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234 SCOTTISH ECCENTRICS
They could be swayed, deceived, or goaded into war by
any alleged insult to their immediate community. The
larger issues were unrealised. Few could read or write,
which mattered little, for there was little to read and no
occasion to write.' So two highly respected Scottish
scholars, one of whom bears a Highland name. It matters
not to Professor Hume Brown that not even the then
enormous sum of £30,000 could procure a traitor from
among the Highlanders to betray the Prince even from
among the clans ivho had regarded his enterprise with in-
difference (as if the uncorruptibility of the Highlanders
were too much to be believed, it has even been suggested
that the idea of money had no meaning for them, and the
offer no temptation!) or to Mr Mackay that the people
whose illiteracy he derides had by 1745 been deprived of
all education through the medium of their mother-tongue
for more than a hundred years, and yet maintained an oral
literature of no small extent and beauty, and, in the re-
mote island of Uist, the traditions of the old Gaelic cul-
ture which centuries earlier had made Ireland the illumi-
nation of the western world. But 'omne ignotam pro
barbaro' seems to have been the proverb of the High-
landers' critics, maintained more recently as a reaction
against the literary exploits of James Macpherson and
the effusions of the Jacobite and Highland romanticists.
And here indeed there is to be found some measure of
excuse, though from the critical point of view there is no
condonation, for the historians' bias against the Gael.
For if the Highlanders have been undeservedly criticised,
they have also been undeservedly praised, and in fact the
controversy over their merits and faults has often been
waged in an atmosphere of complete unreality, the
imaginations of the contestants frequently relieving them
of the arduous task of historical research. And it is also
necessary to point out in fairness that Scottish Gaelic
literature has never been until recently well edited or
easily available. The text of the principal poet (Alexander
MacDonald) whose poems are included in this anthology