None of the Gaelic bards had a wider acquaintance, nor a larger outlook of life than MacColl. But in the midst of all new associations and attractions, he remained at heart frankly and even sternly Highland. The following verse of an address (1878), to a well-known Highland patriot, Mr John Murdoch, illustrates this phase of his character:—
I think I see thy manly form,
Firm and unyielding as Cairngorm,
The poor man’s cause maintaining warm,
Just like a true-souled Highlander;
I see the scorn within thine eye
As some evicting Chief goes by—
One whose forbears would sooner die
Than dispossess a Highlander.
Before Celtic things were held in such esteem as they are now, or rather, perhaps, before their value was appreciated as recently, men of Celtic extraction like Macaulay and Charles Mackay wrote of the Highlanders and Highlands, not only without discrimination and sympathy, but without knowledge, and even in a spirit of savage contempt. The latter lived to express regret for his earlier conduct; the former had not the same opportunity of modifying his earlier impressions, and his Highland fellow-countrymen were not slow to declare their minds on the subject. Among those who sought to pay back the illustrious historian in his own coin was Evan MacColl. On the occasion of Macaulay’s death some one had written “Macaulay now is registered among England’s mighty dead!” On this MacColl wrote verses the first and last of which are as follows:—