With a pack of Satan’s leaflets
There the husband’s hands between,
They lost time and vainly wasted
Light at wicked work, I ween.
MacLauchlan’s poems have been considered at greater length than the mere quality of his poetry might warrant because they shed light on the life and manners of the Highlanders during a particular time in a circumscribed district, and because hitherto they, in common with those of several other religious bards, have received no attention whatever. On the other hand, the great bards of the secular life have been very abundantly written upon and their merits exhibited.
DUGALD BUCHANAN.
The Highlands produced several religious poets of considerable merit during the eighteenth century, although the areas of living religious activities were undoubtedly very limited. Chief among them was Dugald Buchanan, whose hymns have taken a very high place. He has been compared to Cowper, but he reminds us more of the celebrated Welsh bard Goronwy Owen, who has much in common with Buchanan. It is curiously suggestive that the sacred bard of Anglesea and the sacred bard of Rannoch, the religious representative poets of their respective countries, should be found composing highly spiritual poems, and at the same period writing elaborate ones on the awful theme of the “Day of Judgment,” while the polished Addison and ethical Johnson were delivering their well-finished articles on mere moral platitudes to a highly conventional generation. Perhaps the Highlanders have received, apart from the Bible, no greater gift than the holy and sublime strains of the muse of Buchanan, who impressed his personality and character on all the Gaelic-speaking portion of his countrymen who in his days were in the throes of painful political changes, and about to enter on a new era of severe trial and uncertainty. Much of what the world has admired in the Highland character since is due to the formative and healthy influence of Dugald Buchanan’s hymns.
Dugald Buchanan was born in 1716 on the farm of Ardoch, Perthshire, where his father rented a farm and was the owner of a small meal mill the remains of which are still standing. His people were deeply religious people, of whom he speaks with much affection and respect in the autobiographical sketch which he left written in English. It is remarkable to find such people in Balquidder at that period—in the country of Rob Roy, who the year before the poet was born had marshalled his men on the field of Sheriffmuir under the banner of the Pretender.
Young Buchanan was educated in one of the schools belonging to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which was formed in 1701. There he received a good education, which was afterwards supplemented by attendance on some classes in Edinburgh University, while he was superintending the printing of the Gaelic New Testament. And this last fact reminds me that I have recently counted more than twenty well-known Gaelic bards who received University education; so the general cry of illiteracy is not applicable to the majority of them who at least were trained in the rudiments of learning.
Buchanan was afterwards appointed by the Presbytery of the bounds to be catechist and evangelist in the district of Rannoch, where he laboured with much acceptance and success. He died of virulent fever in June 1768, when he was fifty-two years of age. His death was profoundly mourned by every family in the district. His widow survived till 1824, and one of his daughters died as recently as 1854.