Burn their children great and small!
In the hut and in the palace,
Prince and peasant, burn them all!
Plunge them in the swelling rivers,
With their gear and with their goods;
Spare, while breath remains, no Saxon,
Drown them in the roaring floods.”
Neil Mac Mhuirich, the bard already mentioned, had been at a bards’ college in Ireland, and brought back to his father’s house not only stores of knowledge, but also the small-pox. Afflicted with the disease, he lay on a bed near the fire, where John and Donald Mac Arthur, two of the famous race of pipers, came in, and sitting down in front of his bed, began tuning their pipes. The discordant sounds raised the bard, and he, bursting with indignation, started railing at the pipes in a poetical and mock genealogy of the instrument. The poem itself is presentable in Gaelic, but in English it would be too much for the average reader. It emphasises strongly the bard’s aversion to the pipes, comparing them and their music to many ridiculous things in nature and art. The pipers, who had intended to make the house their quarters for the night, were startled by the fierce invective coming from behind them, and on looking round and seeing the swollen and marked face of Neil, worked up into extraordinary excitement, terror took hold of them and they fled in consternation. The bard’s father evidently sympathised with his son, for he waited patiently until the poem was ended, and then exclaimed “Well done, my son, your errand to Ireland has not been in vain.”
When the pipes became paramount is about as difficult to determine as when they first threatened the position of the harp. They seem to have existed alongside the harp and the coronach and the fiery cross for a considerable time, as we have references to all these in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Mac Leod of Dunvegan, who lived about 1650, had a bard, a harper, a piper, and a fool, all of whom were most liberally provided for. We have got a blind harper, Ruaraidh Dall, harper to Mac Leod of Glenelg, and a blind piper, Ian Dall, piper to Mac Kenzie of Gairloch, each of whom excelled in his own sphere, and both of whom flourished about 1650, while, as we have seen, the bards and the pipers were often at loggerheads. The pibroch did not supersede the fiery cross at all, for, so long as the chiefs found it necessary to call the clans together, the goat was killed with the chief’s own sword, the cross was dipped in the blood, and the clansman sent round.
The last battle at which a bard recited was fought in 1411, the last clan bard died in 1726, the last clan harper in 1739, when the hereditary pipers were in all their glory; the fiery cross was last used in 1745, when it travelled thirty-six miles through Breadalbane in three hours, and the coronach was superseded gradually by the lament of the pipes. The bards ceased to live as an order on the accession of the Kings of Scotland to the British throne, and there were no means provided at the Reformation for educating ministers or teachers for the Gaelic speaking part of the country. But all through the centuries covered by the dates given there were pipers. There are pipers still, not indeed clan pipers, but the class are recognised as peculiarly belonging to the Highlands, while harpers and bards have gone completely under in the great social revolution through which the Highlands have passed.