“It is harsh, imperfect, and untunable. It is not wonderful if the responsive vibrations of the piper’s tympanum are not very accurate, nor the musical organ of his brain peculiarly sensitive to sweet sounds after the daily induration which they must have undergone from such outrageous and unceasing inroads on their sensibility. The auricular wave is probably hardened as effectually as if it had been immersed in a tan pit. So much the better for them, but it is not easy to describe the subsidence of feeling the general deliquium, as physicians have it, which such worthless auditors as we are experience when an act of this music closes. It cannot be much unlike what the Mickmak or Dog-ribbed Indian feels, when his teeth have all been drawn.... As a vocal accompaniment this instrument is plainly inappropriate, unless it were to accompany a concert of tigers and cats. Nevertheless it is used for reels, and with bad enough success, if the ears are to be consulted. As a moving force, however, it answers its purpose very effectively. There are very few dancing airs that lie within its compass.... Six inches of Neil Gow’s horse hair would have beaten all the bagpipes that ever were blown.... The variations were considerably more abominable than the ground, musically speaking, but they are the best tests of the artist’s merit, as all that merit lies in difficult and rapid execution. Any man can blow the charge, but when it comes to action it is he who has the strongest fingers and the worst taste who will carry the day. Yet there are rules for all this cutting of notes as it is called. The term is not ill-chosen, as the ground is literally cut into tatters by a re-iteration of the most clumsy, commonplace and tasteless flourishes, offensive in themselves, but still more so by their excess, since every note is so encumbered that whatever air might have existed is totally swallowed up in the general confusion.” Mac Culloch, however, admits in another place, the merits of the bagpipe as an outdoor instrument, and an instrument of war especially. Carr, another Englishman, who wrote in 1809, had not a good word to say of the pipes:—