“As slumbering I lay by the dark mountain stream, My lovely young Rosie appeared in my dream; I thocht her still kind, and I ne’er was sae blest As in fancy I clasped the fair Nymph to my breast. Thou fause, fleeting vision, too soon thou were o’er, Thou wak’d’st me to tortures unequalled before, But death’s silent slumbers my grief soon shall lull, An’ the green grass wave o’er the Harper o’ Mull.” The transition from the harp to the bagpipe was spread over about two centuries. In 1565 George Buchanan speaks of the Highlanders using both instruments, and during the seventeenth century the use of the harp declined to such an extent that the number of professional harpers was very small indeed. The civil wars largely accounted for this, as the fitness of the bagpipe for the tumult of battle gave it an easy superiority over the harp. Writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Alexander Macdonald, the Keppoch bard, said he preferred the pipes to the harp, which he called _ceol nionag_, maidens’ music. When the bards thus openly avowed their liking for the pipes, the transition period was over, for the harp was wont to be their favourite instrument. The harp still exists as the _clarsach_, which is being revived by Highland Associations, more especially in Glasgow, but, if the Irishism may be permitted, the bagpipe is now “the harp of the Gael.” Besides supplanting the harp, the pipes also supplanted the bards themselves. The bards were in their day a more important body of men than the harpers, and naturally much more relating to them has come down to posterity. They existed from the remotest period of which there are any records, and it was only in 1726 that, with the death of Neil Mac Vuirich, the Clan Ranald bard, the race of distinctively clan bards became extinct. The race continued to exist—bards exist to this day for that matter—but not as clan bards, and after 1726 they were only public makers of verse.