ing in any wise to exhaust a fertile theme, but only to call attention to a subject which, from an unhappy combination of influences, has been either unduly subordinated, unworthily neglected, or altogether ignored.

Amid the immense mass of traditional materials moulded and remoulded into popular song, and floating about as a stimulating element in the atmosphere of medieval life, it is extremely difficult to lay the finger certainly upon this or that fragment and say to what particular century or epoch it belongs. But this much we may unquestionably say, that the reverence for the past, which is inherent in all healthy-minded peoples, and was specially potent in the Celts, will not willingly allow the monuments of its earliest lyrical inspiration to be buried under the rank growth of the present. If the glittering novelty of to-day is strong to attract the popular gaze, because of its glitter mainly, and because of its novelty, the hoary sign-post that points through centuries will often claim a veneration from its age that it could not earn by its virtue; and so, among the collections of popular Celtic poetry that have been made at various times in Scotland and Ireland, we are justly entitled to look for much whose origin extends further back than any date that strict evidence would entitle us to assign to it. Of the old Celtic traditional poetry common to Ireland and Scotland-for the intimate connection of Hibernian and Caledonian culture shines like a golden thread through the lyrical literature of both` countries-the most notable collection is that made by Mr. Campbell of Islay, and published under the title of the Book of the Finn.1 The greater part of this collection,

1 Leabhar na Feinne. London, Spottiswoode, 1872. Printed for the Author. Gaelic only. Mr. Campbell surely means to add a volume with an English and, if possible, an elegant Latin translation. Such a work belongs to the world.

taken down by the patriotic zeal of the distinguished author from popular recitation, presents of course no literary landmark by which the date of its composition could be determined. Nevertheless we have here the sort of stuff on which the patriotic spirit and the imaginative capacity of the common people was fed for centuries before the Reformation, and even prior to the Christian era. One certain date only, and a date which enables us to exclude all productions of the Celtic Muse more recent than the Reformation, is afforded by the Book of the Dean of Lismore, which, to the non-Gaelic scholar, presents the best materials for judging of the state of professional bardic minstrelsy during the lustiest epoch of the middle ages. Of this book and its contents, therefore, we shall now proceed to give a short account.

In the beautiful village of Fortingall, situated at the extreme east end of the picturesque winding Glen-Lyon, which extends westwards behind Schihallion towards Ben Doran and the hills of Tyndrum, there lived, at the era of the Reformation, a Churchman belonging to a sept of the great clan M'Gregor, who, to the vicarage of his Perthshire clachan, added the dignity of the Deanery of Lismore, at that time the Episcopal seat of the Bishops of Argyll. This gentleman, with a largeness of sympathy which contrasts favourably with the narrowness of certain modern Presbyterian divines in the north, who will hear of nothing but sermons, employed his leisure hours in collecting into a commonplace-book a number of those historical and other ballads which formed the staple of intellectual recreation in all parts of the country inhabited by the Celtic race. This collection of course contained nothing but what had received the stamp of popular acceptance and general currency. Its contents may therefore justly be considered as being generally several centuries

older than the Reformation; so that its genuine character, as containing the most authentic remains of early Caledonian poetry, cannot be disputed, and its value to the literary and civil historian of medieval Scotland is altogether unique. The worthy collector of these interesting remnants died in the year 1551, going piously and quietly to his rest just when John Knox was beginning to shake the foundations of all comfortable old Church life in Scotland by the rumbling earthquake of a necessary reformation. After his decease, his collection of ballads wandered, as is the course of such things, through various old family shelves, desks, and presses, till, in the last century, it came into the possession of the Highland Society of London, by whom it was handed over to the custody of the sister Society of Scotland; thence it sought and found a fitting place of refuge in one of the learned vaults of the Advocates' Library, principally through the agency of Mr. William Skene, whose labours in the field of early British history are largely known and universally appreciated. Considering the character and position of the custodiers, it may appear strange to some that such a book was not given to the public a hundred years ago, at the time when the publication of alleged Ossianic poems by Macpherson excited such a wide ferment of opinion in the British literary world. But it was easier to battle about Celtic poems than to take the trouble to study them. In the midst of all that bandying of sharp words about Celtic matters, Celtic books were not read and the Celtic language not studied; but there was a peculiarity of the Dean M'Gregor's collection which made it a sealed book even to the most expert scholars of the day. This peculiarity consisted in the circumstance that the learned Churchman, by a curious anticipation of Pitman and the modern phonetic orthoepists, had written down his popular songs, not accord

ing to the character and spelling long sanctioned by the authority of Irish scholars-the spelling at present used in Irish books, and originally used in the Gaelic Bible,-but by the simple application of the Roman letters to express phonetically the spoken Gaelic of the then Scottish Gaels. Of course it required a man not only of learning, but of purpose and decision, to attempt such a decipherment; and accordingly the book had to wait for a half-century after the Ossianic inquisitions of the Highland Society of Edinburgh, before it found a worthy translator in the person of the Reverend Dr. Thomas M'Lauchlan of the Gaelic Free Church, Edinburgh. To the interpretation of the old Gaelic by this learned Presbyterian Churchman Mr. Skene added a valuable introduction, containing, besides an account of the Dean's book, a philological estimate of the Irish and Scottish varieties, for they are scarcely dialects, of the Gaelic, and a critical verdict on the famous Ossianic question, which we shall have occasion to discuss afterwards.

I have said that the Book of the Dean of Lismore is unique in its way, and must be regarded as containing a most valuable treasure of old Celtic material; but I must now warn the reader not for that reason to expect to find in it the highest flights of the Celtic Muse. Quite the contrary. It is no very easy task, from the high strain and hot spur of lyric poetry, as we find it in the lofty flights of Shelley, Coleridge, and other notable English singers of the last generation, to tone readers down to the simplicity and sobriety which like a fundamental keynote lies at the bottom of all genuine poetry of the people. But apart from this, the great body of the poetry in the Dean's collection will certainly not rank high when compared with the popular ballads of Scotland, of Germany, of Servia, or even of the modern Greeks.

For

vividness of portraiture, fervour of feeling, truth of character, rich flow of humour, and great wisdom of life, unless my patriotic sentiment deceive me, I think there are no compositions of purely popular growth anywhere that surpass the Scottish songs and ballads, compared with which not a few of the poems in the Dean's collection are scarce worthy to be called poetry at all; indeed, I have little doubt that the bards who wrote them, in many cases, were a sort of necessary professional appendage to a great family, functionaries who composed verses on important occasions, pretending as little to any real poetic inspiration as a family chaplain drawling out his tame weekly discourse in the family chapel may boast of the glowing apostleship of St. Paul. No doubt those bards were no hirelings; they were quite honest and loyal so far as they went. But if a poet be, as Plato will have it, a winged animal, these Macnabs and Macdougalls and Macrories show rather like ducks in a village pond than like eagles ministering to the thunderbolt of Jove. In fact, if these old professional bards were only well skilled in family genealogy, which it was their business to be, and had been decently indoctrinated in the tricks of Celtic versification, which was a simple matter of drill, like learning to write Greek iambics in Oxford, they might play their part at a great local gathering with much more effect and applause than if they had possessed the ethereal glow of Shelley, the eagle swoop of Byron, or the rich quaint pregnancy of Browning; just as a Parliamentary orator, well versed in the Whig and Tory traditions of the House, will make a more telling speech on some great party occasion than a man of ten times his ability, who has not lived in the atmosphere of Parliamentary manœuvre nor been studious to wield the Parliamentary war-weapons. But if these poems have not often a high poetical value, they have always a genuine