By manliness, courage, by daring, by sleight.
In counsel or fight, thy kindred know these should be thine—
Branch of Lochlin’s wide-ruling and king-bearing line!
And in Erin they know it, far over the brine;
No Earl would in Albin thy friendship decline.
The name of Mairi ni’n Alastair Ruaidh has been affectionately remembered by many generations of Highlanders.
John Macdonald.—This well-known Lochaber bard, called Iain Lom, or bare John, was of the Keppoch family; lived in the reigns of Charles I. and II.; was a very old man about 1710.
The heir of Keppoch was sent abroad to be educated; and in his absence his affairs were entrusted to his cousins, who planned a scheme to get rid of him so that they themselves would get possession. The bard perceived their wicked scheme beforehand; and comes prominently before us in his endeavours to expose them; and again in the active part he took in punishing the murderers. The massacre took place in 1663; and soon after the poet persuaded Sir Alexander Macdonald to concert measures for punishing the perpetrators of the deed. They were seized and beheaded, and the awful retribution is commemorated by the ugly monument, “Tobar nan Ceann,” or “Well of the Heads,” in Invergarry. Macdonald was politician as well as poet in his day. He was a keen Jacobite, and acted as the laureate of the party in the Highlands. He was the means of bringing the armies of Montrose and Argyll together at Inverlochy, where, on Sunday, February 2, 1645, a bloody battle was fought, in which the flower of the Campbell clan were slain. He is a poet of great fire, vigour, and satiric power. He was buried in Dunaingeal, in the braes of Lochaber.
BATTLE OF INVERLOCHY.