“My young Highlander played me on the road five miles, and I would gladly have sunk the portable screech-owl appendage. A man had better have a poll-parrot chained to his ear or be doomed to listen to a concert of files and saw teeth in a saw manufactory, than be obliged to listen to such music. If, ‘Sir Harry,’ has any musical instrument, it will be the great Highland bagpipe. What a hideous yell it makes! ... that grunting, howling, yelling, screaming, screaking pig of a bag or portable screech-owl. It seems to hook its tedrum threthrum crotchets and quavers upon your nerves, and tears them to tatters, like the ‘devil machine’ in a cotton manufactory. I would speak with the same deference of the music of a country, as I would of its superstitions; but what can a man do when his very soul is twisted out of its socket.... To think that this squealing pig in a poke should be the great lever of a people’s passions. It would not let a man die quietly, but would almost wake the dead.” Even in the Highlands there seems to have been a tendency to joke at the expense of the pipes. A well-known proverb is said to have originated in this wise. The fox being hungry, found a bagpipe, and proceeded to eat the bag. There was still a remnant of breath in it, and when the fox bit it the drone gave a squeal. The fox was surprised, but not frightened, for he only said—“There’s meat and music here,” and went on with his meal. His remark has gone down to posterity as a proverb. The bards, whom the pipes supplanted when they supplanted the harp, did not welcome the instrument, and satirised it in many of their poems. Duncan Ban Mac Intyre, the bard of Glenorchy, in the poem _Aoir Uisdein Phiobair_, abused it with sledge-hammer power; but his abuse was coarse, and contained little genuine humour. John Mac Codrum, the Hebridean bard, did better in _Di-Moladh Piob Dhomh’uill Bhain_, one of the most laughable things he wrote. The history of Donald Bain’s bagpipe he traced in an imaginative way through all its vicissitudes, from the days of Tubal Cain, through the disaster of the Deluge, and its damaging treatment by incompetent pipers. He compared the strains to some of the most discordant sounds in nature, spoke of it as a trump whose horrid music might rouse every Judas that ever lived, and used a multiplicity of illustrations to show its want of melody. This spirit of cynicism was not confined altogether to the Gaelic bards. In _The Family Legend_, written by the distinguished poetess Joanna Baillie, there is introduced a short argument between the Duke of Argyll’s piper and “Dugald,” another of the characters. The piper has been playing in a small ante-room leading to the Duke’s apartment, when Dugald enters:—