Her yellow locks like the gold-browed hills;
And her eyes like the radiance the sunbeams bring.
This Aisling in the original is, like the teeth of its subject so “close and well-set,” that a good translation is not easily executed.
This “Vision of a Fair Woman” has nothing in common with that of the “Fair Women” of Chaucer and Tennyson; but no one reading it can fail to remember the poetry of Moore, and recognise the Celtic source of the bright peculiarity of his melodious muse.
JOHN CLARK,
a land-surveyor in Badenoch, the county of James Macpherson, published in 1780 a small volume of translations of ancient Gaelic poetry under the title of “Caledonian Bards.” Among other pieces is a poem entitled Mordubh, whose history is even more mysterious than that of the work of “Ossian.” The translations in this volume are the most unreadable stuff that one could imagine. Clark, and even Smith, failed to catch the secret that enabled Macpherson to pour forth his inimitable prose epics. Clark’s prose is frequently turgid nonsense, and it is rendered ridiculous by his coining of proper names out of unnatural collocations of adjectives. The “ingenious Mrs Grant of Laggan” put some of the surveyor’s poetry into verse, and thought she was handling ancient poetic material instead of eighteenth-century stuff, which might be creditable enough were it not presented to the public under a false garb. She knew the “gentleman’s character,” and “the circumstance of his father and grandfather being great Gaelic scholars and collectors, who most probably had an opportunity of obtaining such poems which were not within her reach.” The pious and honest Mrs Grant never fancied that this family of Clarks and others at that time might spin out such stuff as they palmed on the public, with or without ancient lays to help them. It is the volume of this Badenoch surveyor that finally and fully opened the eyes of the writer to the truth respecting the Ossianic productions of the last century. Clark and Kennedy were men of considerable gifts;—if they had used them with greater honesty the cause of Gaelic literature would not have been so involved in suspicion a hundred years ago. Their labours, however, have not been lost. Kennedy’s manuscript collections of poetry, safely deposited in Edinburgh, have great value, and Clark may be said to have produced a Gaelic composition of some ability. Special efforts seem to have been made to get this conglomerate of Mordubh into appreciative circulation. It imposed on Mrs Grant, as we have seen. In a stray number of the “General Chronicle” for February 1811, which the writer found in London a few years ago, [part of Mordubh], with a literal translation, is published; and the clever editor of “The Beauties of Gaelic Poetry” commenced his splendid volume with this poem of The Great-Black, with a foot-note which says: “The author of this poem, whose name is Douthal, was both a chief and a bard of great repute. The accounts which tradition gives of him are various, but the most probable makes him the Poet of Mordubh, King of the Caledonians.” This was a more ancient and illustrious ancestry for the author of the poem than the genuine producer, John Clark of Badenoch, could boast of.
The Gaelic fragment, as given in the “General Chronicle,” begins thus in Gaelic:—
A’ bheil thūs’ air sgiathan do luathas,
A ghaoth, gu triall le d’uile neart?