The Celtic Magazine, Vol. I No. V / A Monthly Periodical Devoted to the Literature, History, Antiquities, Folk Lore, Traditions, and the Social and Material Interests of the Celt at Home and Abroad

No. V. MARCH 1876.
Very interesting and instructive, though very sad it is to chronicle certain undeniable and not unfrequent facts in the history of human nature, outbursts, as Carlyle calls them, of the feral nature, that element which man holds in common with the brutes, and which, when it breaks forth in him, assumes, by contrast, a more hideous and savage character than in them, even as fire seems more terrible in a civilized city than amidst a howling wilderness; among palaces and bowers than among heathery moorlands or masses of foliage, and even as the madness of a man is more fearful than that of a beast. It is recorded of Bishop Butler that one day walking in his garden along with his Chaplain immersed in silent thought, he suddenly paused and turning round asked him if he thought that nations might go mad as well as individuals. What reply the Chaplain gave we are not informed; but fifty years after the French Revolution with its thunder-throat answered the Bishop's question. Nay—it had been answered on a less scale before by Sicilian Vespers—Massacres of Bartholomew, and the Massacre of Glencoe, and has been answered since, apart from France, in Jamaica, India, and elsewhere. God has made of one blood all nations that dwell on the face of the earth. Yet alas, that blood when possessed by the spirit of wrath, of revenge, of fierce patriotism, or of profound religious zeal, and heated sevenfold, becomes an element only inferior in intensity to what we can conceive of the passions of hell, such as Dante has painted in his Ugolino in the Inferno, gnawing his enemy's skull for evermore; such as Michael Angelo has sculptured on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, in eyes burning with everlasting fury, and fists knotted to discharge blows, the least of which were death, but which hang there arrested as if for ever on the walls, and such as Milton has represented in Moloch's unappeaseable malignity, and in Satan's inexorable hate.
It is to one of these frightful outcomes of human ferocity, an event with which even after a period of 200 years that all Scotland, and especially all the Highlands, rings from side to side, and which unborn generations shall shudder at, that we propose to turn the attention of the readers of the Celtic Magazine . We do so partly, no doubt, from the extreme interest of the subject, and partly also, because important lessons of humanity, of forgiveness, of hatred at wrong and oppression, of the benefits of civilization, of the gratitude we feel for the extinction of clan quarrels and feuds, and the thousand other irregularities and inhumanities which once defaced the grandest of landscapes, and marred a noble and a manly race of men; because such lessons may be, if not formally drawn, yet may pervade and penetrate the whole story as with a living moral.