It is unnecessary for our purpose to follow the history of this family any further; suffice it to say, that the two brothers, James and Duncan,[10] members of a clan which, though under the ban of the Government, and exposed to the grasping aggression of their powerful neighbours, the Campbells of Glenurchy, considered themselves as peculiarly Highland, and had high pretensions, as descended from the old Celtic monarchs of Scotland—connected with the Church, and as such, possessing some cultivation of mind and such literary taste as Churchmen at that time had, yet born and reared in the farm-house of Tullichmullin, in the secluded vale of Fortingall, and imbued with that love of old Highland story and cherished fondness for Highland song, which manifests itself in so many a quiet country Highlander, and which the scenery and associations around them were so well calculated to foster—the one, from his high position in the Church of Argyll, having peculiar facilities for collecting the poetry current in the West Highlands—the other, though his brother, yet, as was not uncommon in those days, his servitor or amanuensis, and himself a poet—and both natives of the Perthshire Highlands—collected and transcribed into a commonplace book Gaelic poetry obtained from all quarters.
This collection has fortunately been preserved. It is, unquestionably, a native compilation made in the central Highlands, upwards of three hundred years ago. It contains the remains of an otherwise lost literature. In it we find all that we can now recover of native compositions current in the Highlands prior to the sixteenth century, as well as the means of ascertaining the extent to which the Highlanders were familiar with the works of Irish poets.
It is a quarto volume of some 311 pages, and is written in the current Roman hand of the period. Though much injured by time, the leaves in part worn away, and the ink faint, it is still possible to read the greater part of its contents.
With the exception of a short Latin obituary, and one or two other short pieces, it consists entirely of a collection of Gaelic poetry made by the two brothers.
At the bottom of the 27th page appears the following note in Latin:—Liber Dni Jacobi Macgregor Decani Lismoren.
At [page 78], there is a chronological list of Scottish kings written in the Scottish language, which ends thus:—“James the Fyfte reignis now in great felicitie.” He reigned from 1513 to 1542; and, on [page 161], there is a genealogy of the Macgregors, written by the brother Duncan, deducing their descent from the old Scottish kings, and he adds a docquet in Gaelic, which may be thus translated:—Duncan the Servitor, the son of Dougall, who was son of John the Grizzled, wrote this from the Book of the History of the Kings, and it was done in the year 1512.[11]
There can be no question, therefore, that this collection was formed during the lifetime of the Dean of Lismore, and a great part of it as early as the year 1512. How it was preserved through that and the succeeding century is unknown. In the last century it passed into the possession of the Highland Society of London, by whom it was transferred to the custody of the Highland Society of Scotland, when a committee of that Society was engaged in an inquiry into the authenticity of the Poems of Ossian, published by Macpherson. It has now been deposited, along with other Gaelic MSS. in the possession of that Society, in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, and forms part of that collection of Gaelic MSS. which have been brought together within the last few years, and contain nearly all the Gaelic MSS. which are known still to exist.[12]
The Dean’s MS. differs from all the other MSS. in that collection in two essential particulars. It is not, like the other MSS., written in what is called the Irish character, but in the current Roman character of the early part of the sixteenth century; and the language is not written in the orthography used in writing Irish, and now universally employed in writing Scotch Gaelic, but in a peculiar kind of phonetic orthography, which aims at presenting the words in English orthography as they are pronounced.
The peculiar orthography employed is, however, evidently not the mere attempt of a person ignorant of the proper orthography to write the words in English letters in an arbitrary manner, so as to present, as nearly as possible, the sound of the words as they struck his ear when repeated to him, but bears evident marks of having been a regular and known system of orthography, which, although we have few specimens of it left, may not the less have once prevailed in that part of the Highlands more removed from the influence of Irish teaching.
It is a peculiarity of all the Celtic dialects, that the consonants suffer a change in the beginning of words, from the influence of the preceding words, or in forming the oblique cases, and likewise change their sound in the middle of words by being aspirated.