drawing-room would have as poor an opinion of the music there as the Londoner has of his. They have suffered too from the well-meaning efforts of their friends. Some have invented contrivances and modifications for bringing the instrument nearer to all-round music. Others have adapted for the pipes pieces never intended for them, and which only show up their deficiencies, in the hope of bringing the music nearer to the pipes. Neither has succeeded to any great extent, and neither is likely to succeed. The Mac Crimmons of Skye, the greatest masters of the bagpipe, never violated the principle of using only music specially composed, and they succeeded beyond all others in demonstrating the powers of the instrument. Those who have since departed from their principle have failed to justify the departure, but they have proved, what they might have known before they began, that an instrument cannot produce what it is not constructed to produce. The Highland bagpipe is the exponent of Highland music, and of that only. And there is enough and to spare without invading the realms of other instruments. There are reels, strathpeys, and marches out of number, and there are, above all things, pibrochs, or, to give the proper spelling, _piobaireachd_ (“pibroch” is simply an attempt made by Sir Walter Scott to spell the word phonetically, so as to make it pronounceable to his south country readers; but it has come into such general use that its correctness passes unquestioned.)[3] The word does not, properly speaking, denote any class of tune—it means pipe-playing—but it is generally applied to a class which in itself includes three classes—the _cruinneachadh_ or gathering, the _cumhadh_ or lament, and the _failte_ or salute. The pibroch has been called the voice of uproar and misrule, and its music that of real nature and rude passion. It is the great specialty of the Highland bagpipe, and no piper is considered a real expert unless he is a good pibroch player. It is the most elaborate of the compositions devised for the pipes, and is difficult to define otherwise than as a theme with variations. Dr. Mac Culloch, a rather cynical traveller, who wrote books on Scotland in 1824, which still pass as standard, considered it “of an extremely irregular character, containing a determined melody, whereon, such as it is, are engrafted a series of variations rising in difficulty of execution, but presenting no character, as they consist of commonplace, tasteless flourishes, offensive to the ear by their excess, and adding to the original confusion instead of embellishing the air which the ground may possess.” “It has,” he adds, “neither time, rhythm, melody, cadence, nor accent, neither keynote nor commencement nor termination, and it can therefore regulate nothing. It begins, goes on, and ends, no one knows when or how or where, and if all the merit of the bagpipe is to depend on its martial, or rather its marching, utility, it could not stand on a worse