to that, and so on. The well-known saying of the great Emperor Charles V. comes à propos here; he said he would speak German to his horses, English to birds and serpents, French to his friends, Italian to ladies, but Spanish he would speak in his prayers to God. Unfortunate man! he did not know Gaelic!

To become acquainted with the characteristics of a language, one must learn that language. This signifies not the work of an hour, but a long period of serious application. Men who write books, and so aim at being the instructors of others, have to submit to this apprenticeship. There cannot be two opinions on the subject, they must be the instructed before they can be qualified to be the instructors. Only when a student finds that he can think in a foreign language, only then can he congratulate himself that he begins to master it. Make your own experiments as to this. Try to think in a foreign tongue, and you will observe very quickly how much or how little you know of it. The Highlander has to do all his thinking in Gaelic. This is his first process. The second process is that he has to substitute English words for the Gaelic. His knowledge of English is defective and limited, and he only bungles through it somehow. He has to change his gold coin into silver, and what with crowns and halfcrowns, florins and shillings, not taking into account all smaller fry, one like him who does not often handle money may be easily bamboozled, and fare badly in the exchange. In the second proc ss, the exceeding difference of form and idiom between the two languages makes all the difficulty. It also accounts for the nature of the mistakes made, at least in the majority of cases. If you were to have charge of a school for a week in a Gaelic district, and there observe the English compositions of the pupils, I believe you would see more of true Highland-English than in all the books ever written. A mistake then would be the genuine article, and none of your counterfeit "Brummagem" ware. It would no longer be the ass covered with the skin of the lion you heard braying, but the lion himself giving voice in a kingly The truly artistic and competent writer must, therefore, be able to think in Celtic before he can hope to render his thoughts into English as a Celt would, and before he can approach to verisimilitude in his efforts to amuse us by his rendering of Celtic mistakes. This preparatory, yet most necessary, labour is precisely what the writers I speak of have never thought of undertaking. The passages I have quoted must have made this clearly evident to you. To write of things Celtic without being a Celtic scholar-even without being a Celtic student-manifests a lite

roar.

As I

rary foolhardiness which deserves severe condemnation. already explained, my quotations have been from Walter Scott, uot that he is the greatest sinner, but because his books are in every hand. I shall task your patience with only other two citations:

"Ah!" said Evan to Waverley, "if yon Saxon Duinhe-wassel saw but the Chief with his tail on!" "With his tail on ?" echoed Edward in some surprise. Evan explains at great length that the tail meant the Chief's personal attendants. A few pages after we have "Phough," said Dugald Mahony, "tat's ta Chief."

"It is not," said Evan imperiously. Do you think he would come to meet a Sassenach Duinhe-wassel in such a way as that?"

But, as they approached a little nearer, he said, with an appearance of mortification-" And it is even he, sure enough; and he has not his tail on after all; there is no living creature with him but Callum Beag" (Waverley, chap. xviii.).

In this quotation the word "tail" is given, and, because it looks ridiculous, is repeated, as the English synonym of the Gaelic word for the retinue of a chief. There is no term in Gaelic with any such signification as "tail" to denote the attendants of a chief. The laugh, instead of being against the Gael, should be against the delinquent writer.

This fitly introduces a new point. It is not enough in writing about a people to know their language. One must also know themselves, their houses, habits, and country, even their local and national history. Familiarity with all these things brings one to the very sources of their ideas. What they esteem, what they despise, what they love, what they hate, what is great, what is mean, what is praiseworthy, what is disgraceful, all has to be learnt. The family must be seen seated round the family hearth. The family must be seen at work in the field, or on the hill. The week-days have their teachings, and so has the Sunday. There are days of gladness and days of mourning. Each occasion furnishes fresh illustrations of the Highland character. And Donald will be found not without shrewdness and rich gleams of humour, far other by a long way than the dry wizened stick he is depicted. The west coast and the islands have different sources of ideas from inland districts. Boats, sails, oars, nets, fishing, storms, billows thundering over the rocks the winds shrieking through the cordage and tattered sails-men striving for life and death on the great sea, open up an infinite source of thoughts, joyful or sad as the case may be. In the inland districts scanty or plentiful crops, cattle and sheep, rivers and lakes, floods and drought, frost and snow,

woods and mountains, a shot at a stag or a cast for a salmon, and all the variety of incidents of a laudward district life, happy or perilous, profitable or unprofitable, exercise the minds, and vary the occupations of the inhabitants. These and such like things. form the world of the Highlander, mental and material. Is it unreasonable to say that he who wishes to write about him should learn the things of his world? Walter Scott had all this knowledge of the Scottish people in its widest extent. He had lived amongst them and seen them at home and at work, at kirk and at market. He was as one of themselves. What can excel his Scotch conver sations? He can praise, he can blame; scold like a fish wife, swear like a trooper; he can fawn, he can flatter, he can wheedle; he can joke, he can back-bite, he can beg, he can mock; he can rage and whine, and prose, and rant to the utmost. Nothing

escapes him. He blunders nothing, and he embellishes all. He revels in the might of his power. No other country has had such a wizard of the pen-least of all the Highlands-to bewitch us with the charms of the words and wit of their people.

My argument can be still further enforced. What is it that is done by writers on like occasions? Books are as numerous nearly as the leaves of the forest. If examples there are, they can easily be found. What writer would be so bold or so ignorant as to make a Cockney speak the dialect of Yorkshire? Whoever heard of a writer making a Northumbrian speak the dialect of Lancashire? What incredible fatuity any writer would manifest should he make the talk of any of these shires like to the broken brogue of an Irishman. Men are chary of their reputation. No one would dare to be guilty of such blunders as I mention. Every paper in the country would be full of the absurdity. Every critic would snatch the goose-quill from the back of his itching ear, and fill it with ink of the bitterest black, to write in abuse of the unfortunate author. Surely we Highlanders are the most patient of men, the least alert of critics, or the most careless and callous as to the treatment of our countrymen, when such blunders about them, and them alone, pass scatheless. Thousands of readersquestionless by far the majority of readers-could not in the least distinguish between Northumbrian and Yorkshire and Lancashire, and any medley of a mixture, however gross and unpalatable, might never cause a wry mouth. But, though this be so, there are behind the multitude so many who do know, that no writer, with safety to himself, can blunder in these dialects. Here they study and learn; with us such trouble is not to be expected. The Jew, the Turk, the Spaniard, the Frenchman, every one is treated

with more consideration than we are. From the days of Shakespeare until our own, there is a difference between the blunders which each of these peoples falls into in speaking English. The nature of the mistake is, as I have argued in regard to the Gaelic, caused by the difference of idiom between their language and English. No writer can be produced who makes any confusion on this score. The Italian is never credited with the sort of blunder a Frenchman would make; nor is the Spaniard ever credited with the sort of mess a German would produce. We can find men to man the lifeboat in the fiercest storm, and men to dare everything in search of the hopeless North Pole-to climb the most dangerous Alps; we can find men to lead the most forlorn hope: but to find a man who cares so little for his literary reputation as to write such a stupid blunder, I think impossible.

A book brings us into close contact with the mind--with the inmost soul of a person when it gives us his words; for what are his words but the outward expression of what inwardly animates his heart. When we have laid before us many conversations of a vast variety of individuals belonging to a people or nation, individuals taken from every rank and profession, we have exposed to our study the soul of that nation. Their weakness and strength, their views, principles, and aims are thus subjected for admiration or condemnation to the judgment of the reading world. The people of a country have, therefore, a pressing interest or rather a duty imposed upon them to see that writers fail not to give a faithful delineation of their character. They ought to be watchful and ready to commend and uphold the truth, to condemn and expose the false in this important matter. For each portraiture of themselves they allow to go forth unquestioned, helps to fix the position, high or low, which they are to occupy in the estimation of mankind.

I hope, then, I have not erred in my expectations, when I thought of this for the subject of my paper to the influential body which forms the Gaelic Society of Inverness. These expectations

are that your greater attention be drawn to the study of this question, that your watchfulness may be excited, your position of influence exercised, that your voices may be raised, and that your able pens be used in newspaper, magazine, periodical, or wherever they may, to condemn strongly the errors I have dwelt upon, and every error in the treatment of the language of the Highlander.

I shall end with one further quotation. Evan Maccombich expresses true Highland sentiments-I cannot say so much for his words at the trial at Carlisle. Great changes have occurred and

are now occurring, whether for good or for evil is a question, as regards the feelings between chiefs and clans, and Evan's feelings may not now animate every bosom. Be that as it may, Evan at Carlisle made the proposal that, should they allow the chief Fergus Mac Ivor to go free, he, by their permission, would go and bring six of the best men of the clan to suffer in his stead. When the proposal was greeted with a laugh, this is the noble answer Evan made-"If the Saxon gentlemen are laughing because a poor man such as me thinks my life or the life of six of my degree is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it's like enough they may be very right; but if they laugh because they think I would not keep my word, and come back to redeem him, I can tell them they ken neither the heart of a Hielandman, nor the honour of a gentleman."

Those writers, whose case we have been considering, ken neither the language nor the ideas of the Highlander.

20th MARCH, 1889.

At this meeting Mr Alexander Macbain, M.A., read the following paper, contributed by Mr D. Munro Fraser, H.M. Inspector of Schools, Glasgow :—

о

CERTAIN PECULIARITIES OF GAELIC IDIOM.

The increased attention given to the study of the Celtic languages, in connection with the advancement of the Science of Language, has operated mainly towards the production of results that are interesting to those who pursue that science for its own sake. A great deal of light has been thrown on obscurities of etymology and syntax in the Gaelic language by investigations into the oldest forms of the language as these are contained in ancient writings. It seems to me, however, that some of the energy that is devoted to the increase of our knowledge regarding the changes which Gaelic has undergone in the course of the centuries might be profitably employed in smoothing the difficulties of the student of Modern Gaelic. We have men who are competent not only to