ART. VI.-1. Johnson's Tour in the Hebrides. 1775.

2. Two Months in the Highlands. By C. R. WELD, Esq. 1860. 3. The Book of the Dean of Lismore. Translated by the Rev. THOS. M'LAUCHLAN. 1862.

4. Tales of the West Highlands. By J. F. CAMPBELL, Esq. 1860. 5. Sir John M'Neill's Report on the State of the Highlands and Islands.

1851.

6. Letter to the Lord Advocate of Scotland on the State of Education in the Hebrides. By J. RAMSAY, Esq. of Islay. 1862. 7. The Days of the Fathers in Ross-shire. By the Rev. JOHN KENNEDY. 1861.

MISTIER than the Highland mountains is the early Highland history. The rude forefathers of the isles are lost in storm and cloud, through which the days of St Columba flash wildly bright. We can trace their story only here and there, up to a period when it is blended with Irish tradition, as rude and mythical as itself, culminating in the arrival of Casar, Noah's niece, upon Hibernian shores, forty days before the deluge!

The population of the Highlands, and of the greater part of Ireland, seems to have been elementarily composed of two racesthe race of the Scots and the race of the Cruithne. In Ireland, the kingdoms of Connaught and Munster, with the south of Leinster, were Scottish, and from these kingdoms the Scots went forth and founded colonies in the north and east. Ulster and the north of Leinster were inhabited by the Cruithne; but the mythical history of Ireland relates the formation of a Scottish settlement in Ulster at a very early period, under the leadership of Dalriada, and the fall of the Cruithnian capital before the forces of another Scottish prince.

These Scots, who seem to have impressed their restless migratory character on their descendants, after assailing the Roman forces, crossed over to the Argyllshire coast, taking possession of Argyll proper, Knapdale, Kintyre, Lorn, Cowall, Isla, Iona, Arran, the adjacent small isles, and probably part of Morven, and bestowed upon their new acquisition the name of Dalriada. As might be expected, their northern boundary varied with the chances of strife, but its average may be marked by a line drawn from the Kingairloch shore, south-westward through Morven and Mull to Colonsay. To the east they were separated from the Cruithne by the natural boundary of the Drumalban mountains, between the counties of Perth and Argyll. Beyond these mountains, and to the north of the shifting northern boundary, the Cruithne were still supreme.

The Scots were Christians, the disciples of St Patrick; the

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Cruithne professed one of the rudest forms of ancient paganism. In the year 563, the landing on the Iona shore of that true Scottish saint, Columba of blessed memory, was the commencement of that change in the condition and language of the people which involved the blending of the two races. In the accomplishment of the great mission of the conversion of the Cruithne, the humble abode of the Culdees became not only the most famous of the western seats of learning, but the source of a mighty ecclesiastical authority, wielded, as such authority seldom is or has been wielded, for the honour of the Head of the Church, and the propaganda to which the innumerable Scottish clergy, who spread and founded churches over the Cruithne realm, owed their allegiance. Thus a learned Scottish clergy, bringing with them a written literary language, as used in the south and west of Ireland, overthrew the rude mythology of the Cruithne, introducing this language along with Christianity among their converts, whose native dialect, if cultivated at all, had only received the rude culture of the pagan magi. Thus both Scots and Cruithne were under the powerful influence of a Scottish clergy, bringing with them a language from Ireland.

Nor was the connection with Ireland religious and philological only; for until the year 573 the Scots of the British Dalriada or Argyll, and the Scots of the Irish Dalriada, were governed by one sovereign, who reigned in Ireland. On the other hand, the Cruithne of Ireland were under the yoke of the Scottish Cruithne, until a king of Ulster threw it off about the year 608. It is to this period of close political union that we are inclined to refer the exploits of the warrior race of the Feinne, giving to both Scotland and Ireland the credit of these somewhat mythical heroes.1 The Scottish Dalriada became peaceably independent of Ireland, by an arrangement entered into at the great council of Drumceat, when Edan, its first monarch, was crowned by the venerable Columba.

The next change arose out of the resistance offered by the community of Iona to the imperious dictates of the secular power, which procured the expulsion of the Scottish clergy in 717, and the banishment to the other side of the Grampians of those who adhered in any measure to Culdee simplicity. The introduction of an Anglican influence by means of a clergy from Northumbria followed upon this measure; but at this point, history, which had previously been growing increasingly illusory and uncertain, almost altogether ceases, the venerable Bede throwing the last

'Mr Skene's introduction to Mr M'Lauchlan's translation of the book of the Dean of Lismore, contains an interesting contribution to the Ossianic controversy, in which some speculations regarding the Feinne are introduced, tending towards the same conclusion.

glimmer upon it in 731, which reveals that the Scottish and Cruithne populations were still in the same relative positions. This gap in Highland history, which swallows up more than a century, is altogether unaccountable, unless the records of the period were destroyed in the subsequent disasters to the monasteries of the seaboard and islands.

A partial lifting of the mist in the middle of the ninth century reveals an important change-the Scottish and Cruithne populations united under the rule of a king of a Scottish family. History is altogether silent here, and tradition fails to throw any light upon the means by which this union was effected; but as the Scots had previously appeared as the leading race, we may conjecture that a series of stubborn conflicts, in which they were victorious, placed a Scottish king upon the Highland throne.

During this parenthetical period new actors came upon the scene, in the Scandinavian pirates, by whose fierce irruptions a change was wrought upon the West Highlands and Hebrides which affected many generations. Towards the close of the eighth century, hordes of these marauders, under their bold Viking leaders, attacked and subjugated the seaboard and the islands, marking their progress by a trail of sacked and burned religious houses. Iona, which had enjoyed sixty years of tranquillity since the death of Nestan, and was once again blooming like a rose in the desert, was the mark for the chiefest fury of these rude Danes and Norwegians. In 802 its monastery was burned, and many of the Culdees were slain. In 806 the Vikings returned, and killed sixty-eight of the family of Hij.' In 877, in consequence of the perils to which Iona was exposed, the Culdees fled to Ireland, carrying with them, according to some accounts, the bones of St Columba; but enough of them lingered on the hallowed soil to provoke another Scandinavian invasion in 985, when the monastery was ransacked, and the abbot and fifteen of the presbyters were killed. The withdrawal of the influence of the learned and pious Scottish clergy was the commencement of a most unsatisfactory era in the history of the Highland population, and Iona from this time ceased to be the luminous centre of Gaelic learning, as well as the stronghold of a simple faith.

So completely triumphant was the Viking power over the combined Scottish and Cruithne races, that the Hebrides were merged in the Norwegian kingdom of Man and the Isles, and the traces of this subjection are still to be found along their stormy shores. The bloody and cumbrous mythology of these pirates succumbed, however, to the spurious Christianity which had displaced Culdeeism; and supreme ecclesiastically as well as politically, the invaders placed the western isles within the juris

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diction of their newly-constituted diocese of Man. There are abundant traditions of this robber era. The bleached summit of a Skye mountain is said to be the resting-place of a homesick Norwegian princess, who desired to be buried where every wind from Norway might blow over her bones; a wild tower at Kyleakin traditionally marks the spot where the Vikings took toll of passing ships. Norwegian kings sleep in Reilag Orain; tales abound of the prowess of Haco, of his fierce legions marshalled on Kerrera; of lochs darkened by the sails of his great war galleys, as they gathered before the defeat at Largs; and in attestation of history and tradition, towers of uncouth construction, frowning from isle and mainland their defiance of time and storm, bear the old Norwegian names.

From the period of the formation of this predatory kingdom of Man and the Isles, until the middle of the twelfth century, while the majority of the Hebrides and the mainland seaboard were ruled by the Scandinavians, and British Dalriada by a Scottish prince, the great remnant of the Gaelic population proper remained intact in the province of Moray, and maintained a persistent struggle for its independence until 1130, when the great Celtic leader, the Earl of Moray, was overthrown and slain by David I. In the middle of the twelfth century the Norwegian power waned, and the Hebrides were formed into a true Celtic kingdom under the dynasty of the Celtic kings, or Lords of the Isles, founded by Somarled, who, by a marriage with the daughter of Olave the Red, obtained the islands south of Ardnamurchan Point for his eldest son Dougall, the ancestor of the powerful house of Lorn.

We have previously mentioned the entire political separation effected between British Dalriada and Ireland at the council of Drumceat. In the history of the northern kingdom of the isles, we find a close connection with Ireland commencing in the twelfth century, and extending over nearly 400 years, the tendencies of the royal race Irish,-Irish aid and influence always at work in promoting the ascendancy of that race, the Highlands colonized by illustrious Irish families, and the Irish literary influence universal, the Highland sennachies themselves being either of Irish extraction, or trained in Ireland in the language and exercise of their art, while the Lords of the Isles were always either taking part in Irish wars, or receiving aid from Ireland in wars at home. This intimate alliance, which ceased only with the fall of the independent sovereignty of the Isles and the Reformation, extending for so long a period, during the whole of which the language and literature of the Hebrides were becoming more and more assimilated to those of Ireland, must have exerted a considerable influence on the country. Mr Skene,

in his valuable introduction to the Book of the Dean of Lismore, doubts whether to the close of this period there existed the means of acquiring the art of writing the language (Gaelic) out of Ireland, or the conception of a written and cultivated literature which was not identified with its language and learning. This literary dependence on Ireland implies a rudeness and absence of cultivation among the people of the Hebrides, fairly represented, we may presume, by that popular unwritten literature of which we retain some fragments in the Dean of Lismore's collection, the legends of the Feinne, and the romantic tales of the West Highlands. In fact, we cannot doubt that the ballad poetry of the country alone resisted the foreign literary influence, and that the uncultivated native bards, the balladmongers of the poor, continued to express themselves in the idiom of the native Gaelic dialect, while their aristocratic compeers delighted the ears of chiefs with the cultivated language and rhythm acquired in the Irish schools of sennachies and bards. The Reformation introduced the craving for a religious literature; and it is a curious fact, that the first book printed in Gaelic was the Liturgy or Book of Order issued by John Knox, and translated by the Protestant superintendent of the Isles. All translations of books for the next two centuries were in the Irish idiom; and when Scotch Gaelic finally became elevated to the dignity of a written language, it was clothed in the Irish orthography.

The Irish political influence having died out with the extinction of the Kingdom of the Isles, as the religious influence ceased with the Reformation, a period succeeded in which the history of the Hebrides is a history of broils and dissensions, redeemed only by such a generous devotion to a royal race as has tinged the closing days of their military history with all the hues of romance.

We have, then, in the Hebrides an early history remarkably obscure, only redeemed from a singular monotony by the light which emanated from the Iona shore, and the success of the Scandinavian raid-a people partly Scottish and partly Cruithnian, with an infusion of the Scandinavian element-an ecclesiastical influence always derived from without, alternately Irish and Northumbrian, and a native literature oral only.

Fantastic islands, the fringe of a coast lacerated by deep fiords; inaccessible cliffs, against which the Atlantic surges hurl themselves in fury, to recoil defeated; cataracts tumbling into the sea from precipice summits, or whirled upwards in white wreaths by the storm; huge mountains, rising sheer from the sea level; uncouth ruins piled on every headland; caverns, in which the waves for ever make wild music; a solemn loneliness, to which nothing else can compare; a sublimity of barrenness decked out in gor