Ne’er forget thy country’s claim.
After the Celtic poems and translations of the Bard of Badenoch had begun to realise fame and fortune for their author, other writers of varying gifts sought to enter into similar labours. For literary students the Gaelic realm of letters hitherto had been obscure and untrodden fields; but now all at once the old Celtic world of the Scottish past became alive with heroes of magnificent deeds and bards of illustrious renown. The refinement, the culture, the heroic courage of grand old Scots, in the environment of the purest chivalry, kindled everywhere admiration throughout Europe. People wearied of the artificialities and platitudes of the eighteenth century, allowed themselves to get into raptures over the healthy pictures of ancient life which these Celtic compositions unfolded. The blind old Ossian was then more popular than the blind old Homer, and all “Old Lays” connected with the Highlands and Islands acquired a value which they never had before. There was a general rage for Gaelic old lays and ballads, and a search was instituted throughout the land for such productions. Bards, senachies, reciters, and singers of every description and every rank in life were requisitioned for the supply of ancient Ossianic ballads.
One good result of this was to make the Highlands better known, and to help in the removal of old race-prejudices which had all along existed in some quarters, but which had become greatly intensified through the recent Jacobite rebellions for which the Highlanders as a people were not primarily responsible. John Knox may be said to have made the Scotland of his time reforming, radical, and religious, and Sir Walter Scott the Scotland of the nineteenth century romantic in verse and story; and James Macpherson may be said with equal force to have made the Highlands in the eighteenth century. It has been said that old Celtic lays and ballads became then the fashion. The pioneer in the field, it ought to be remembered, however, was not the Badenoch tutor. Three or four years before Macpherson was heard of there died, in June 1756, in the 30th year of his age,
JEROME STONE,
who was the first to direct public attention to Ossianic ballads. He was born at Scoonie, Fifeshire, in 1727. His father was a seafaring man. As a mere lad, Jerome became a packman; but dealing in buckles, garters, and such small articles not suiting his “superior genius,” he sold his stock, bought books, and finally struggled into St. Andrews University, where he graduated in 1750. He soon received the appointment of assistant in Dunkeld Grammar School, of which he became Rector two or three years afterwards. In this position, acquiring knowledge of the Gaelic language and of the people, along with his other duties, he remained until struck down of fever, as already stated, in 1756. At that time Dunkeld, an ancient home of Celtic activity, learning, and enterprise, was more of a Gaelic district than it is now and Stone found himself in social and intellectual surroundings which were new to him. He had probably more racial kinship, with the people than he himself knew or acknowledged, or than even Professor Mackinnon, who has edited his collection, has thought of. For centuries Gaidel and Brython lived and fought in his native Fifeshire, and their fervid life-blood has never ceased to run in the veins of Fife men. Probably the eloquent Thomas Chalmers received much of the inspiration of his genius from this Celtic source. Stone left a collection of Gaelic ballads which was for some time regarded as lost. The MS., after passing through various hands, passed two years ago into the possession of Edinburgh University on the death of Dr Clerk, to whom it was given when preparing his edition of Ossian, by David Laing. Professor Mackinnon has published the collection of ballads in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 1887-88, occupying fifty pages of the volume, and accompanied with an interesting biographical note, to which the writer is indebted for some of the particulars given above. These ballads are of exactly the same character as those of the Feinne already considered. They are merely other versions of the same poems dealing with the same themes of the Finnic environment of the old Gaelic national life.
The first translator of Gaelic poetry deserves a memorial cairn in any book devoted to the interests of our Anglo-Gaelic literature. Jerome Stone gave the first translation of the old Gaelic Lays to the world in 1756 four years before the appearance of Macpherson’s Fragments. It appears that a St. Andrews Professor was the first to interest young Stone in Gaelic poetry, and the best of his efforts at translation was his free rendering of “Fraoch’s Death,” or as he entitles it, “Albin and the Daughter of Mey”:—
A thousand graces did the maid adorn:
Her looks were charming, and her heart was kind;
Her eyes were like the windows of the morn,
And Wisdom’s habitation was her mind.