It was in that wild and turbulent period of clan feuds in the Northern and Western Highlands, and family quarrels between the Douglases and their rivals in the Lowlands, almost half a century before the Scottish Reformation, that the Dean of Lismore in his island home near Oban, set about collecting his fund of Gaelic poetry. In 1512, just the year before Flodden, he began to write down what he gleaned from oral recitation throughout the Highlands and Ireland, and continued with the help of his brother down to the year 1526, thus conserving not only the poetry of his own generation and of two previous centuries, but also most beautiful and characteristic fragments of Ossianic poems, some of which, but for him, would have been irretrievably lost. A hundred and sixty years pass stormfully by before we meet the next gleaner in this field of poetic literature. And then arose among the wild Macraes of Kintail the chief of that name, Donnachadh nam Piòs, full of piety and song. Amid the tumults of the Revolution of 1688, while Claverhouse was leading the clans on to fateful Killiecrankie, and Cannon and Buchan were ravaging the Northern Highlands, this friend of the Muses, and learned chieftain, found a pastime in making of verse and committing to manuscript, thousands of lines of poetry current in his own district, from Carsewell’s day down to his own, and in point of place from Southern Argyllshire north to the borders of Caithness. This representative gleaning carries the bardic succession over the long interval since the Dean’s time, and it is a pity that though the Fernaig manuscript has been transcribed and annotated by Professor Mackinnon, and again transcribed by Dr. Cameron and Dr. Macbain, and partly transliterated by Dr. Henderson, no English rendering has yet been published. The poems in the Book of Clanranald are not of the same high order as the earlier survivals, with the exception of the two or three Ossianic fragments, which are likewise to be found elsewhere. But they supplement the Fernaig collection, and help to bring down the poetic tradition nearer the Forty-five. It is to the Macvurichs—the descendants of Muireach Albanach, and the hereditary bards of Clanranald—that we owe this contribution to the gleanings of poetising in by-gone days. They collected throughout their successive generations chiefly elegies and eulogies, from the time of Charles the First to George the Second.