However much the Church may have gained the ascendency over rival influences, it has never been able to stifle the heroic poetry of the race. At periods when the latter seemed most to have gone under, and disappeared beneath the ban of religion, it came to life again with amazing vitality, as, for example, in the days of Maelmuiri and after, when the ecclesiastical seemed to have conquered the pagan; and again in the days of Macpherson, when the Reformation appeared to have made a clean sweep of the heroic saga in the land, leaving neither name nor memorial. And the MSS. had so completely disappeared that they were not known to exist. But forth they came to testify once more to the hidden and precarious genius of the Celtic people, which produced such diverse characters as Fergus and Ossian, Patrick and Columcille. While the nineteenth century has been exceptionally brilliant in the department of English literature, the same cannot be said of Gaelic literature. In the former great works of creative genius have appeared, which have added immense lustre to the language in which they were conceived. In the latter the output by comparison has been very poor and meagre, no lengthy sustained production of any originality having seen the light either in prose or poetry. It would seem as if the genius of the Gaelic language had found more congenial expression in English, for not a few of those who have enriched the younger literature, from Sir Walter Scott onwards to William Black and Robert Buchanan, have derived their inspiration, and sometimes their themes, from Celtic sources. Of native compositions we have nothing to show beyond elegies, songs, and lyrics, some of them of great beauty, and as spontaneous and true to nature as the beating of men’s hearts. But no epic, no heroic poetry, no drama, no great prose work worthy to be classed with the masterpieces of English literature, or even with the minor works, has appeared within the last century. Instead of being a century of creative work, as in English, it has rather been a century of gleaning. All the best works in Gaelic are collections—gleanings from the past. It would be difficult to assign the real reason for the barrenness of production in recent times. Many causes seem to combine. The derelict condition of the Highland and Irish populations in the beginning of last century may have had something to do with it; the decline and limited use of the language; the invasion of English and English literature, of Lowland people and Lowland ways.