652 Professor J. Stuart BlacMe [April 29, 



tlieir published shape ; and this is a doubt which, like many points 

 connected with the Homeric poems of early Greece, must, I fear, 

 remain for ever unremoved. The Greek Homer, that is, the great 

 poet who usually passes for the author of the Iliad, and the Celtic 

 Homer, that is, not Ossian, but MacPherson, equally founded their 

 fame on the working up of the floating materials of popular ballads 

 into a more elevated form ; as they both equally, no doubt, left im- 

 printed on the materials which they used the stamp of their own 

 peculiar genius ; only with this difference, that Homer lived in an age 

 when the minstrel world to which he belonged was still in its vigour, 

 while MacPherson appeared late in a literary age in the character 

 rather of an antiquarian refurbisher than of an active contemporary 

 bard. The consequence is, that between Homer and the times of 

 which he sings, the most complete and pleasant harmony everywhere 

 is felt ; whereas MacPherson's work can never altogether be cleared 

 from the suspicion of having quitted the healthy simplicity of the old 

 traditions to indulge in the superfine sentiment and a certain tragic 

 attitudinising, characteristic of the somewhat flat and feeble century 

 to which he belonged. 



Though the Highlanders were never a reading people, and are not 

 even now so to any great extent, we must not suppose that they were in 

 any sense a savage or a degraded or an uncultured race. Not in the 

 least. Man liveth not by books alone, but by every word that floweth 

 out of the living soul of a brother. Professional bards always existed 

 amongst them, learned in all the traditions of their clan, and with 

 senses well exercised to discern all the beauty and sublimity of the 

 picturesque country which they inhabited. Of the intellectual fer- 

 tility of this race a notion may be had from the study of the Sar 

 ohair or book of the classical Highland poets, a collection made by 

 a certain John MacKenzie, of Gairloch, in Eoss-shire, to whose 

 memory a monument recently erected strikes the eye of the tra- 

 veller as he proceeds from the old village to the New Inn outside 

 the loch. 



It would be impossible for me, in the bird's-eye view I am here 

 presenting, to enumerate even the names of those who have merited 

 an honourable place in this Pantheon of the Celtic bards ; for not only 

 within the book but outside of it, everywhere, even at the present 

 hour, the intellectual atmosphere of the Highlands is intensely 

 lyrical, and common people express their best thoughts in song as 

 naturally as the moist banks shoot forth primroses in April.* But I 

 may single out three as having more than common claims to the notice 

 of the general British public ; I mean Alastair MacDonald, of Ard- 

 namurchan, Dugald Buchanan, of Loch Rannoch, Perthshire, and 



* The fertility of the living Celtic Muse will be b( st imderstood by the 

 perusal of the Omnaiche and other lyrical collections published by Mr. Sinclair, 

 Argyle Street, Glasgow, or to be had' from MacLachlan and Stewart, publishers, 

 opposite the College, Edinburgh. 



