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

4 INTKODUCTORY REMARKS.
vacation-time as teachers, for the purpose of procuring funds to pay their class
fees, &c. : hence the egotism of the dominie was usually superinduced on the cal-
lousness and coarseness of the plebeian, before the generality of such clergymen
had become placed ministers. Naturally looking to a position, which had been the
object of such a struggle and such privations, as the highest that in his view
can be attained on earth, such a clergyman, when he attains a church, considers
himself a most lordly personage, and wants nothing, in his own opinion, to
establish his dignity and fix his status, but a few lordly, or at least, lairdhj
acquaintances. Every branch of the Protestant Church furnishes men of heads,
hearts, and manners, which make them true specimens of scholars and gentle-
men ; but such are rare. Surely, when society as now constituted consists of
three classes, means might be found to secure a greater number of the higher
and middle classes for the Church. It would indeed be a pity to exclude men
of fine hearts and high talents from the Church, merely because their parents
were poor or low-born ; but as for the common herd of plebeian ministers, these,
we affirm, would be more happy, and certainly more suitably employed and
useful to their country, as artisans and labourers, than in their present
position.
The bard and seannachie, who were the guardians of the Gaelic language,
ceased to live as an order on the accession of the King of Scotland to the
throne of the British Empire ; and there were no means provided at the
Keformation for educating ministers or schoolmasters for the Gaelic-speaking
part of the people. But this was not all. Corruption was added to the neglect
of the language ; for since the patriarchal governments of the clans were
dissolved by the disasters of Culloden, and Highland tenures have been sub-
jected to the feudal laws, the people have been in a transition state, and the
country so inundated with a Lowland peasantry, as scarcely to leave a single
locality in which the Gael or his language are to be found in their native purity.
The clerical student who really wished to qualify himself for the native pulpit,
had another formidable diificulty to surmount besides the want of Gaelic pro-
fessors and schoolmasters, and that was, the hostility of the Reform Clergy,
Episcopalian as well as Presbyterian, to the native poetry and tales, in which
alone the Gaelic is to be found in its purity.
The priesthood who succeeded the Culdees, showed far more tact and
knowledge of human nature than those who succeeded the Ecformation ; for,
instead of entering into hostility against the traditional poems and heroes that
had such a hold on the hearts, and such an influence over the lives of the people,
they went deliberately and systematically to work, so to reconstruct these as to
render them subservient to the " pious fraud" by which they sought to convert
mankind to the new religion. The Protestant historians of the Catholic Church,
in accounting for many of its feasts, &c. say that they availed themselves of
" established superstitions." Had they said that they invented superstitions,
which afterwards became established, they had been nearer the truth. At any
rate, they composed new versions of the traditional poems of the north and east
of Erin and of Albin, where the draid or natural religion and the patriarchal