DIRGE FOR IAN MACECHAN.
A FRAGMENT.
Mackay was entertained by Macechan, who was a respectable store-farmer, from his earliest life to his marriage. According to his reverend biographer,[94] the last lines of the elegy, of which the following is a translation, were much approved.
I see the wretch of high degree,
Though poverty has struck his race,
Pass with a darkness on his face
That door of hospitality.
I see the widow in her tears,
Dark as her woe—I see her boy—
From both, want reaves the dregs of joy;
The flash of youth through rags appears.
I see the poor's—the minstrel's lot—
As brethren they—no boon for song!
I see the unrequited wrong
Call for its helper, who is not.
You hear my plaint, and ask me, why?
You ask me when this deep distress
Began to rage without redress?
"With Ian Macechan's dying sigh!"
THE SONG OF THE FORSAKEN DROVER.
During a long absence on a droving expedition, Mackay was deprived of his mistress by another lover, whom, in fine, she married. The discovery he made, on his return, led to this composition; which is a sequel to another composed on his distant journey, in which he seems to prognosticate something like what happened. Both are selected by Sir Walter Scott as specimens of the bard, and may be found paraphrastically rendered in a prose version, in the Quarterly Review, vol. xlv., p. 371, and in the notes to the last edition of "The Highland Drover," in "Chronicles of the Canongate." With regard to the present specimen, it may be remarked, that part of the original is either so obscure, or so freely rendered by Sir Walter Scott's translator, that we have attempted the present version, not without some little perplexity as to the sense of one or two allusions. We claim, on the whole, the merit of almost literal fidelity.