Blair Collection > Celtic monthly > Volume 4, 1896

THE CELTIC MONTHLY.
239
Amonp; the earliest historical refei-ences to
the Highland sword is the description gi\en by
Andrew ^V_vntolm of the battle of the North
Inch of Perth in V.V.)(\. He says referring to
the combatants: —
" All thai entrit in liarreris,
Wyth bow and axe, knyf and sword,
To deil aniaiig them their last werd."
Terrible indeed were the wounds inflicted by
this powerful weapon. " Heads were clo\en
assunder, limbs lopped from the trunk. The
meadow was soon llooded with blood, and
covered with dead and wounded meu,"t
t Sir Walter Scott's "Tales of a Grandfather."
Two double-handed swords used in this tight
are in the possession of the Mackintosh of
Mackintosh at Moy Hall. The sword shown
Fig 5 (July issue) is practically identical with
those weapons.
('/'() be continued).
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
To the Editor, Crttk MunfhUj.
Mr. bogle and THE HIGHLAND RACE.
Sir, — Most of your readers will be amazed, if not
amused, at Mr. Lockhart Bogle's letter in your issue
of this month. Not tliat the obliquity of vision
which he displays therein is at all new to us. We
are by tliis time well .iccustomed to the species of
critic who, finding the feuds and forays of a
thousand years compressed within a few score
pages, lacks the sense of proportion which would
enable him to set these red and striking incidents
in their proper relationship to the drab and incon-
spicuous events which form the truer history of a
people, but which the historian does not see fit to
chronicle. We are not so familiar, however, with
the strange lack of tact which leads Mr. Bogle to
write to a magazine which is mainly read by the
compatriots of Livingstone and Lord Clyde and
Norman Macleod and Mackay of Uganda, blandly
inforining its readers that the chief characteristics
of their race is treachery, revengefnlness, and (as
he terms it) animalism >. That liy the way, however.
Mr. Bogle is an artist ; but he seems to lack
that sense of proportion to which I have
referred, and to be unaware that there is such a
thing as perspective in history as well as in drawing,
and that the battles and treasons and spoils tliat
crowd its pages are merely outstanding events, often
set far apart in the great plain of work-a-day life.
If Mr. Bogle will be good enough to i-e-peruse his
History of England he will lind that it is largely
a chronicle of " battle, murder, and sudden death,"
of feud, treachery, cruelty, and greed. What more
brutal or revengeful feud than the Wars of the
Roses I Did tlie wildest Highland caterans ever
display a more cold-blooded ferocity than that with
which Cromwell's Englishmen put the defenceless
people of Drogheda to the sword ; or that with
which Jeffreys and Kirke stamped out the Monmouth
rising, or Cumberland treated the Highlanders
after CuUoden ; And is there an act in Highland
history more fiendish than that of the English
colonists in Tasmania, in the present century, who
got rid of the blacks by poisoning them wholesale
like rats (
But no thoughtful person supposes that such a
record gives the key to the true character of the
English people.
^ Has Mr. Bogle ever read Norman Macleod's
Stonj (if ,1 Hhjlihinil PidIxIi, and if so, does he
think that the kindly and good-humoured folk there
portrayed (and portrayed to the life), at all corres-
pond to the description with which he has favoured
us ; Do the kindly and witty lines of Duncan Biin,
or the sweet strains of Rub Donn (favourite poets
"f the Gael as they are and were) breathe treachery
and revenge and slaughter ? Is the Beiim Jlnniin
of the former— the poet who gave expression to his
own and his countrymen's love of nature, 50 years
before English reviewers had begun to jeer at
Wordsworth — is Beinn Doiain redolent of "ani-
malism ! " Was the treatment of the Lowland
people by the Highlanders in the Forty -five
characterised by any of the savagery with which
Cumberland treated even the Highland wounded !
On the contrary, the "wild " Highlanders displayed
a gentleness and moderation which was not at all
characteristic of European armies in the l.Sth
century. Had it not been so, we should not now
have some of our best Lowland songs.
Mr. Bogle will admit that Dr. Johnson was not
prejudiced in favour of the Highlanders. Yet this
is what the Smiter of Macpherson said, when the