Contemporary with Iain Lom, and his confederate in bringing retribution upon the Keppoch traitors, was a minor bard, known as Archibald Macdonald, or “An Ciaran Mabach,” an illegitimate son of Sir Alexander Macdonald, sixteenth baron of Sleat. In after life he lived in easy circumstances, well adapted for the cultivation of his poetic tastes, on an estate granted him in North Uist by his influential father, in return for numerous services rendered as a sagacious and practical man of affairs. Otherwise his life was uneventful and his poetry limited in amount. But the field held various other less prominent bards, for to this period belonged several of those whose productions appear in the Fernaig MS. of Duncan Macrae. Nor was the Highlands then lacking in poetesses. Two at least figure in the record of the remembered. Dorothy Brown, a native of Luing Island, Argyllshire, composed many poems, of which perhaps that to Alasdair Maccolla is the only one now extant, yet as a poetess she alone of women in that age approached the standard of Mary Macleod. Cicely Macdonald, her contemporary, was daughter of Ronald of Keppoch, in youth a frolicsome maiden and clever at epigrams. Marrying a gentleman of the Lovat family, she lived with him farther north, and came to be known for her bardic gifts. Songs and laments were her chief productions, but after her husband died at Inverness in a fit of inebriety, she took to hymn-making. The names of her earlier pieces are suggestive, such as: “Moràghach Mhic Shimidh,” “Slan gu bràth le ceòl na clarsaich,” and “Alasdair a Glinne-Garaidh.” The latter beautiful one, Mackenzie assures us, has served as a model for many Gaelic songs. The next name in the succession is that of Nial Macvurich, family bard and historian of Clanranald, distinguished also as a descendant, through a long line of bardic ancestors, from the ancient and historic Muireach Albannach, whose poetry figures in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. To Nial we are indebted for the history of his illustrious clan, written in Gaelic and preserved in the Red Book of Clanranald. But it is to be regretted that of his own poems none is now extant, except two pieces treasured in “The Beauties.” Solicitous to perpetuate the history and ancient poetry of others, it appears that Nial took no thought for his own to have them written down, and so they have mostly disappeared. He lived to a great age, like the majority of these early Highland bards, and was an old man living on his farm in South Uist at the time of the first Jacobite rising in 1715.