"This sword," says his biographer, Thomas Pattison, "the poet lost or threw away in the retreat. On his return home therefore the gentleman to whom it belonged, and whose substitute he had been, refused to pay the sum for which he had engaged Duncan Ban to serve in his stead. Duncan consequently composed his song on 'The Battle of the Speckled Kirk'--as Falkirk is called in Gaelic--in which he good-humoredly satirized the gentleman who had sent him to the war, and gave a woful description of 'the black sword that worked the turmoil,' and whose loss, he says, made its owner 'as fierce and furious as a gray brock in his den.' The song immediately became popular, and incensed his employer so much that he suddenly fell upon the poor poet one day with his walking-stick, and striking him on the back, bade him 'go and make a song about that.' He was however afterward compelled by the Earl of Breadalbane to pay the bard the sum of 300 merks Scots (£16, 17_s._ 6_d._), which was his legal due." Duncan ended his days in Edinburgh, where he died in 1812,--one of the last links of the moving record of the early eighteenth century and its Jacobite associations. Duncan was a contemporary of Macpherson's, and with Macpherson and his 'Ossian,' to which a special article is devoted elsewhere, we may well leave our chronicle, forbearing to touch on the debatable ground of later and contemporary Celtic literature in Scotland. Enough to say that Duncan Ban Macintyre has no lack of worthy followers in Gaelic poetry, and that with the Anglo-Celtic development, associated with such names as Dr. Norman Macleod, Professor Blackie, Robert Buchanan, George MacDonald, William Black, and, among new-comers, Miss Fiona Macleod and Mr. Neil Munro, there seems every prospect that the Gaelic spirit promises to achieve greatly in the new centuries to come. The first selection is from the 'Sean Dana,' or Ancient Poems, collected, or rather written (from oral legendary lore and ballads), by Dr. John Smith, late in the eighteenth century. PROLOGUE TO GAUL How mournful is the silence of Night When she pours her dark clouds over the valleys! Sleep has overcome the youth of the chase: He slumbers on the heath, and his dog at his knee. The children of the mountain he pursues In his dream, while sleep forsakes him. Slumber, ye children of fatigue; Star after star is now ascending the height. Slumber! thou swift dog and nimble-- Ossian will arouse thee not from thy repose. Lonely I keep watch,-- And dear to me is the gloom of night When I travel from glen to glen, With no hope to behold a morning or brightness.