"Now farewell Rannoch, with thy loch and isle, When I have been oft at the King's horn. 告 Now good Glendochart, for ever more adieu, That oft has been my buckler and my beild (protection); Farewell Fernay, that oft my friend has been; Thou wast the ground of all my woe and teyne (grief). Farewell Glenurchy and Glenlyon baith, My death to you will be but little skaith. Farewell Glenalmond, garden of Pleasance, * Farewell Stratherne, most comely for to know, Farewell Menteith, where oft I did repair, And came unsought aye, as does the snow, The existence of this morsel in Ms. in Taymouth Castle excited a good deal of curiosity in the inquiring world, at last gratified by Professor Innes, who printed it for the Bannatyne Club in the Black Book of Taymouth. If not, properly speaking, published, it was thus put at the command of all who might desire to see it and comment on it. The best commentary, however, that we yet have on it, is to be found in Professor Innes's own Sketches of Early Scotch History, to which we refer for a fuller account of the whole affair than any we can here give room for.1 It was generally supposed that Laideus, as the hero is called, was a merely typical person, but he comes forth as a man of this world in very emphatic form and large proportions. He is identified with Duncan M'Gregor of Ladassach, the head of a band of reivers of that proscribed name. He flourished for a period 1 See Sketches of Early Scotch History, p. 355, et sey. unusually long for one in his position-from the year 1513 to the year 1552—and hence perhaps the fame that tempted our anonymous poet to impersonate him as a type of his class. The poem professes to embody his prison thoughts while waiting execution in the feudal dungeon of the Earl of Breadalbane. That potent chief had the old power of pit and gallows. He would have thought twice before he exercised the power of death on any responsible subject of the king; but with a M'Gregor it was a different affair. Putting one of their tribe to death was at all times meritorious, and in fact it would have been considered a sort of indecorum to trouble the king's courts about the matter. While Duncan was at large, to be sure, the king's court fulminated indictments and other documents against him, which did him no harm, while they furnish us, through their hard formality of statements, with some glimpses of his ferocious and sanguinary life. One of them says how, under "silence of night," he came to the house of one of the retainers of Breadalbane, " and by force took him furth of his said hous, and by way of murder strake him with whingairs (or hangers), and cruelly slew him, and spulyet and took from him his purse, and in it the sum of forty pounds; and incontinent thereafter passed to the lands of Killin, to the house of ane pure man called John M'Bean, piper, and there assegit the said house and brake the doors thereof, and by force took the said John forth of the samin, and strake his head from his body and cruelly slew him." Professor Innes says, There is poetry in the wild wail of the chained robber, and moreover a sense of natural beauty and a tenderness of feeling which we do not look for in writers of that age, and which no earlier Scotch poet had expressed so well, if we except the admirable Gawin Douglas."i This sense of natural beauty and tenderness are the specialties that are significant to the present purpose. The poem is a satire of that kind which clothes in the attributes of the loved and the beautiful whatever is most loathed and detested. It is in the same vein of the burlesque that in the Pickwick Papers the dirty ruffians clustering about a debtors' prison of the old type, are found sentimentally moralizing over past scenes of London street-brutality, as Byron muses on his boy-feelings and the dreams he then dreamt under the shadow of Lochnagar, or as Waverley recalled all that had passed between his first and second visit to Tully-Veolan. So when Neddy is called upon to remember the pugnacious butcher, Tom Martin: "Bless my dear eyes," said Mr. Roker, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and gazing abstractedly over the grated window before him, as if he were fondly recalling some 1 Sketches, p. 365. peaceful scene of his early youth; "it seems but yesterday that he whopped the coal-heaver down Fox-under-the-Hill, by the wharf there. I think I can see him now a-coming up the Strand between the two street keepers, a little sobered by the bruising, with a patch o' winegar and brown paper over his right eyelid, and that 'ere lovely bull-dog as pinned the little boy arterwards a-following at his heels. What a rum thing time is, ain't it, Neddy?" The old satirist finds his fun in the grotesqueness of linking ideas of sentiment and poetry with Highland scenery; the modern novelist finds his in linking such ideas with low London life. The Lowlander viewed the Highland reiver of that day with. loathing, and a contempt only modified by terror. Even the panic of rage, fear, and antipathy, aroused in the London mind two years ago against the ticket-of-leave men whom imagination set garotting in every street, was something far inferior. To put poetical sentiment and feeling into the mouth of one of the accursed race was high irony. It was heightened by making the events of his savage criminal life the object of his tender reminiscences. It was still further heightened by the physical character of the places on which his affections alighted. Instead of lawns and pleached alleys, fair gardens and fountains, it was that howling wilderness, that abode of horrors-the Highlands of Perth and Inverness-the district which all the fashionable world now delight in. To speak of Glendochart, Glenlochy, Glenurchy, Breadalbane, Loch Tay, and Stratherne, was sufficient to call up sensations of the most lively horror and disgust. The reiver's sentimental reminiscences point to two distinct elements of Highland scenery, each adored in the present day for its special beauties. The one was where he got his prey, the other where he hid it and himself. Along all the streams there are straths or haughs of rich alluvial land. Until sheep-farming began, these were the only productive tracts close to the Highlands, and their acreage was valuable as well for its fruitfulness as its narrowness. But there was one terrible element in the price paid by the Lowland peasant who cultivated these straths the ceaseless vigilance and contest with "the Children of the Mist" who occupied the rocky recesses rising close over them. At that time the ethnic position towards each other of the Celtic freebooter and the Lowland farmer was about as antagonistic as that of the Red Indian to the Pilgrim Father in New England. Our extracts may possibly have been read without a suspicion that the author had not himself some sympathy with the old Highlander bidding an eternal farewell to the scenery which he loved. The fact is that the asterisks in the quotations represent some lines that would have revealed the wolf. For instance, there is pleasant Stratherne, "most comely for to know "I rugged thy ribs till oft I made them roar, For oft time I gart them alarum.” To those who know the local history of the times, this rug-ging of the ribs calls up a scene of horror such as, in later times, has only been realized by the Indian scalpings of distant settlements in America, or the Sepoy rebellion in India. It will serve, perhaps, still more distinctly to emphasize the antagonism between the existing and the older notions about the Highlands, to remember that this Duncan M'Gregor was just a Roderic Dhu, and that nothing was more natural than that about his out-premises there might be seen wandering some captive maniac, like Blanche, "Tane in the morn she was a bride, When Roderic forayed Devon side.” All the world knows about the loveliness of Ellen's Isle, and the heroic and romantic incidents of which a rich poetic fancy, by selecting the picturesque elements out of realities, made it the theatre. Thousands are the pilgrims who have worshipped at the shrine, and found it even lovelier than they expected in its rich feathering of birch and aspen.. But to respectable persons of the sixteenth century, it was a den of Cacus, infested by murderers, and a great emporium of stolen goods. In the indictments it was called Island Varnoch, a picturesque enough name, which might have been of use to Scott, if he had fallen on it. Some persons were indicted for the slaughter of John Macgillies, several thefts of horses and cattle, and "being in company with Duncan Macewan Macgregor, called The Tutor, at the burning of Aberuchel, where seven men were slain, three bairns were burnt, twenty kine and oxen were stolen, reft, and away taken." And the next accusation is for "taking part with the rebels and fugitives that took to the isle called Island Varnoch, and taking into the said isle of eight score kine and oxen, eighteen score sheep and goats, stolen, reft, and away taken from the inhabitants of the country about," "whilk," as the document elsewhere says, were eaten and slain by them within the said island." The place was viewed with horror as the dwelling of creatures, filthy, ferocious, and half-naked, who lived like 1 Pitcairn's Criminal Trials, iii. 232. wild beasts, surrounded by the bones, the refuse, and the rotting carcases of the animals they had stolen. But a still more revolting suspicion hung around them--that of cannibalism. It was often recalled how St. Jerome said he had seen the Celtic Scots eating human flesh, and had noticed how they relished the more succulent parts of the bodies of women and young people. The suspicion that the Highlanders were cannibals lingered in England later than the '45. In that exceedingly popular book, Captain Johnston's Lives of Highwaymen and Robbers, there is a specific and sober account of Sawney Bean and his gang who had eaten away to such an extent as to have told on the census if there had been one. If, therefore, the inhabitants of the isle had sedulously tended a comely Lowland maiden such as Ellen Douglas, they might have borne the suspicion sometimes incurred by New Zealanders when attentive to the feeding of their missionaries; that is, always supposing her to have been as Wordsworth puts it- "A creature not too wise and good For human nature's daily food." To come back to the ordinary poetic literature of Scotland. William Drummond, as every tourist knows pretty well, possessed one of the most charming little specimens of Scottish rock and river scenery in existence; but if he ever makes any allusion to it in his poetry, we have not discovered the passage. People say that strange piece of wild and plaintive musing, called a Cypresse Grove-like a combination of Jeremy Taylor, Cicero, and Sir Thomas Browne-had reference to a grove of his own, but it was doubtless purely mythical. In some complimentary verses addressed to him by his contemporary the Earl of Stirling, there is a distinct reference to his stream of Esk, and some other allusions to scenery, of which the reader may make the best he can. Thus "Swan which so sweetly sings By Aska's banks, and pitifully plains, That old Meander never heard such strains, And now our Caledon Is by thy songs made a new Helicon. Her mountains, woods, and springs, While mountains, woods, springs be, shall sound thy praise, And though fierce Boreas oft make pale her bays, And kill these myrtles with enraged breath Which should thy brows enwreath, Her floods have pearls, seas amber do send forth, If the poet had in his mind the place "Where Johnson sat in Drummond's classic shade," |