“A Sassenach chief may be bonnily built, Wear a sporran, a hose (!) a dirk and a kilt; He may in fact stride in an acre of stripes, But he cannot assume an affection for pipes.” The Scots were always a musical people. Their national airs, if nothing else, prove this. But music to Scotsmen, still more to Highlanders, was always more than music; it was something which inspired and intensified all their thoughts, and, combined with the impassioned lays of the bards, was to them their principal intellectual food. The bards, whether leading their countrymen with naked bodies and bared broadswords, against their foes, or reciting in the festive hall, endeavoured by means of the choicest language, wedded to the tenderest and boldest music, to impart to their listeners all that was noble and heroic. With harp and voice they poured forth music and words that stirred the very depths of courage and fervour in the enthusiastic nature of the Gaels. And the music which they composed was, like the people, rugged but whole-hearted, “the music of the great bens, the mysterious valleys, and of deep crying unto deep,” a music which showed that the people who could live on it were not a people of sordid and sensual tastes, but a people who were by nature and circumstances fitted to appreciate the grand, the awe-inspiring, and the true. They traversed daily a country of the wildest and most diversified scenery, mountains and forests and lochs, their minds partook of the sublimity of their surroundings; they mused continually with glowing imagination on the deeds of their forefathers and their own exploits, and the music to whose rhythm they were bred was but the reflex of their character and life. “That is what makes all your Celtic music so good,” wrote Professor Blackie. “It is all so real; not tricked up for show, but growing out of a living root.” Highland music was always different from Lowland, in that it was based largely on memories of the past, and connected by undying tradition with events that had left their impress on the country or the clan. It was always simple and unaffected, and the Highlander always preferred the simple strains of his countrywomen and the grandeur of the pipes in their native glens to the finest opera. Besides he liked variety, as the existence of marches, pibrochs, quicksteps, laments, reels, jigs, and strathspeys testify, and he was equally at home with the grave, the gay, or the melancholy. The melancholy, however, was the predominating note. One can recognise a Gaelic air among a thousand. Quaint and pathetic, it moves on with the most singular intervals, the movement self-contained and impressive, especially to the Celt.