chief in dangerous passes; the gilletruishanarnish, or carrier of the baggage; the piper; and lastly, the piper's gilly, who, as his master was always a gentleman, carried the pipes. Burt, a writer on the Highlands, thus speaks of the piper's functions:"In a morning, when the chief is dressing, he walks backward and forward, close under the window, without doors, playing on his bagpipe, with a most upright attitude and majestic stride. It is a proverb in Scotland, namely, the stately step of a piper. When required, he plays at meals, and in an evening is to divert the guests with his music when the chief has company with him: his attendance in a journey, or at a visit. His gilly holds the pipe till he begins; and the moment he has done with the instrument, he disdainfully throws it down upon the ground, as being only the passive means of conveying his skill to the ear, and not a proper weight for him to carry or bear at other times. But, for a contrary reason, his gilly snatches it up; which is, that the pipe may not suffer indignity from its neglect."

What is somewhat remarkable, the Highland Celts do not seem ever to have possessed a native literature of any kind; a circumstance which tends to place them lower in an archæological point of view than their Irish kindred of the middle ages. In Iona there was a learned priesthood, but they were a colony of Irish settlers, who brought with them the civilisation of Hibernia, at that time a land of classical and general lore-the Greece of the British Islands. The only engines of what may be called refined amusement among the Highlanders were the bards or minstrels who went about reciting the traditionary poetry of the clans. We have a striking testimony of the general ignorance of letters among the Scottish Celts, that they have bequeathed no written history, and even no ballads, such as solaced them at their rude firesides. Not until Macpherson collected the scattered fragments of the wild epics of the hills, and dressed them up as the poems of the fictitious Ossian, were these legendary heroics impressed into literature-the literature, however, of England.

IMPROVEMENT AND PRESENT STATE OF THE HIGHLANDS.

The abolition of the heritable jurisdictions, and the settlement of an educated stipendiary magistracy, as has been shown, altered the social character of the Highlands. From the year 1748 the old clan-feeling gradually died out, as far as practical conse quences were concerned. The bonds of legal connexion between the chiefs and their retainers were snapped. Now began an entirely new condition of society, which was greatly advanced by the rising taste for rural improvement. No longer able, or requiring, to draw out his clansmen to fight his petty battles, the chief was forced to the conclusion that they were a useless incumbrance to his estates. He was poor, and they were poor. As in Ireland at the present moment, it was almost a question

whether he, no longer a chief, but a laird or common proprietor, and they, no longer clansmen, but tenants at will, should vacate the estate. This was a critical posture of affairs. Ancient recollections would have induced the lairds to persevere; but the people could do no good as farmers. Every year their numbers were increasing, and the farms were diminishing in size. Without capital, and liable, from the precariousness of their crops, to be thrown occasionally into a state of destitution, their case demanded earnest consideration. There would appear to be times in history when even harshness partakes of the character of virtue. This was one of them. It was a harsh resolution which the lairds generally came to, nevertheless it is not without a reasonable show of excuse. They resolved to clear their lands of the greater number of the ancient inhabitants, and let them on lease to capitalist store-farmers from the low country, throwing perhaps as many as twenty or thirty small holdings into one. This was accordingly done-not without causing much present physical distress, as well as laceration of feeling.

The Gael felt it to be a dreadful thing to leave the glens of his forefathers, the churchyards where they were buried. What, also, were they to do? They could not speak the English tongue, nor were they acquainted with low-country usages. Hundreds had not a farthing in the world. The apparent severity of uprooting families so situated has engaged much controversy. One party contend that it was justifiable on every principle of necessity, law, and social economy. Another has declared that, however seemingly expedient, it was scarcely justifiable in equity; because the lands had been brought into the families of the chiefs by the swords of the clansmen, and accordingly that, by traditional right, they had a species of claim on the property. Our own opinion inclines to the latter view; but while sympathising in the expatriation of the Highlanders, we are conscious that their removal was indispensable. Fortunately, the clearings, as they are called, did not all take place at the same time. According to local circumstances, they were spread over a number of years, and were, on the whole, executed with humanity.

The largest of the clearings was in Sutherlandshire, on the extensive estates of the Countess, afterwards Duchess, of Sutherland; and it is no more than justice to say that the families were provided for to a certain extent, by being planted close to the sea, in the village of Golspie, where every humane effort was employed to create in them habits of industry and self-dependence. Beyond this, we think, no one could be expected to go, even as a matter of strict justice. Numerous families emigrated to America. The largest band of these emigrants was that of the Glengarry Highlanders, who are now comfortably located in the Glengarry settlement in Western Canada. When we add that many young men entered the army, and that many pushed off to the large Lowland towns for employment, we have said

all that is here necessary on the subject. In Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Dundee, and other towns, there are many Highlanders and their descendants, some still speaking Gaelic in their own family circles, but all gradually becoming intermingled with the general population.

In consequence of the clearings, the Highland counties are now generally under a strict economical system. Here and there, and more particularly in the islands, there are still clusters of an ancient tenantry, their miserable condition showing pretty clearly that it would really have been more humane to send them adrift with their neighbours. In a few instances, as, for example, in the Isle of Lewis, Lowland capital is endeavouring, by means of local and private improvements, to give employment to these poor Celts; transforming what were crofters or farmers on the most petty scale, into day labourers, paid by regular money wages. Where the country was subjected to the regular clearing process, the estates are sectioned into large farms, chiefly for the feeding of sheep and black cattle, and at good rents to the proprietors. Independently of this advantageous economical system, no little money is realised by letting rights of shooting for game -grouse, black-cock, ptarmigan, &c. and in a few places reddeer, the remains of the ancient objects of the chase. In Perthshire alone, upwards of £10,000 are realised as game rents; and in the whole Highlands, probably not less a sum than £40,000.

The following instances of the rise of the price of land in the Highlands within the last seventy years, will give an idea of the revolution which has been effected in Highland agriculture. "The estate of Castlehill, belonging to the Cuthberts, an ancient family, of whom the French Abbé Colbert, and the Bishop of Rodez, were cadets, was brought to judicial sale in or about the year 1779, and was purchased for the family by their agent for £8000 sterling. It was exposed in lots, for debts due to Mr Roberts, a London banker, in 1804, and sold for between £60,000 and £70,000 sterling. In 1787, the barony of Lentron, a holding of the family of Fraser of Strichen, producing a trifling rental, and itself in a wretched state, was sold, after a competition, at £2500 to a Mr Warren; five-and-twenty years afterwards, he disposed of it to Major Fraser of Newton for £20,000. Simon, Lord Lovat, sold the estate of Glenelg in Inverness-shire, in 1620, to M'Leod of Macleod for a few thousand merks Scots. In 1781, the rental of the same property was about £600 sterling per annum. M'Leod sold it in 1811 to Mr Bruce, banker in London, for £100,000. It was previously exposed, towards the close of last century, for less than £30,000." In none of all the Highland counties has the spirit of innovation been so powerfully at work as in Sutherlandshire. "When I came to the Highlands in 1809," are the words of a gentleman in a letter written in 1828, "the whole of Sutherland was nearly destitute of roads. This county imported corn and meal in return for the small value of

Highland kyloes (cattle), which formed its almost sole export. The people lay scattered in inaccessible straths and spots among the mountains, where they lived in family with their pigs and kyloes, in turf cabins of the most miserable description, spoke only Gaelic, and spent the whole of their time in indolence and sloth. At that time nothing could have led me to believe that, in the short space of ten years, I should, in such a county, see roads made in every direction, the mail-coach daily driving through it, new harbours constructed, in one of which upwards of twenty vessels have been repeatedly seen at one time taking cargoes for exportation; coal, and salt, and lime, and brickworks established; farm-steadings every where built; fields laid off, and substantially enclosed; capital horses employed, with south-country implements of husbandry made in Sutherland; tilling the ground, secundum artem, for turnips, wheat, and artificial grasses; an export of fish, wool, and mutton, to the extent of £70,000 a-year; and a baker, a carpenter, a blacksmith, mason, shoemaker, &c. to be had as readily, and nearly as cheap too, as in other countries."

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While benefited by roads in the interior, the coasts of the Highlands have been immensely improved by the visits of steamboats; these vessels take away the produce of the country, and bring back articles of utility to the people. Not the least remarkable feature in the progress of Highland meliorations is this: No species of improvement has ever provoked outrage among the native population. The most afflicting clearings took place peaceably, and with a species of quiet resignation among the sufferers. This leads us to observe that the Celt of the Highlands is, in several features, a very different being from his brother Celt in Ireland. He is patient, docile, obedient, and economical, but is generally considered to be a little lazy and selfish. He has little or no enterprise, and, to be improved, he requires to be operated on by external influences; the truth being, that ages of tutelage under chiefs has afforded no proper culture of the higher faculties of the mind. He makes a better servant than a master; is a drudge, not a genius. Unless for his perseverance and steadiness, he is not prized in any civil profession. In the Highlander's mind, religious impression seems to have taken the place of veneration for his chief, and in both he has gone to the verge of bigotry. Instances of Highlanders rising to eminence in literature, science, or art, are exceedingly rare. Already it has been mentioned that the Highlands cannot show a scrap of ancient literature. If this says little for the accomplishments of the ancient Scottish Celts, it says still less that, in the present day, when many thousands as yet speak Gaelic, there is no such thing as a newspaper or periodical of any kind issued in that tongue. Are we to infer from this that the Highlander, even with his considerably improved tastes, has not yet been fired with a love of refined recreation? The

contrast between Wales and the Highlands in this respect is striking. In the year 1833, in Wales, with a population of 700,000, there were no fewer than seventeen periodicals of various kinds in the Welsh language; while in the Highlands, with a population not very much inferior, there was not one. A miscellany, called the "Gaelic Messenger," had indeed been set on foot; but it had been abandoned for want of support. The only literature of the Highlands consists of religious books and tracts, and the Bible, translated into Celtic for the use of those who cannot read English. Even this valuable branch of letters would not have been extended to the poor and deserving population, but for the exertions of the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, formed in 1704; an institution which has been an important means of mental melioration. In 1769, the first edition of the New Testament in Gaelic made its appearance, under the auspices of the society just named; it was not, however, till so recently as 1802, that the whole Bible was translated. "In 1811, a Gaelic School Society was established in Edinburgh; and in the following year an Auxiliary in Glasgow, which last institution combined the teaching of English with Gaelic reading. A society was formed in 1818, in Inverness, for the education of the poor in the Highlands and Islands. This society instituted, in 1824-5, a series of very particular inquiries throughout all the different parishes in the Highlands and Islands." It appeared from the returns made to their inquiries, and which applied to about one-half of the whole population of the Highlands, "that 'one-half of all ages were then unable to read;' 'a third part of the families visited were above two miles distant from the nearest schools;' and 'a third part of the families visited were found to be without copies of the Scriptures."" In 1825, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland appointed a committee to superintend the means of religious education in the whole country, but especially in the Highlands and Islands; and since that time much has been done, in various ways, to extend the means of instruction among the Gaelic popu lation. Yet, according to the most accurate information obtained after the census of 1831, it appeared that out of a population of 504,955 persons, inhabiting the Highlands and a few contiguous parishes, there were 83,396 persons unable to read either in English or Gaelic. Of the remainder, there were many who could read only in Gaelic, many who could read but imperfectly in either language, and many more whose education scarcely extended beyond reading-only one in three of those who could read possessing the additional accomplishment of being able to write. In some districts the destitution of instruction was greater than in others. Thus, in the Presbytery of Mull, out of a population of 24,113, there were 8104 who could not read; in the Presbytery of Uist there were 10,831 out of a population of 17,490; and in the single parish of Lochbroom, out of a popu