Mackay wants imagination and the overpowering feeling we find in two or three others of the Gaelic bards. But although he does not stand among the very first of the Gaelic poets, he is yet a powerful, refreshing, and influential singer, with a good deal of wit, point, and satire. He is a shrewd and sensible man, with a Wordsworthian tendency to exalt the commonplace into fit themes for poetry.
His Elegy on Ewen is one of his best-known pieces. The morning he composed it he heard of the death of Pelham, then Prime Minister to King George the Second; and he contrasted his death with the dying state of poor Ewen, in whose house he had stayed the previous night. Ewen could not converse with the bard, who, after kindling the fire in the morning for the dying man, composed the poem from which the following stanzas translated by a clansman of the bard—Mr Angus M. Mackay—are taken:—
’Tis thus thou dost instruct us, Death,
That we should turn ere yet too late!
The longest lives are but a breath,
Thou callest hence both small and great!
But these thy latest actions ought
To ope at once our slumberous eyes—
Thy sudden leap from Britain’s court
To this low nook where Ewen lies!