its motive. We find no other source adequate to account for the new

spring of amendment, and without it no other source of good could have

been relied on.”

So here Christianity, through its medium, the Church, besides saving the

soul of a departing oral literature, has been the fruitful spring and

inspiration of much that is beautiful, pure, and enduring in our Gaelic

heritage.

CHAPTER XVI

THE INFLUENCE OF CELTIC, ON ENGLISH LITERATURE

Earliest contact—Loan-words—Three periods of marked literary

influence—Layamon’s “Brut”—A fascinating study for critics—The

development of the Arthurian Romance—Sir Thomas Malory—Question as

to origin of rhyme—A Celtic claim—Elements in Scottish poetry—in

English literature—Gray’s “Bard”—Macpherson’s “Ossian”—Influence

on Wordsworth and his contemporaries—Moore’s “Irish Melodies”—Sir

Walter Scott—Tennyson—Interesting comparison—Arnold, Shairp,

Blackie—Novelists after Scott—Living writers.

Anglo-Saxon or Old English came into contact with Celtic from the year

449 onwards. By the end of that century the latter had the beginnings of

a literature, the former had not. Cædmon’s poem dates from nearly 200

years later.

English literature could not, therefore, have been influenced by Celtic

for centuries after the first Saxon invasion, as it had not then come

into existence. But the English language was so influenced. From the

earliest contact it doubtless bore traces of the Celtic in the form of

loan-words.

Yet, strange to say, very few such native vernacular words passed over

into Old English till the Norman invasion. The reason may have been, as

suggested by Sweet, that the Britons were themselves to a large extent

Romanised, especially those of the cities, who were for the most part

descendants of Roman soldiers.

After the Conquest many more Celtic words found their way into English

through the Norman-French, and, as might be expected, it is very

difficult to discriminate between the contributions of the earlier and

the later period. Names of persons and places, on the other hand, are

easily distinguished, because they were generally taken over without

change.

Not till the fateful Forty-five had finally broken down the ancient

barriers of racial seclusion was there any further great accession of

this Celtic element. But owing to the interest awakened then in the

Highlands, the freer intercourse established with England and the

Lowlands of Scotland, and especially through the writings of historians

and travellers, and of great authors like James Macpherson and Sir

Walter Scott, a number of new words passed from this time direct from

the Highland Gaelic as well as from the Irish into the English language.

From the former came the well-known clan, claymore, ghillie, plaid,

pibroch, sporran, slogan, whisky, reel; and from the latter, brogue,

kern, Tory, shamrock, shillelagh, usquebaugh, bother, and a few others.

Words had been dribbling from the Welsh also, as we might expect, from

time to time.

The influence on the literature began later, but it has been very marked

and continuous down to the present day. Three periods stand out as

particularly potent. The first begins from the end of the twelfth

century and extends to the Reformation. The second, taking its impetus

from the Forty-five and the Ossianic revival, carries us forward to the

time of Tennyson. And the third, coeval with the modern Celtic

renaissance, reaches from Tennyson to the present time.

Though the different branches of the Celtic people had been producing a

literature from the sixth century, that literature does not seem to have

affected English authorship, until in the Middle Ages it created the

captivating Arthurian romances. Then, like the other Continental

literatures, the English for the first time fell under the sway of the

Celtic imagination.

The earliest great poem written in the English language after the Norman

Conquest owes its inspiration and theme entirely to that source. In the

opening passage the author introduces himself thus: “There was a priest

in the land, whose name was Layamon; he was son of Lovenath; may the

Lord be gracious unto him! He dwelt at Ernley at a noble church on

Severn’s bank, good it seemed to him, near Radstone, where he read

books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest thought that he would

of England tell the noble deeds, what the men were named, and whence

they came, who first had English land.”

This Layamon, travelling widely over the land in search of information,

found three valuable books on which he based his tale—an English

translation of Bede, a Latin book made by St. Albin and the fair Austin,

and the French one by Wace.

His own poem he called the “Brut,” after the fabulous Brutus, the

great-grandson of Aeneas, who, according to Welsh writers, became the

ancestor of the Kings of Briton. It deals chiefly with the materials of

Wace, but it gives the story of Uther Pendragon and his famous son

Arthur in much fuller detail. For example, while Wace’s “Brut” contains

15,300 lines, Layamon’s has 32,250, more than double, and the

composition is characterised by a somewhat rude attempt at alliteration

and rhyme.

There are two MSS. still extant of this interesting work, both of them

in the British Museum. The oldest is held to have been written not later

than 1205, and the language is so purely English, notwithstanding its

source, that less than fifty words of French origin have been found in

it by Sir Frederick Madden, who in 1847 first edited these texts.

Almost a hundred years pass after Layamon wrote before another English

book of the kind appears. And this time it is the rhyming chronicle of

Robert of Gloucester, who goes over some of the ground of Geoffrey of

Monmouth, and brings the history down to 1272.

A fascinating study for critics is the wonderful way in which the

Arthurian romance seems to have developed from a small beginning. This

gradual evolution can in the main be traced.

So far as our modern knowledge goes, the Arthur of real life was a

Cornish chief with a following in Wales, who met Cedric of Wessex in the

stricken field, but who himself at length fell fighting the Picts, most

probably in our own native Scotland. Gildas chronicles a great victory

won over the Saxons, but omits to record who was the victorious chief.

It is Nennius who first mentions Arthur by name, in the ninth century.

His story is vastly amplified by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote about

1154, and by the time it comes from the pen of Robert Wace, some ten

years later, there is the splendid addition of the Round Table. Layamon

is able to go into details, not hitherto mentioned, of the construction

of this famous Board, which obviated quarrels over uppermost seats,

since no one could have precedence owing to its shape. Up to this point

the legend bore no Christian character. It is saturated with the magic,

and slaughter, and revenge of the old Pagan North, rich in stories of

giants, dwarfs, serpents, and heathen enchantments, far enough removed

from the spirit of medieval Christianity. But by the beginning of the

thirteenth century it suddenly underwent a great development, and new

incidents were added with which the earlier writers could not have been

acquainted.

Thomas Arnold thinks that this transformation is due to the genius of

Walter Map (_circa_ 1210), who introduced the religious element with the

view of converting the Arthurian legends, and employing them in the

service of Christianity.

From this time we have in French the Story of the Holy Grail, the

History of Merlin, Sir Launcelot of the Lake, the Quest of the Holy

Grail, and the Death of Arthur. The first two have been attributed to

Robert Borron, the latter three to Walter Map himself. But the whole

subject appears to be wrapped in singular obscurity, and offers a field

for considerable divergence of opinion. The latest dissertation on the

question is that by Jessie L. Weston in her recent publications. (Nutt:

London, 1901.) After the above, five more stories followed, such as

Tristram and the history of King Pellinore by other writers. These later

series of romances seem to have caught on better in France than in

England. For only a few metrical compositions of this class are found in

English MSS. prior to the days of Sir Thomas Malory, and these in

documents of the fifteenth century. One alliterative tale, indeed, that

of _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_, first printed by Sir F. Madden in

1839, and re-edited by Dr. Morris, is held by the latter to have been

written about 1320. Sir Gawayne was Arthur’s nephew, and figures in the

early stories as one of the purest models of knighthood, though very

differently represented by the author of Tristram and subsequent

writers, including even Malory, who drew from French sources. About the

middle of the fifteenth century Henry Lonelich translated into English

verse the prose narrative of the sacred Grail, and possibly this may

have led Malory, the author of the more famous _Morte d’Arthur_, to

produce, as he did about the year 1470, the remainder of the romances

connected with the Holy Grail in English prose. It was one of the

earliest books printed by William Caxton (1485), and certainly one of

the finest examples of the prose of the pre-Elizabethan period.

Sir Thomas Malory compiled it out of the French versions of “Merlin,”

“Launcelot,” “Tristram,” the “Queste du Saint Graal,” and the “Mort

Artur.” His own postscript at the end of the book fitly describes its

scope in very quaint terms. It runs as follows:—

Heere is the end of the whole booke of King Arthur and of his noble

Knights of the round table, that when they were whole together there

was ever an hundred and fortie. Also heere is the end of the death of

King Arthur. I pray you all, gentlemen and gentlewomen, that read this

book of King Arthur and his Knights from the beginning to the ending,

pray for me while I am alive, that God send mee good deliverance.

And when I am dead, I pray you all pray for my soule. For this booke

was finished the ninth yeare of the raigne of King Edward the Fourth,

by Sir Thomas Maleor, Knight, as Jesu help me for his great might, as

hee is the servant of Jesu both day and night.

Thus endeth this noble and joyous booke entitled _La Mort Darthur_,

notwithstanding it treateth of the birth, life, and acts of the said

King Arthur and of his noble Knights of the round table, and their

mervailous enquests and adventures, the achieving of the holy

sancgreall, and in the end the dolorous death and departing out of

this world of them all.

As literature, this work of Malory is very interesting, and has been

frequently edited within the last hundred years.

Beyond the powerful influences exerted by the Celtic romances, there

falls to be noticed another way in which the Gaelic genius is believed

to have affected and even moulded English poetry in the later Middle

Ages. It is well known that down to Chaucer’s time English poetry was

characterised chiefly by alliteration. Scarcely any authors attempted

rhyme. And those, like Layamon, who tried to combine both, often seem to

achieve neither the one nor the other. They failed to produce the real

effect of metre. But after Chaucer, rhyme gradually supplanted

alliteration. And it is held by various learned authorities that this is

due to Celtic influence. The Celts first invented rhyme, they say, and

in proof of this it is shown that they used it centuries before the

English or any other western nation. “Outside of Wales and Ireland,”

says Dr. Hyde, “there probably exists no example in a European

vernacular language of rhymed poetry older than the ninth century.”

And Matthew Arnold, in a footnote to his _Study of Celtic Literature_,

asserts that “rhyme,—the most striking characteristic of our modern

poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to

our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its _romantic

element_,—rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes

into our poetry from the Celts.” And in this opinion these litterateurs

are supported by the earlier testimony of great philologists like Zeuss

and Count Nigra.

From the time of John Barbour, too, it is recognised that the bards of

Scotland who wrote English poetry have been influenced in various ways

not peculiar to their own contemporaries in England, by their connection

with and descent from the Celt. Stopford Brooke mentions three elements

of Scottish poetry that he regards as distinctly Celtic contributions.

These are, first, the love of wild nature for its own sake—the

passionate, close, and poetical observation and description of natural

scenery, which is not found in the poetry of England till near the end

of the eighteenth century; second, the love of colour so characteristic

of Gaelic and Cymric authorship; and, third, the wittier, more

rollicking humour, which contrasts with the Teutonic humour, which has

its root in sadness. The humour of Dunbar is thus as widely different

from that of Chaucer as the humour of Burns is from that of Cowper, or

of a modern Irishman is from that of a modern Englishman.

But if there is really humour in the ancient Celtic literature it is

entirely unconscious. Many passages tickle our risible faculties now,

and we smile as we read some of the narratives, such as the fight

between Queen Meve’s bull and his opponent in the old saga, but this is

because of the very wealth of the Gaelic imagination and the mendacity

of its exaggerations. It is questionable if the original Gael, the slave

of such a powerful fancy, saw anything in his own extravagant

descriptions to laugh at. More likely he perpetrated these fictions

quite as unconsciously as his Irish descendant of to-day perpetrates his

bulls.

All the same it is quite conceivable that from this early tendency to be

carried off the ground by flights of fancy, the Scottish sense of

humour, conspicuous in the poets from pre-Reformation times, may have

developed.

That Celtic literature revelled from a remote antiquity in nature and

love of colour is very manifest from the earliest Gaelic, Welsh, and

Breton tales. Take, for instance, the following description of Olwen

from the Welsh:—

The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about her

neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious emeralds and

rubies. More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her

skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands

and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray

of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the

three-mewed falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more

snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the

reddest roses. Whoso beheld her was filled with her love. Four white

trefoils sprang up wherever she trod.

The old sagas and romances are full of this sort of vision. It was

impossible that such Celtic compositions could exist without imparting

some of their charm, their brilliant colouring, their observation, and

delight in nature and the unknown, to English literature. Naturally,

Scottish poetry first felt this influence. But the wonder is that

English literature as a whole was so late in being permeated therewith.

When it did enter, it effected a mighty change both in the style and

subject matter.

Beyond rhyme, love of nature, love of colour, and a certain type of

humour, which we have just glanced at, Matthew Arnold recognised three

elements which are in a manner distinct from these. “If I were asked,”

he says, “where English poetry got these three things—its turn for

style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for

catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and

vivid way—I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its turn

for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much of its

melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from a

Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.”...

“The Celt’s quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his

poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion; his

sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift

of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature. The

forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wildflowers are everywhere in

romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature’s

own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something

quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin

poetry. Now, of this delicate magic Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a

mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come

into romance from the Celts. Magic is just the word for it—the magic of

nature; not merely the beauty of nature,—_that_ the Greeks and Latins

had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,—_that_

the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature—her weird power and her

fairy charm.” What better example of this distinction between the magic

and beauty of nature might be wished for than the following beautiful

conception? “Well,” says Math to Gwydion, “we will seek, I and thou, to

form a wife for him out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the

oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the

meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most

graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name

of Flower-Aspect.”

Shakespeare, in handling nature, while he had the Greek touch, is also

credited with sometimes striking the more exquisite and inimitable

Celtic note. Thus:—

The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,

When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,

And they did make no noise, in such a night

Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls—

... In such a night

Did Thisbe fearfully o’er-trip the dew—

... In such a night

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand,

Upon the wild seabanks, and waved her love

To come again to Carthage.

But we must pass on to the second period, the period after the

Forty-five, to see a more abundant entrance of the Celtic elements into

English literature as a whole. It might be detected in isolated

instances, but during the latter half of the eighteenth century both

prose and poetry were influenced by Celtic in a very marked degree.

Collin’s ode on the “Popular Superstitions of the Highlands” was perhaps

the first contribution after the memorable Rising to herald the new

time. If we except Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” it is almost the earliest

inroad by an English poet into the wild and romantic regions beyond the

Grampians.

After him came Gray, with a similar interest in Celtic lore. His

well-known poem “The Bard” appeared in 1755. This ode is founded on a

tradition current in Wales that Edward I., when he completed the

conquest of that country, decreed the death of all the bards who should

fall into his power. The original argument of this fine production is

set down in the author’s commonplace book as follows:—

The army of Edward I., as they march through a deep valley, are

suddenly stopped by the appearance of a venerable figure seated on the

summit of an inaccessible rock, who, with a voice more than human,

reproaches the king with all the misery and desolation which he had

brought on his country; foretells the misfortunes of the Norman race,

and, with prophetic spirit, declares that all his cruelty shall never

extinguish the noble ardour of poetic genius in this island; and that

men shall never be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour in

immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly

censure tyranny and oppression. His song ended, he precipitates

himself from the mountain, and is swallowed up by the river that rolls

at its foot.

Gray deviated a little from this original sketch, but the above is, in

the main, the gist of the poem.

“Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!

Confusion on thy banners wait!

Though fanned by conquest’s crimson wing,

They mock the air with idle state.

Helm nor hauberk’s twisted mail,

Nor e’en thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail

To save thy secret soul from nightly fears,

From Cambria’s curse, from Cambria’s tears!”

Such were the sounds that o’er the crested pride

Of the first Edward scatter’d wild dismay,

As down the steep of Snowdon’s shaggy side

He wound with toilsome march his long array.

Stout Glo’ster stood aghast in speechless trance:

“To arms!” cried Mortimer, and couched his quivering lance.

On a rock, whose haughty brow

Frowns o’er old Conway’s foaming flood,

Robed in the sable garb of woe,

With haggard eyes the poet stood;

(Loose his beard, and hoary hair

Stream’d like a meteor, to the troubled air;)

And, with a master’s hand and prophet’s fire,

Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre.

“Hark! how each giant oak, and desert cave,

Sighs to the torrent’s awful voice beneath:

O’er thee, oh King! their hundred arms they wave,

Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe;

Vocal no more, since Cambria’s fatal day,

To high-born Hoël’s harp, or soft Llewellyn’s lay,” etc.

In addition to “The Bard,” Gray translated into English verse fragments

of the “Gododin” and “The Triumphs of Owen” from Mr. Evans’s _Specimens

of the Welsh Poetry_, published in London in 1764.

After Gray came the renowned Macpherson, representing the very soul of

the Celtic genius, and Europe listened surprised as it felt the thrill

of the new notes which he struck from the old instrument—the passionate,

penetrating regret, the deep melancholy, the sensitiveness to the powers

of nature. In his _Ossian_ we are made to feel “the desolation of dusky

moors, the solemn brooding of the mists on the mountains, the occasional

looking through them of sun by day, of moon and stars by night, the

gloom of dark cloudy Bens or cairns, with flashing cataracts, the ocean

with its storms.” And when the wind shrieks and the elements do

frightful battle, there is the eerie sensation of ghostly presences

hovering around the warriors on the hillside or out on the ocean.

And through all the sadness of sorrow and the clang of conflict there

break gleams of tender light and soothing reflection, as, for example:—

Come, thou beam that art lonely, from watching in the night! The

squally winds are around thee, from all their echoing hills. Red, over

my hundred streams, are the light-covered paths of the dead. They

rejoice on the eddying winds, in the season of the night. Dwells there

no joy in song, white hand of the harps of Lutha? Awake the voice of

the string; roll my soul to me. It is a stream that has failed.

Malvina, pour the song.

I hear thee from thy darkness in Selma, thou that watchest lonely by

night! Why didst thou withhold the song from Ossian’s failing soul? As

the falling brook to the ear of the hunter, descending from his

storm-covered hill, in a sunbeam rolls the echoing stream, he hears

and shakes his dewy locks: such is the voice of Lutha to the friend of

the spirits of heroes. My swelling bosom beats high. I look back on

the days that are past. Come, thou beam that art lonely, from watching

in the night!

No wonder these plaintive notes struck the heart of modern times with

overpowering emotion, awakening a sympathy with the past, and opening a

new avenue of vision into the life of nature. Englishmen especially, who

had hitherto beheld the bleak mountains, the moors, and the naked rocks

with feeling almost akin to aversion, began to see a hidden beauty and

majesty in these sublime and lonely objects. And a passion for nature

gradually crept into English poetry. Thomson had made a beginning in

this direction with his _Seasons_ as early as 1726–30, but it cannot be

said that he quite struck the notes which afterwards so moved and

enchanted the readers of Macpherson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and

Tennyson.

The new Ossian had a wonderful mastery of style, rhythmical flow,

pathos, and sometimes even sublimity of language, though it can scarcely

be said that he represented the realistic force and vivid exactness of

the Gaelic he sought to imitate in his English style. Of his

_Fragments_, when they appeared, the poet Gray wrote: “I was so struck,

so extasié with their infinite beauty, that I writ into Scotland to make

a thousand enquiries.” And he adds, “In short, this man is the very

demon of poetry, or he has lighted on a treasure hid for ages.”

English poets and litterateurs from this time found a new well-spring of

inspiration in the ancient Celtic fountain thus wondrously and

unexpectedly tapped. And so we find men like Pennant, Dr. Johnson,

Boswell, and numerous other interested travellers and historians, making

pilgrimages through the Highlands, with the view of observing for

themselves the old life surviving there, and of gathering up materials

for literary work. Each of the above-named, well known in the pages of

English literature, have contributed books which are now classic

authorities on the social customs and conditions of the Highlands at the

time of their visit, and thus helped to carry a stream of Celtic thought

and feeling into the prose of the period, which was afterwards more

fully developed by the great magician, Sir Walter Scott.

Meanwhile the new elements had entered into the warp and woof of English

poetry, and may be traced in all the great masters of the period—Cowper,

Burns, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Byron, and their numerous contemporaries.

Blake was so enthusiastic that he is generally regarded as an imitator

of Macpherson, and Southey, going even farther back, edited, with

introduction, in 1817, the _Morte d’Arthur_ of Sir Thomas Malory before

mentioned.

Yet more characteristically Celtic as a poet than all these, because

himself an Irishman, was Thomas Moore, author of _Lalla Rookh_, an

Indian tale; and _Irish Melodies_. It is with these latter lyrics that

we are here most concerned, because they exhibit so much the quality of

the Gaelic muse in English verse. Take, for example, the following

delightful pieces—euphonious, melancholy, and touching—so full of the

Ossianic sadness and Celtic sentiment for the past, and for the dead

heroes:—

The harp that once through Tara’s halls

The soul of music shed,

Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls

As if that soul were fled.

So sleeps the pride of former days,

So glory’s thrill is o’er;

And hearts that once beat high for praise

Now feel that pulse no more!

No more to chiefs and ladies bright

The harp of Tara swells;

The chord alone, that breaks at night,

Its tale of ruin tells.

Thus freedom now so seldom wakes,

The only throb she gives,

Is when some heart indignant breaks

To show that still she lives.

This one, too, sounds a similar note. It is entitled “After the

Battle”:—

Night closed around the conqueror’s way,

And lightnings show’d the distant hill,

Where those who lost that dreadful day

Stood few and faint, but fearless still!

The soldier’s hope, the patriot’s zeal,

For ever dimm’d, for ever crost—

Oh! who shall say what heroes feel

When all but life and honour’s lost?

The last sad hour of freedom’s dream

And valour’s task mov’d slowly by,

While mute they watch’d, till morning’s beam

Should rise and give them light to die.

There’s yet a world where souls are free,

Where tyrants taint not nature’s bliss;

If death that world’s bright opening be,

Oh! who would live a slave in this?

From Moore it is but a step to the great master-hand of Celtic romance,

the heroic Sir Walter Scott, who has done more than any modern writer to

popularise the literature of the Gael, and to make the Gael and his

country interesting to Englishmen. With his magic power he threw a halo

over the land and the people, and made their past live again in his

enchanting pages. What a world of forgotten romance he brought to light

alike in his prose and his poetry! In the _Lady of the Lake_, _Tales of

a Grandfather_, _Waverley_, and _Rob Roy_, we have Celtic life and

tradition depicted in a way which has vastly influenced and enriched our

English literature, besides showing the gate to subsequent authors into

a field near at hand, into which English imagination, much less English

sympathy and literary art, had hardly as yet found its way. What

Wordsworth in England did for the Lake District, Scott in Scotland did

for the Highlands, fostering the love for scenery which the English

poets had already begun to awaken.

Yet, more than any of his predecessors who cultivated the poetry of

natural description, Scott carried into English literature the Celtic

imagination and sentiment, the Celtic magic and wistful veneration for

the past, which made him the wizard of modern literary romance.

The enthusiasm aroused by Macpherson, and even more by himself, had not

died down before another great period of Celtic influence arrived—the

last, and, in certain respects, the most potent and extensive of all. As

early as 1842, the _Morte d’Arthur_ and some other pieces of Tennyson

appeared, but it was in 1859, contemporary with the Celtic renaissance

at home and abroad, that he published _The Idylls of the King_. Founding

on the old Arthurian romances, as told in English by Sir Thomas Malory,

Tennyson depicts anew the more picturesque characters and incidents,

idealising them in his own inimitable poetic style. So we have, in

twelve books,—

The Coming of Arthur,

Gareth and Lynette,

The Marriage of Geraint,

Geraint and Enid,

Balin and Balan,

Merlin and Vivien,

Lancelot and Elaine,

The Holy Grail,

Pelleas and Ettarre,

The Last Tournament,

Guinevere, and

The Passing of Arthur.

The charm of these Idylls, which rank among the Poet-Laureate’s best

work, may be gathered from the opening passage, describing the coming of

Arthur:—

Leodogran, the King of Cameliard,

Had one fair daughter, and none other child;

And she was fairest of all flesh on earth,

Guinevere, and in her his one delight.

For many a petty king ere Arthur came

Ruled in this isle, and ever waging war

Each upon other, wasted all the land;

And still from time to time the heathen host

Swarm’d overseas, and harried what was left.

And so there grew great tracts of wilderness,

Wherein the beast was ever more and more,

But man was less and less, till Arthur came.

For first Aurelius lived and fought and died,

And after him King Uther fought and died,

But either fail’d to make the kingdom one.

And after these King Arthur for a space,

And thro’ the puissance of his Table Round,

Drew all their petty princedoms under him,

Their King and head, and made a realm and reign’d.

And thus the land of Cameliard was waste,

Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein,

And none or few to scare or chase the beast;

So that wild dog, and wolf and boar and bear

Came night and day, and rooted in the fields,

And wallow’d in the gardens of the King.

And ever and anon the wolf would steal

The children and devour, but now and then,

Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat

To human sucklings; and the children, housed

In her foul den, there at their meat would growl,

And mock their foster-mother on four feet,

Till, straighten’d, they grew up to wolf-like men,

Worse than the wolves.

This, surely, puts us back into the old days. But “Arthur heard the call

and came; and Guinevere stood by the castle walls to watch him pass.”

The Celtic ideal of woman and the Celtic pursuit of the unknown and

mysterious, and the delicacy and passion that characterise the early

romances, pervade these nineteenth century Idylls throughout.

It is interesting to compare the Passing of Arthur, for example, as

recorded by Layamon, with Tennyson’s more elaborate and developed

idealisation. According to the former, these were the words of the

king’s dying speech to Constantine:—

I will fare to Avalun to the fairest of all maidens, to Arganté the

Queen, an elf most fair, and she shall make my wounds all sound; make

me all whole with healing draughts. And afterwards I will come again

to my kingdom and dwell with the Britons with mickle joy! Even with

the words there approached from the sea a little short boat floating

with the waves; and two women therein wondrously formed; and they took

Arthur anon and bare him quickly and laid him softly down, and forth

they gan depart. Then was it accomplished that Merlin whilom said,

that mickle care should come of Arthur’s departure. The Britons

believe yet that he is alive, and dwelleth in Avalun with the fairest

of all elves, and the Britons even yet expect when Arthur shall

return.

Compare with this the appearance from the wave of Tennyson’s wondrous

barge with its fair occupants, and the famous farewell speech Arthur

made before setting out. After the well-known passage beginning, “The

old order changeth, yielding place to new,” he goes on:—

But now farewell. I am going a long way

With these thou seést—if indeed I go

(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)—

To the island-valley of Avilion;

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns

And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,

Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail

Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan

That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,

Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood

With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere

Revolving many memories, till the hull

Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,

And on the mere the wailing died away.

But when that moan had past for evermore,

The stillness of the dead world’s winter dawn

Amazed him, and he groan’d, “The King is gone.”

And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme,

“From the great deep to the great deep he goes.”

Sir Bedivere was thus the sole survivor of the Knights of the Round

Table. In the final battle all that remained of them perished except the

king himself and two knights, who escaped wounded. But first one and

then the other passed, dying from his hurt. With what a halo of colour

and real Celtic enchantment poets and romancers have covered up the last

grim tragedy of the wounded knight watching his master, the royal Arthur

die, after all the rest were fallen and gone, and the Round Table was

from henceforth to be but a memory.

Macaulay must have inherited the Celtic power of pictorial detail and

vivid colouring, though he might not willingly acknowledge it. Where did

he get that brilliant turn for style and those suggestive tricks of

lively fancy if not from his Celtic ancestry?

After him came three Celtic enthusiasts of great literary standing, who

put Macaulay’s apathy towards the Gaelic and Cymric tradition to the

blush. These were Matthew Arnold; John Campbell Shairp, Professor of

Poetry at Oxford, and Principal of the United College, St. Andrews; and

Professor Blackie of Edinburgh.

Over the first, the apostle of culture, and otherwise dispassionate

critic, the Celtic past undoubtedly cast a spell. The finding of its

literature seemed to have influenced him in a similar manner as the

hoving of a new planet into his ken thrills the eager astronomer. And we

have his personal contribution in his well-known _Study of Celtic

Literature_ (1867), a book which, like Renan’s French essay, has done

much to enhance the reputation and influence of our ancient heritage in

modern times. It was through his strenuous advocacy that the Celtic

chair which Professor Rhys now occupies in Oxford was established.

Principal Shairp published _Kilmahoe: a Highland Pastoral, with other

Poems_, in 1864; his _Poetic Interpretation of Nature_ in 1877; and

_Aspects of Poetry_ in 1881. These books revel in the Celtic sentiment,

its melancholy, and love of nature. Their author exhibited the same

spirit of admiration for the Gaelic muse that Matthew Arnold did for the

Cymric.

In one of his Highland lyrics, entitled, “A Dream of Glen Sallach,”

Shairp showed that he could be overpowered by the gloom pervading the

land of the heather as much as any Gael:—

In deep of noon, mysterious dread

Fell on me in that glimmering glen,

Till as from haunted ground I fled

Back to the kindly homes of men.

Thanks to that glen! its scenery blends

With childhood’s most ideal hour,

When Highland hills I made my friends,

First owned their beauty, felt their power.

And in “The Forest of Sli’-Gaoil” he muses thus of other days:—

And doth not this bleak forest ground

Live in old epic song renowned?

Of him the chief who came of yore

To hunting of the mighty boar,

And left the deed, to float along

The dateless stream of Highland song,

A maid’s lorn love, a chief’s death toil.

Still speaking in thy name Sli’-Gaoil!

Well now may harp of Ossian moan

Through long bent grass and worn grey stone:

But how could song so long ago,

Come loaded with some elder wo?

Were then, as now, these hills o’er-cast

With shadows of some long-gone past!

Did winds, that wandered o’er them, chime

Melodies of a lorn foretime?

As now, the very mountain burns

For something sigh that not returns!

Professor Blackie in later life had a similar passionate regard for

Celtic literature, and not only did much by poetic renderings into

English from the Gaelic, and in other ways, to introduce English readers

to the best treasures of the Gaelic past, but also, like Matthew Arnold,

was instrumental in founding a Celtic chair, namely, that in Edinburgh

University.

Of novelists who, like Sir Walter Scott, have drawn their themes and

inspiration from Celtic sources, there has been a splendid succession

from the days of Tennyson till now. Among others, besides the veteran

Dr. George Macdonald, we may mention William Black, Robert Buchanan, and

Robert Louis Stevenson, all three now dead, but recognised in their time

as men of considerable literary genius. Black’s descriptions, his scenes

and incidents and characters in those graphic stories laid in the West

Highlands, are well known, and are as full of nature as Stevenson’s

thrilling tales of _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_ are of Celtic passion and

adventure. Buchanan’s _Child of Nature_ is now perhaps not so well known

as these others, but the plot is laid in the extreme north-west corner

of Sutherlandshire, and interprets Gaelic life and character with

wonderful verve and insight. All the three writers seem to have caught

the magic glamour of the North, and to have been influenced in their

style by the Celtic elements.

Of living novelists to carry on the succession we have still a

distinguished contingent. Besides names, less familiar, the following

have achieved a wide reputation, namely, Dr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren),

Neil Munro, Fiona Macleod, Katherine Tynan, and W. B. Yeats. These

writers are distinctly Celtic in style, idiom, and sentiment. They have

all the passion, yearning, imagination, and emotion of the Gael,

combined with his wonderful gift of story-telling and of local colour.

There are other writers of distinction, such as Andrew Lang, Dr. Douglas

Hyde, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Dr. Sigerson, Dr. Todhunter, Stopford A.

Brooke, Edmund Jones, T. W. Rolleston, Miss Eleanor Hull, Miss Jessie L.

Weston, Miss Goodrich Frere, and Miss Emily Lawless, who have done much

of later years to popularise the Celtic lore and literature, and to

extend its sway over English letters.

Through books of history and philology which have been issuing from the

press in a steady flow for decades past, the tide of Celtic influence

still continues to rise and permeate every department of English

literature. So that from that little spring we saw welling up in the

fifth century, and which at first yielded but a few words of Celtic

import to incipient English, we have been able to trace a continuous

stream, gaining in volume and momentum through the centuries, until now

it is like a mighty Missouri which mingles its waters with the broader

and more potent Mississippi, to be carried to the great ocean of human

intercourse, and lose itself in the common good.

CHAPTER XVII

THE PRINTED LITERATURE OF THE SCOTTISH GAEL

Two interesting bibliographies—Surprising revelations—First Gaelic

printed book—Meagre output prior to the Forty-five—Earliest

original works issued—No complete Bible in type before

1801—Nineteenth century activity—The Highlander’s favourite

books—A revelation of character—His printed literature mainly

religious—Translations—The two books in greatest demand—Dearth

of the masterpieces of other languages—The most popular of

English religious writers—of native bards—Gaelic poetry—The

printed succession—Notable books—Account of the Gaelic

grammars—Dictionaries—Periodicals—Value of the literature.

A close study of the printed literature of the Scottish Gael leads to

some surprising and even wholly unexpected revelations. Happily, we have

the materials for such a scrutiny within moderate compass, a fact which

cannot be predicated of the more comprehensive and ubiquitous English.

It is an amazing circumstance—indeed the _Spectator_, some seventy years

ago, dubbed it “a piece of Highland dilettanteism”—that one should be

found enthusiastic enough to attempt to make an exhaustive bibliography

of the printed Gaelic output of Scotland. Yet such a devotee has emerged

not once, but twice within the last century.

First, in the person of John Reid, a Glasgow bookseller of Lowland

birth, who published in 1832 his _Bibliotheca Scoto-Celtica_, or “an

account of all the books which have been printed in the Gaelic

language,” down to that date.

Second, in the person of the Rev. Donald Maclean, minister of Duirinish,

Skye, who brought the catalogue forward to 1900, arranging the authors’

names alphabetically, and giving the various editions, with their dates

and places of publication. This MS., which has not yet been printed,

contains in addition a complete transcript of the title of each work, an

account of the author or translator so far as known, the number of

copies printed, size of paper, and published price, and in the case of

the very rare books, an account of the copies known to exist, and the

price they fetched on transfer.

Had it not been for the earlier researches of Reid, it is not likely so

elaborate an effort would have ever been attempted. Even Reid seems to

have been lured on gradually, all unconscious at first of the magnitude

of the task, for he says that his book was not written with the view of

being published. On the contrary, its _raison d’être_ is thus explained

by him in the preface:—

While studying the Gaelic language in 1825 a friend wished me to make

up a catalogue of his Gaelic books. It appeared, after the list was

made up, scarcely probable that many more should exist, and under the

idea of having almost already completed the list, the present work was

undertaken. All the Gaelic books in the neighbourhood were examined,

but I found the work increase so rapidly on my hands that it became

necessary to class them and re-write the whole; and the longer I

searched the more I was convinced that the literature of the Gael was

richer than even its friends imagined. The number of translations,

song-books, etc., which I now met with, many of them works which I had

never previously heard of, obliged me four times to extend the plan

originally adopted, and to re-write the MS.

Reid ransacked the principal libraries in this country and on the

Continent in search of Gaelic books, yet he admits the list must

necessarily be imperfect. When finished, the work was awarded a premium

by the Highland Society of London in 1831, and printed the following

year. It has been the aim of his bibliographic successor to supplement

and complete the list by a new classification up to date.

Both men deserve credit for having patiently and persistently pursued

what was undoubtedly an interesting but eminently thankless task, so far

at least as financial remuneration was concerned.

When we hark back to the period when MS. writing first began to pass

into modern type, we discover that no book of any kind was printed in

this country before 1477. In that year Caxton issued in London the

earliest publication from an English printing press. Other books quickly

followed, but nearly a century elapsed before any Gaelic writing passed

through the inky mill.