After seven years’ tuition in Skye he returned to his native parish, succeeding his father as family piper to the Laird of Gairloch, and subsequently marrying. Numerous pibrochs, strathspeys, reels, and jigs are placed to his credit. When at length he was superannuated on a small but competent annuity, the old man used to pass his time visiting gentlemen’s houses in the Reay country and the island of Skye. On one of these peregrinations in Sutherlandshire he composed the beautiful pastoral “Coire an Easain,” lamenting Lord Reay. Of this poem Mackenzie says, “It is not surpassed by anything of the kind in the Celtic language—bold, majestic, and intrepid, it commands admiration at first glance, and seems on a nearer survey of the entire magnificent fabric as the work of some supernatural agent.” Could Highland admiration go farther? The “Piobaire Dall” lived till he was about ninety-eight years of age, and sleeps with his father Ruairidh Dall within the clachan of his native parish in the west. Other minor bards of the period were, John Whyte, William Mackenzie, John Maclean, Malcolm Maclean, the poet Macdonald of Muck, who composed the “Massacre of Glencoe,” Angus Macdonald, Hector Macleod, Archibald Macdonald, and Zachary Macaulay. Archibald Macdonald excelled as a comic bard—one of the few that Highland Gaeldom has produced. His “Elegy” on Roy while living—a piper and favourite companion of his own—and his “Resurrection” of the same individual, are counted very clever. He it was who composed the famous satire, “Tha biodag air Mac Thomàis,” which, when played at a wedding memorable in Highland history, ended so tragically for the player, and, indeed, for Mac Thomàis himself, the alleged heir to the Lovat estates, who had to fly from the country, and whose descendants have on more than one occasion in recent times contested the right of the present Lovat family to the ancient inheritance. Tradition still pathetically relates how on that occasion, enraged at the playing of the piece which so cleverly satirised himself, this young Master of Lovat stabbed the bag of the piper, to silence it, with his biodag, but the weapon entered the player’s heart also, and bag and piper both collapsed with a mournful groan. Zachary Macaulay is worthy of note on another account. From his family was descended the brilliant Lord Macaulay, so famous in letters, and it may very well have been from this source that the gifted essayist and historian derived his vivid pictorial style. Zachary was born in the island of Lewis early in the eighteenth century, and was the son of an accomplished Episcopalian clergyman there. His productions as a poet exhibit true bardic power, though he is believed in his youth to have been given to writing wanton songs. The air of one of his popular pieces was in after days a great favourite with Burns.