themselves rolling their purple billows upward into the blue—all fill the soul with the sublime; and life under the Bens grows sombre and sweet, and keeps and gathers memories. To the present day in the Highlands are to be heard recited compositions of undoubted beauty, descended from the remotest antiquity. The Dean of Lismore's Book was engrossed before 1537, yet the editor of the printed edition of 1862 was able to append to one of its contents (p. 42) a version of the poem, "taken down from the oral recitation of a Cristina Sutherland, an old woman in the county of Caithness, in the year 1856." And the beautiful story of Grainne and Diarmid, a legend common to Ireland and Scotland, also included by the worthy Dean (p. 30), may still be heard in the traditionary Gaelic in its native district of Benderloch.
Hume, again, in his well-known letter to Dr. Blair, demanded proof that there existed in the memory of the Highlands any Gaelic poem corresponding exactly and completely to a translation by Macpherson. And it is true that with all the researches of the Highland Society on the subject, detailed in the "Report" of their special committee published at Edinburgh in 1805, no such word-for-word copy could be found. Versions of closely similar compositions, and
