Scottish music as it now exists has been derived largely from the Highlands. No man did more to acclimatise Celtic music in the Lowlands than Burns. By wedding Highland airs to his own incomparable poetry he gave them a new lease of life, albeit he helped to destroy them under their old names while preserving them under the new. The music of “Scots Wha Hae,” “Boy’s Wife,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Of a’ the Airts,” and “Ye Banks and Braes,” has no counterpart across the Border or among the Saxon race. It is the ancient inheritance of the Celt, made national by the genius of a national poet. The age of Highland music is another guarantee of its excellence. It has stood the test of time, the severest of all ordeals. We have not much English poetry which can, with any certainty, be ascribed to a date earlier than the time of Chaucer, but the Scots were celebrated for musical genius since the beginning of history, genius which, an early historian says, could not be found elsewhere on this side of the Alps. We have, for instance, a “Song of the Druids,” though, to tell the truth, we cannot prove its Druidical origin; we have “Somerled’s Lament,” composed on an event which took place in 1164, though not necessarily at that date; we have a piece of pipe music composed in the middle of the battle of Inverlochy in 1427; the “Rout of Glenfruin,” which refers to a desperate engagement between the Mac Gregors and the Colquhouns in 1602; and a “March to the Battle of Inverlochy,” and “The Clans’ Gathering;” both composed on the battle fought at Inverlochy in 1645. These do not prove that the pipes themselves were capable at that time of rendering such music, but they prove that the music existed. There are some pipe tunes—_Cogadh na Sith_ and _A Ghlas Mheur_—for instance, so ancient that their origin cannot be traced, but they have, by means of their own merits, and in spite of the want of the printing press, lived all through the centuries. In the beginning of the twelfth century, Giraldus Cambrensis said of the music of the Irish Celts that it was above that of any nation he had ever known, and in the opinion of many, Scotland at that time far surpassed Ireland, even while her people were sunk in misery and barbarism.