ladder with great composure and resolution, and read a short written prayer with an audible voice. The storm was so great all this time that it was with the utmost difficulty one could stand upon the hill, and it was near five before the body was hung in chains. There were a great number of the country people present; and sixteen men of the command in Appin are stationed at Ballachulish to prevent the gibbets being cut down." Little wonder that people in Appin still show you where James of the Glens was done to death, and declare that the very grass refuses to grow on the accursed spot.

In all copies of the printed trial there is, or ought to be, a map of the district, and in the particular copy in my possession that map has on it certain MS. notes. These notes are in an oldfashioned hand, and betoken considerable local knowledge on the part of whoever is responsible for them. For example, the house of James Stewart is marked, so too the place where Glenure was killed, and one or two other places of less conspicuous importance. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to know who was responsible for these notes. The names of several proprietors of the volume adorn its pages, the earliest of all, if one may judge from an old-fashioned book-plate, having been a certain General Conway. The volume itself was published in Edinburgh by S. Hamilton and J. Balfour in 1753, and it struck me at first that Conway might have been as a young officer employed in garrison duty, say at Fort-William, about the time in question, but after a good deal of investigation, this conjecture had to be put aside, as no trace of any such person could be obtained. There was, however, a very eminent General Conway-Horace Walpole's friend who occupied a prominent place in the political and social life of the second half of last century. Born in 1721, he lived till 1791, having been Secretary of State and leader of the House of Commons in 1765, and Commander-in-Chief, with a seat in the Rockingham Cabinet, in 1782, besides having in the meantime seen a good deal of service, and, in particular, having commanded the 48th Foot at Culloden. But it was not from any experiences of his during the '45 that this General Conway was likely to have been interested in the killing of Glenure and all that followed thereon. Here, as elsewhere, comes into play the good old maxim-cherchez la femme. In December, 1747, Conway married the widowed Countess of Ailesbury. This lady, who had in 1739 married, as his third wife, Charles, fourth Earl of Elgin and third Earl of Ailesbury, was the daughter of John Campbell of Mamore, whose father was

the second son of Archibald, ninth Earl of Argyll; and who was thus first cousin of Archibald, the third Duke, who presided at the trial. Duke Archibald, who died in 1760, left no legitimate children by his wife, the daughter of Wakefield, the Paymaster of Marines. To a woman named Williams, by whom he had an illegitimate son, he left his whole English property, but the dukedom and minor titles and the family estates devolved on Lady Ailesbury's father as the fourth Duke of Argyll. For three years after his marriage, Conway lived at Latimers, in Bucks. Then in 1751 he was for a short time with his regiment in Minorca, but returned home early in 1752, and bought Park Place, Henley-onThames. During part of that year and the next he was on duty in Ireland, but during part both of 1753 and 1754 he was in this country, and attending Parliament. In 1755, he was again in Ireland as secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant, but was back in London next year, and for some time to come. I have been unable to find any trace of his having been in Scotland during any of these years with his wife's relatives, and very possibly visiting the Appin country itself. Of course he may have been, but no evidence that he was has yet come under my notice. But it is quite clear not merely that he had abundant opportunities during this time of associating in London and elsewhere with his Scottish connections, and learning from them what was going on in the north, but also that he himself actually took a very lively interest in Scots affairs. Such an event as the murder of Glenure cannot, in the circumstances, have failed to come under his notice, and, coming under his notice, to have secured his attention also for the whole proceedings. It would not, accordingly, be surprising to find that he possessed a report of the trial of James Stewart, and if so, that the map in his copy was annotated by somebody possessed of full local knowledge. There is no reason for believing that he possessed that local knowledge himself, but nothing was simpler than for him to transfer to his own map the notes which some of his Campbell relatives-perhaps even the Duke himself-had placed on theirs. In short, I think there is very little reason for doubting that the General Conway, to whom the old volume before me once belonged, was Henry Seymour Conway, whose career has been described, and also that the annotations on the map owe their existence to somebody who was either himself mixed up with the judicial murder of James of the Glens, or intimately connected with those who were.

7th MAY, 1890.

At this meeting Mr R. L. Mackintosh, wine merchant, Church Street, was elected a member of the Society. Thereafter Mr Alex. Macbain, M.A., read a paper contributed by Professor Mackinnon, Edinburgh, entitled "Scottish Collection of Gaelic MSS." Mr Mackinnon's paper was as follows::

With the exception of some half-dozen manuscripts, all that remains in Scotland, so far as at present known, of the labours of industrious Gaelic scholars through many centuries, now lies for preservation and reference in the Library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. The collection is to be regarded as but gleanings from the dust heap of the ages, mere fragments cast ashore from the wreck of the past, rather than a full representation of the literature. That native scholarship flourished in our midst in the far past we know. Historically, Gaelic literature in Scotland begins with Columba. The Saint was a poet, a scholar, an accomplished penman; and the literary as well as the missionary spirit of the founder lived in Iona for many a long day. It used to be said that Columba left a copy of the Psalter written in his own hand in every church which he founded. Be this as it may, we know that the great missionary was a devoted student of the Psalms from his boyhood, and that it was death alone that was able to snatch the pen from his hand. But of the literature of this period hardly a vestige remains. The Norsemen swept the Hebrides in the end of the eighth, and through the two succeeding centuries. These "roving barbarians" took particular pleasure in plundering monasteries and massacring priests. They were passionately devoted to their native saga, but in their heathen days the books of monks were objects of value to these men solely because of their costly coverings. A single volume has happily escaped their destroying hand. The monastery copy of Adamnan's Life of St. Columba, in the hand of Dorbene, writing-master of the day, and at the time of his death (713 A.D.) Abbot-elect of Iona, was carried away by a monk to the Continent, probably after the murder of Blatbmac, in the year 825

A.D.

The priceless document lay for a thousand years in the monastery of Reichenau, on the lake of Constance, and on the suppression of that house in the end of last century, found

is.

its way to the Library of Schaffhausen, where it now Six or seven manuscripts of this period have been preserved in Ireland. Whether any of these belonged to Iona is now matter of conjecture only. The Book of Kells is, in its decoration and ornamentation, the crowning glory of Celtic art. Now, it has been observed that in the character of its illuminations the "Lindisfarne Gospels," the work of men who acquired the knowledge of their craft from the school of Iona, approaches the Book of Kells more nearly than the Irish manuscripts of the period. Historically we know that the Monastery of Kells rose on the ruins of Iona. Accordingly, it would seem a fair inference that this Book was at one time the Book of Iona, or the work of students of that great school. Gaelic learning flourished in Pictland. But the reforming Queen Margaret was hostile to native ways, and this accounts for the total disappearance of Gaelic manuscripts produced in that part of the country. Among the articles handed over by the Culdee Monastery of Loch Leven to St Andrews, seventeen books are named, but all trace of these, as well as of the hundreds of others The Book of Deer, a MS. of the that must have existed, is lost. ninth century, with memoranda written on its blank spaces in Gaelic of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, has been preserved, we of a know not how, and is now in Cambridge. Sixteen months ago, Mr copy Whitley Stokes discovered, from a note on a beautiful Psalter in the Vatican, that the Codex at one time belonged to the Monastery of "Sancta Maria de Cupra," that is, Coupar-Angus.

When a settled government was established in the Hebrides, first under the kingdom of Norway and afterwards under the Lords of the Isles, the old literary relations with Ireland were resumed, and learning revived. The Monastery of Iona, and in a less degree the Abbeys and Priories of Ardchattan, Saddell, Oronsay, with others, were seats of Gaelic learning and culture. The Macdonalds kept state in Islay for several generations, with all the pomp and circumstance of Royalty. This great house fell on the eve of the Reformation, and the records, which we know to have been kept, have disappeared. A solitary charter written in 1408 on a strip of goat's skin, and conveying certain lands in Islay to "Brian Bicare Magaodh," was recently found in the possession of a man of the name of M'Gee in Antrim, who had deposited the parchment for safe custody in a peat hag, but who with difficulty was persuaded that the Register House in Edinburgh afforded a securer home, pending the time when the lands described In the middle in the document would be restored to his family.

of the 16th century came the Reformation, which, in so far as the uprooting of the old order of things and the destruction of native manuscripts were concerned, was pretty vigorously carried out in those districts which looked to Iona for light and leading.

There were other causes of a permanent character which powerfully affected the production and especially the preservation of manuscript literature in the Scottish Highlands. The country was turbulent and lawless; the climate was damp; the dwellings frail and mean. Over and above all there were the neglect and indifference with which such literature came to be regarded by the great mass of the people. A family of MacMhuirich was for eighteen generations hereditary seanachies to Clan Ranald in South Uist. The illiterate descendant of this long line of Gaelic scholars describes, in the year 1800, the dispersion of the family library, the accumulation of centuries. Clan Ranald ordered the reporter's father to give the "Red Book,” amissing since that time, to James Macpherson from Badenoch. There were many parchments, but " none of these books are to be found at this day, because when his family were deprived of their lands they lost their alacrity and zeal. He is not certain what became of the parchments, but thinks that some of them were carried away by Alexander, son of the Rev. Alexander Macdonald, and others by Ranald, his son, and he saw two or three of them cut down by tailors for measuring tapes. He himself had some of the parchments after his father's death, but because he had not been taught to read them, and had no reason to set any value upon them, they were lost." The wonder perhaps is, not that so few MSS. have been preserved, but that so many have survived.

For the collection of Gaelic MSS. as we now have it, scholars are indebted mainly to Mr William F. Skene, D.C.L., the present Historiographer Royal for Scotland, author of "Celtic Scotland," and other learned works. The catalogue prepared by Mr Skene enumerates sixty-five separate manuscripts. Of these, MS. xxxii., one of the oldest and most valuable, described at length in the Highland Society's Report on Ossian (App., pp. 285-293), and in Ewen Maclachlan's "Analysis" (pp. 122-127), has been amissing since 1841, when it was in the possession of Thomas Thomson, Esq.; and MS. xxviii., containing an old and valuable copy of the Synchronisms of Flann of Bute with other matter, is represented now only by a modern transcript of a portion of the Synchronisms. In addition to these sixty-five, there are transcripts made of the