The verse of Scott’s, quoted at the head of this chapter, referred to the harp, but we may use it as referring to the pipes, remembering at the same time that there is little hope of these ever occupying the position they once occupied. The waking must be to another life altogether. Civilisation ousted the pipes from the position of clan and war instrument of a native population, but it did not find them another. “Had the governing powers been anxious,” says Professor Blackie, “to do common educational justice to the sons of the brave fellows who so freely shed their blood in our defence, the last thing they would have suffered to be neglected in the Highland schools was the national music. For national purposes the “March of the Cameron Men,” and scores of such heroic lays in the true old Greek style, were worth all the Latin grammars that ever were printed. But an evil destiny hung over this noble foundation of national inspiration; a blight fell with deadening swoop over the brightness and the joy and the luxuriance of Highland life.” Professor Blackie himself did more than any other man to remove this blight, and to him in great measure is due the credit for the present revival of respect for Highland literature and Highland music. Other men of letters have, by writing of the Highlands, shown that the country has a past worth the attention of the romancist, and Scott, Stevenson, William Black, Fiona Mac Leod, and Neil Munro have brought Highland life into touch with the rest of the world better than centuries of ordinary “civilisation” could have done. But Professor Blackie was the champion enthusiast, though even he realised that if the harp of the Gael was to wake it must wake to new conditions, and be prepared to live in a world it knew not, and which, to a great extent, knew it not. There is no room in the world for the piper of the olden time; there is room for the piper of the olden time when he adapts himself to modern circumstances. That he has done, and the result is that the pipes are more the national instrument of Scotland than ever they were.