Mackenzie of “The Beauties” appraised this quaint personage as the most original of all our poets, who borrowed nothing. Her thoughts, her verse, and rhymes were all equally her own; her language simple and elegant; her diction easy, natural, and unaffected. There is no straining to produce effect; no search after unintelligible words to conceal the poverty of ideas. Her thoughts flow freely, and her versification runs like a mountain stream over a smooth bed of polished granite. She often repeats her rhymes, as in the above instance, yet we never feel them tiresome or disagreeable, for, more than most of her Gaelic compeers, Mary was mistress of the poetic lyre. After her came another striking figure in the history of Highland bardic literature. This was John Macdonald, the Lochaber poet, popularly known as Iain Lom, probably from lack of hair either on his head or face, and sometimes styled Iain Manntach, from an impediment in his speech. Singular in these physical respects, he was no less remarkable for his mental characteristics. A man of great force of character, he combined in his personality the ardent poet and the keen politician, the intuitive dreamer and the restless man of action. Macdonald belonged to the Keppoch family, lived through the stirring times of Charles I., Charles II., James II., the Revolution, and subsequent reign of William and Mary, dying at an advanced age in 1710, when Anne was on the throne. This is the wonderful schemer whom some regard as the real genius of the Montrose Campaign during the Civil War. Were it not for him, it is certain, events could not have developed so favourably and so brilliantly for the victorious Marquis as they did. Keen Jacobite as he always was, he accompanied the latter on most of his marches, and it is marvellous that the great Border minstrel, Sir Walter Scott, especially in his account of the battle of Inverlochy in the _Legend of Montrose_, makes no reference to him.