the translations, I have endeavoured to follow the spirited freedom of Dryden and our old masters, rather than the curious literalness which has been lately fashionable. While anxiously retaining every feature of the original that was in anywise characteristic, I have been throughout indifferent to mere words which, if expressed, had no particular beauty, and, if omitted, left no appreciable blank.

ALTNACRAIG, Oban,

October 1876.

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

OF

THE HIGHLANDS OF SCOTLAND.

CHAPTER I.

LANGUAGE.

A chànain sgapach

Thapaidh bhlasda, ghrinn

Thig le tartar

Neartmhor o bheal cinn !—MACDONALD.

JOHN BULL is, as all the world knows, a very clever fellow, and has done not a few notable things in his day that will be talked of in history as long as the temples of the Greeks and the roads of the Romans; but with all his cleverness and all his practicality he has made not a few great blunders in public matters, most of which have not even a flash of brilliancy to redeem their stupidity. Among these great blunders may certainly be reckoned three -Ireland, the Education of the People, and the Scottish Highlands. All these blunders, however various in their character, seem to flow from one common cause, of which the positive side is an excess of individual freedom, and the negative a defect of social organisation. We are in the habit of leaving too many things to shift for them

A

selves, till, like an unweeded garden, they grow up into an intolerable nest of nettles, by which being stung and fretted we immediately commence reforming and retracing our steps in a fashion extremely furious, and therefore not exactly wise; sometimes altogether futile, being too late. The blunder which was perpetrated in the Highlands, in the shape, first, of rank population which no man cared to weed, and then of a systematic depopulation which no man cared to moderate, was the natural result of the overstrained idea of personal freedom, especially in matters of landed property, hereditary in Englishmen, acting in concert with certain political misfortunes and certain economical crotchets which specially affected that part of the British dominions. These causes, working quietly, and without any attempted check, for more than a century, have caused the Highlands generally to fall into a state of neglect and disregard which every man wise to estimate the worth of the Celtic element in our mixed population must lament. No doubt Walter Scott with his Rob Roy, Robert Burns, to a certain extent, with his Highland Mary, and Wordsworth with his Inversnaid Beauty, did something to revive the kindly feeling towards the Highlands which the political rancour inherited from the Rebellion of 1745 and the dogmatic prejudices of Dr. Johnson had done their best to extinguish; but this revival, like the Jacobite songs of Hogg and others, was more in the way of sentimental sympathy than of practical aid; and so it came to pass that, in the middle of this nineteenth century, we found our Highland economy drifted into a condition, if less fretful and less noisy, not much less lamentable than that of Ireland. In our haste to make money, the besetting sin of a commercial people, we had surrendered ourselves to the despotic sway of economical reforms, crudely conceived and harshly exe

cuted, proceeding upon the false idea that, if only the absolute amount of certain products were increased, no regard was to be had to the quality or the distribution of the producing population; and the infatuation of this one idea had, in many cases, proceeded so far as to leave large districts of the country absolutely without anything to represent a middle class, save the factor, the doctor, and the parish minister. Landlords, once the centre of a kindly circle, found society everywhere except at home; and as for the land, once green with furrowed slopes, and happy with smoking cottages, the only thing to be done for it was to stock it largely with sheep or deer, to reap large rentals, at no expense, from Tweedside farmers or London millionaires, with an absolute immunity from the possibility of poor-rates and poachers. Of course, the state of things was not everywhere so bad; there were noble gentlemen who knew how to combine warm devotion to mountain sports with the kindly care of a hereditary tenantry; but if any proprietor of land, whether to pay his own debts, or to save himself from poor-rates, or to humour a heartless factor, chose to clear the land of its people, and stock it with sheep or deer, there was no law to hinder him; and public opinion, which might have complemented the deficiency of feudal law, partly from the remoteness of the region where these acts, equally inhuman and impolitic, were committed, partly from the servility of the local press, writing too often in the interest of lairds and lawyers, partly from the pernicious influence of the selfish maxim, "that a man may do what he likes with his own," partly, no doubt, in the way of reaction from the exaggerated statements and unfounded outcries of agrarian agitators without fairness, and economic speculators without sense,—from all these causes public opinion did nothing to preserve the Highlanders; accustomed itself rather, comfort