Blair Collection > Treatise on the language, poetry, and music of the Highland clans

OF THE HIGHLAND CLANS. 57
The above was written in the beginning of the twelftli century, while the
people of Ireland and Scotland were yet sunk in ragged misery, filth, and
barbarity, before that enlightened and civilizing myth of penny-a-line creation, — •
the Saxon, — had brought every thing beautiful, enlightened, great and lovely, to
spread intelligence and happiness over these rude and benighted countries!
Let those who assert that Italy is the source of this divine art, try if they can
quote from any Latin or Italian work of the twelfth century, such a proof of the
civilization of the Koman and his Italian descendants, as the above paragraph
furnishes of the civilization of the barbarous Celtic nations of Ireland and
Scotland in that age.
Extraordinary honours were paid to the Bards, who thus elevated the
lives of the people. Their persons were inviolable, their houses sanctuaries,
their lands and flocks carefully protected. Compare this to the estimation in
which the poet and his productions are held in this par excellence age of
civilization, and there can remain no doubt that the Celtic race of the twelfth
century were regular savages ! " As those who entered the order were of un-
blemished character, they were eminent in the practice of the virtues they
inculcated." " Within this bosom there is a voice," says the blind bard of Selma
— " it comes not to other ears — that bids Ossian succour the helpless in their hour
of need." In the same poem he expresses other sentiments, equally noble and
magnanimous. "Your fathers have been foes," he says to two unfriendly warriors;
" but forget their enmity, — it was the cloud of other years." And Fingal, who is
celebrated for his poetry, often expresses similar sentiments. " None," he calmly
says to his grandson, Oscar, "none ever went sad from Fingal — my hand never
injured the weak, nor my steel the feeble in arms. Oscar, bind the strong, but
spare the feeble hand. Be thou a sea of many tides against the foes of the
people, but like the gale that moves the grass to those who seek thine aid. So
Trenmor lived, such Trathel was, and such has Fingal been. My arm was the
support of the injured, — the weak rested behind my steel." In the denounced,
and all but proscribed, Macpherson's Ossian, are to be found the most generous,
the most heroic, and the most tender and benevolent sentiments ever uttered by
bard. Beautiful, indeed, is the civilization of the people that could allow them-
selves to be prejudiced against such poetry !
The Roman emperors and the English and Scottish kings, as already
mentioned, passed atrociously penal enactments against the Bards, who have
ever been the friends of liberty, and the deadly foes of all despotism. Under
the pretext of putting down a mischievous superstition, the former struck at
the Bards, through the Druids, and subjected both themselves and their wives
and children to an indiscriminate massacre in Anglesea. Similar massacres of
the Bards were committed by the kings of England, both in Ireland and Wales ;
and the following, among many similar enactments, shows that the feudal kings
of Scotland treated those of the Bards who adventured within the Lowland
Pale, in a similar spirit ; for in Scotland, as well as in Ireland, the feudal kings
and their laws were happily kept for ages within a Pale, or circuit, beyond
which the rights and liberties of the people were conserved, — although the
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