years were spent in Badenoch as pupil and as teacher. He served for a short time with the Ordnance Survey in Wales. In 1874 he entered the Grammar School of Old Aberdeen, famous then under the Rectorship of Dr. William Dey as a preparatory school for Aberdeen University. Two years thereafter he entered King’s College as second bursar. He is said to have impressed his fellow-students as the ablest man of his year, a year which included James Adam, now of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and our foremost platonist. Though a good classical scholar, Macbain read for honours in philosophy, a subject which in after life he reckoned one of the most barren of studies, and graduated in 1880. For a short time he assisted Dr. Dey in the Grammar School; thereafter, in 1880, he was appointed Rector of Raining’s School, Inverness, under the government of the Highland Trust. He occupied this post till 1894, when Raining’s School was transferred to the Inverness Burgh School Board. Since then he has been officially connected with the Secondary Department of the High Public School. In 1901 his University of Aberdeen honoured him with the degree of LL.D. In 1905 Mr. Arthur J. Balfour, then Prime Minister, in consideration of his great services to Celtic, and specially Gaelic, philology, history, and literature, recommended him to the King for a Civil List Pension of £90, to date from 1st April of 1905.
As Headmaster of Raining’s School, Dr. Macbain exerted an influence over his students very similar to that of his own old teacher, Dr. Dey of Aberdeen. He taught them to think for themselves, to insist on having not only the facts but also, wherever possible, the reasons why these things are so. The students of Raining’s School, lads drawn from all quarters of the Highlands, were not slow to kindle at their master’s quickening fire. They gladly lived laborious days and nights, doing with all their might that which was given them to do. Under such conditions it is no wonder that Raining’s School became a nursery of students who subsequently took the highest position in the University classes, and became useful and distinguished men in their various callings. Some idea of their numbers may be formed from the fact that the annual re-union of old Raining’s School boys became a regular function in Edinburgh. There their enthusiasm for their former master found expression, for the great feature of these gatherings was the presence of Dr. Macbain.
While thus actively and successfully engaged in the work of an arduous profession, Macbain was at the same time carrying on with extraordinary vigour those Celtic studies which won him a world-wide reputation. When he came to Inverness in 1880, the scientific study of Scottish Gaelic had already begun under Dr. Alexander Cameron, of Brodick (ob. 1888), but little substantial progress had been made. In February of 1882, in his first speech at the annual dinner of the Gaelic Society, Macbain said, ‘Hitherto the Highlanders have been too much inclined to guess, and too little inclined to accurate scientific research. We want a good critical edition of the Gaelic poets; we want also a scientific Gaelic Dictionary dealing with the
