tor the Lamiter, bard of M'Lean, were
pre-eminent in this department. The Massacre of Glencoe suggested
numerous elegies. There is one remarkable for pathos by a clansman who
had emigrated to the Isle of Muck, from which circumstance he is styled
"Am Bard Mucanach."

The knights of Duart and Sleat, the chiefs of Clanranald and Glengarry,
the Lochaber seigniory of Lochiel, and the titled chivalry of Sutherland
and Seaforth,[18] formed subjects of poetic eulogy. Sir Hector Maclean,
Ailein Muideartach, and the lamented Sir James Macdonald obtained the
same tribute. The second of these Highland favourites could not make his
manly countenance, or stalwart arm, visible in hall, barge, or
battle,[19] without exciting the enthusiastic strain of the enamoured
muse of one sex, or of the admiring minstrel of the other. In this
department of poetry, some of the best proficients were women. Of these
Mary M'Leod, the contemporary of Ian Lom, is one of the most musical and
elegant. Her chief, _The M'Leod_, was the grand theme of her
inspiration. Dora Brown[20] sung a chant on the renowned Col-Kitto, as
he went forth against the Campbells to revenge the death of his father;
a composition conceived in a strain such as Helen Macgregor might have
struck up to stimulate to some deed of daring and vindictive enterprise.

Of the modern poetry of the Gael, Macpherson has expressed himself
unfavourably; he regarded the modern Highlanders as being incapable of
estimating poetry otherwise than in the returning harmony of similar
sounds. They were seduced, he remarks, by the charms of rhyme; and
admired the strains of Ossian, not for the sublimity of the poetry, but
on account of the antiquity of the compositions, and the detail of facts
which they contained. On this subject a different opinion has been
expressed by Sir Walter Scott. "I cannot dismiss this story," he writes,
in his last introduction to his tale of the "Two Drovers," "without
resting attention for a moment on the light which has been thrown on the
character of the Highland Drover, since the time of its first
appearance, by the account of a drover poet, by name Robert Mackay, or,
as he was commonly called, Rob Donn, _i.e._, Brown Robert; and certain
specimens of his talents, published in the ninetieth number of the
_Quarterly Review_. The picture which that paper gives of the habits
and feelings of a class of persons with which the general reader would
be apt to associate no ideas