Blair Collection > Address to Highlanders respecting their native Gaelic

ADDRESS TO HIGHLANDERS.
Mv Fellow-Countrymrn,
I lately considered it my duty to address the
Highland Proprietors on a subject which has been most painful
to us all, namely, on "Highland Clearances,"* and the same spirit
which urged me to write that address, urges me to write the
present. A lover of my country I am, and ever have been ; and
if there is anything more than another that is peculiar to my
native country which I love, it is the language. It was the
language that gave us a name, and that made us to differ from
the rest of Scotland. If there is anything more than another that
makes me feel proud as a man, it is this : that the Gaelic is my
native tongue, and the Highlands of Scotland my native country.
A language more glittering with a refined imagination than the
former, and a country more glittering with the same than the
latter, in the names given to the different places, is not, I believe,
to be found on earth. I am also a great lover of the native
melodies of my country. I am aware that many of a serious turn
of mind, not putting a distinction between songs and the melodies
accompanying them, have been led to look upon them as something
bad, calling them cursed songs and cursed bagpipes. But they
might as well call the Gaelic by the same name, because wicked
men use it for a bad purpose. The Gaelic may be used for a good
purpose, and so may these beautiful melodies. There are many
who use instruments of music in their parlours for a good purpose,
and why might not the bagpipes be used in the same way? Any
music that surpasses the melody of the bagpipes, in a Highland
glen, resounding from rocks, 1 have never listened to. I am sorry
that the old beautiful melodies of this Highlands are only to be
found now, in most places, amongst the aged, and that the young
race have lost them almost entirely. As the friend of our race, I
would say to them : Gather them all up, that none of them be lost.
You can scarcely leave a better inheritance for your children. I
would willingly part with everything I have in the world to be in
possession of them.
Do not suppose that when a man becomes a Christian he ceases
to be a patriot— a lover of his country. No doubt he ceases to be
a lover of everything sinful peculiar to his countrymen, but I have
no idea of that religion that would make a man cease 1o be a man.
Did the great Apostle of the Gentiles ever forget that he was a
Hebrew of the Hebrews ? No doubt he renounced it as the founda-
* Not published yet.