No man despised Finn ne'er refused To any man, Sent those who came. No gifts e'er given Like his so free. 'Twas yesterday week." The ideal here set forth is perfectly Homeric. Achilles in his best moments and his most favourable aspect might have stood for it. In the second part of the Dean's collection, where a distinctly more modern element speaks out, in addition to the two ballads of real and mimic war-for hunting is always the best school of soldiership—we have moral and aphoristic poems; quite in the natural order of things, just as Hesiod with his metric fragments of rustic wisdom accompanies or follows very shortly after Homer with the pomp of his military processions and his flash of hostile encounters between Greek and Trojan. In Homer himself, as the well-furnished repertory of all the life and all the wisdom of his age, we find not a few of those sagacious, curt sentences, into which men unacquainted with books are fond of compressing their experience of human life. Closely allied to the sententious is the element of popular satire, the same that in Hesiod created the story of Pandora, in which all the ills of humanity are charged by the bearded half of the community to the unsanctified curiosity of the unbearded. In this department, from the satirical versifiers of the Dean's book down to Rob Donn, the favourite bard of the Mackay country, and the sour-blooded creature who heaped his rhymed maledictions on Glen Nevis and Glencoe,1 Gaelic literature never wanted emphatic spokesmen. Indeed, where there is no leading article in the Times or the Scotsman, some authoritative individual must wield the lash, and in such society as that of the Highlands the local bard was the only person who could effectively perform the function. The pulpit might condemn great sins, but it was too dignified to laugh at small follies, and not seldom lacked courage to meddle with strong offenders. Among the didactic bards in the Dean's Book, one Phelim M'Dougall is particularly prominent, from whom we extract a string of aphorisms each of which might form the text of a most profitable sermon :— "'Tis not good to travel on Sunday, 1 I forget the fellow's name, but I have seen some notice of him somewhere in the Gaidheal. The verses about Glen Nevis-a vile slander-I amused myself translating as follows: "Glen Nevis, cold and bleak, barren and bare, The lines on Glencoe are equally severe, but perhaps better merited. Not good is an Earl without English; Not good is a bishop without warrant; Not good is entering a port without a pilot; Not good is a castle without an heir; Not good is a crown without supremacy ; Not good is learning without courtesy; These maxims are not adduced as evidence of any unusually keen practical sagacity in the people who made them, but in so far only as they serve to throw light on the fashionable virtues and vices of the age. The very first one shows us clearly that the objection to Sunday travelling, which some people represent as the offspring of Presbyterian Calvinism, was expressed in the Catholic Church before the bold Saxon had blown the first blast of his trumpet. The sixth maxim is noteworthy, as showing the general prevalence of Gaelic through all classes of society at the time when it was written. For taking a part in the business of the kingdom, the local thane, however mighty in Gaelic at home, would require a familiarity with the English tongue. In the present day one might invert the maxim, and say, Not good is a lord of the soil who has no sympathy with the language, the traditions, and the poetry of the people from whom he draws his rents. Another maxim, "Not good is a crown without supremacy," shows an admirable insight into the weak point of aristocratic government in the Highlands, when every thane was a king, and every king might be a despot. The same rhyming moralist, or some brother bard of the same kidney, sets forth his special dislikings in an aphoristic shape, and ends very naturally by telling us that it is impossible for him to exhaust the bead-roll of the things which he dislikes. Earl Gerald, the fourth Earl of Desmond, known in Ireland as Earl Desmond the Poet, indulges largely in satirical effusions against the fair sex; a very cheap thing to do, as there were no literary ladies in those days strong enough with the pen to fling back the ill-natured badinage. An anonymous writer indicates his estimate of monks and monasteries in a sufficiently intelligible way by saying, "I, Robert, went yesterday A monastery for to see; But to my wishing they said nay, But, while the bards performed the function of public censors with sharp incision when required, their main duty consisted in the celebration of the great deeds of the brave heads of their clan, especially of those who showed a princely liberality in the remuneration of bards. Thus Finlay MacNab, the red-haired bard, sings the praises of his patron, Ian Dubh MacGregor of Glenstrae, who was buried at Dysart in Glenorchy, 26th May 1519, in the following strain : "I've been a stranger long By chant of lofty theme, Who knows the craft of ruling, |