: give a formal verdict on their merits. What a man does not admire, he will be wiser, in the general case, quietly to drop rather than hastily to condemn; for the absence of admiration may arise as naturally from deficiency in the spectator as from a fault in the spectacle. Something I do admire in Ossian, viz., its sustained tone of sombre sympathy with some of the most sublime aspects of nature in the Highlands, and not less the combination of heroic manliness and delicate sensibility in the poetical personages. I will say, also, that to my ear there is a rich melodious flow of descriptive verse in many parts of the original, very far removed from the pseudo-sublime staccato-stride of the English prose. On the other hand, there is a prolonged monotone about these epics which is really oppressive there is extremely little variety either of character or incident there appears in Fingal, as already remarked, an artificial stuffing up and padding out of a very meagre plot, with a disproportionate array of episodes; and, worse than all, there is to my feeling, in some places, a certain melodramatic air about the poems, and a vein of overrefined, almost sickly, sentiment, here and there, which I cannot away with. At the same time, I am very far from setting up my own taste as a norm for other people. I know not a few gentlemen, of high original genius, who derive intellectual nourishment from Ossian and other types of poetry against which my stomach rebels. Some men cannot read Tennyson; most men find it difficult to digest Browning; and other men say that Walter Scott was no poet. Diversities in such matters need not be contradictions; and I hope the enthusiastic admirers of Ossian may willingly condone the fault of my temperament when I say that I, in every view, prefer the simple natural grace of Duncan Ban M'Intyre's cheerful Muse to the sombre and somewhat stilted sublimity of the author of Fingal, whoever he may be. V CHAPTER V. GAELIC LITERATURE IN ITS MOST RECENT PHASES; Thir steallaireach, alltach, ard-choillteach thiugh sprèidheach EWAN M'COLL. I PITY the man who can ramble among the waving woods fresh-tipt with green, in the month of May, and resonant with vocal life, and not wish to be a bird; and him I pity more who, at no moment of his life—not even once in the exuberant fulness of opening youth-has felt those bird-like motions in his soul which naturally issue in song. Song, in fact, is the very triumph of life with itself, the harmonised issue of a happy vitality thrilling in all its strings; it is the unfolding of the cased wings of the creature that on common occasions can only walk or creep; for which reason, no doubt, Plato calls the poet a winged animal;1 and every man is a poet when he sings. What the single song poured out of a full heart, and curiously vibrated through the cunning apparatus of the throat, is to each individual who sings, that the popular 1 Ζῶον πτερωτὸν ὁ ποιητής.—ION. song and the national air is to the people. It is the stirring of the great national life in its deepest fountains; it is the upbillowing of the grand river of popular energy with fertility in its flood; it is the feeder of the inspiration of the mighty phalanx of an organised humanity, as it marches on its way through the phases of heroic struggle and manly conflict to the goal of national independence from without, and reasonable liberty from within. What the nation wishes and wills, what it desires and what it achieves, what it triumphs in and what it weeps over, fitly expresses itself in song. Music in fact is the only art that can make even sorrow enjoyable; there is a miraculous power in it which changes all water into wine, and a touch that clothes even the basest object with a coating of living gold. If Every one has heard the definition of the old French constitution, struck out in the usual happy way by some wit of the saloons-monarchy limited by a chanson. song was mighty in modern France, as in ancient Greece, it was not less potent among the Highlanders of the middle ages, the progenitors of those best of national soldiers who made the British name immortal, in the great European war against Napoleonic despotism, on the memorable fields of Spain and Belgium. If sermons did much to form the character of Scotsmen and Highlanders, songs I imagine did no less. I do not scruple in all soberness to agree with the stout remark of a manly Highlander, that "the old Gaelic system of cultivating the hearts of the people by means of poetry and music was, so far as the masses are concerned, infinitely superior to a lettered education."1 Nothing is more natural than that people who have unfortunately in this hard country been strangers to the 1 Language, Poetry, and Music of the Highland Clans, by Donald Campbell. Edinburgh: 1862. educating power of music in their own homes, should be unable to estimate its action in forming the noble and chivalrous character of the genuine old Highlander. But modern opinions and dry scholastic notions are no test of truth. It was a musical education that made Achilles and Agamemnon, Homer and Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Plato. The Greeks no doubt invented logic also; but they used that only as a tool for intellectual fence; their instrument for popular education was music-povσIKÝ— that is, a poetry essentially popular, and a music wedded to words of a predominantly national significance. Herein lay the secret of their greatness; and our own Highlanders, though performing a less prominent part on the great stage of human life, used the same method, and achieved to a great extent the same result. It always must be so. Nature, however ignored by fashion, overridden by red-tape, and tortured by schoolmasters, will always assert her supremacy. She alone can make men; school boards easily, if they fail to follow her indications, may invent a patent machinery to unmake them. The Celt is essentially a lyrical animal; and, had the Government of this country, or the lords of the soil, who were the natural overseers (or bishops) of the people in civil matters, been anxious to do common educational justice to the sons of the brave fellows who so freely shed their blood in our defence, the last thing they would have suffered to be neglected in Highland schools (where there were any) was the national music. For national purposes the "March of the Cameron Men," and scores of such heroic lays, in the true old Greek style of ev μúpтov kλadì τὸ ξίφος φορήσω, were worth all the Latin grammars that ever were printed. But an evil destiny hung over this noble fountain of national inspiration, a blight fell with deadening swoop over the brightness and the joy and the luxuriance of Highland life; and not only on the brave land beyond "the rough boundaries," but in Scotland also, the land of Burns, and in once merry England, from a combination of causes that we shall now endeavour to enumerate. That song-genuine national song rousing enthusiasm and forming character, does not reign among us now with that sway which it once possessed, and with that divine right which belongs to it, is but too evident. To what causes is this to be traced? First, I think there is the democratico-political spirit which arose in Europe with the French Revolution, and is still working with a fretful fermentation amongst us. No doubt the Revolution had its songs, and some of the best; but the continuous struggle for power which democracy begets, the bitterness of party strife on which it feeds, and the habit of faultfinding which it cherishes, are not favourable to that sweet and sympathetic temper which delights in a song. There is a hardness, a sharpness, and sometimes a sourness about politics with which music can have no fellowship; and democracy, which makes every man a politician, will have a tendency to substitute party recriminations for social entertainment, and Parliamentary debates for songs. Then again with the French Revolution there came upon our poets a strange rage of tugging at the roots of things, laying all sorts of new imaginary foundations for Church and State, now soaring up to heaven and now diving down to hell with all sorts of perturbed questionings; in short, they became metaphysicians and theologians; and, though this could not annihilate poetry, but rather created a new species of it, attempting in a more brilliant style the cosmic problems which in the earliest times had stirred the soul of an Empedocles and a Heraclitus, it certainly was not favourable to song. It had rather a decided tendency to ignore singing generally, and to substitute in |