Here is No. IX., for example, a portion of a single leaf of dirty paper—no more. And No. LII., loose leaves and scraps gathered together under one cover; XXXVII., one of the best known of all, with several of its leaves torn, and in many places quite illegible. No. XL., five layers of different origin stitched together in a vellum cover. And what shall we say of the curious little volume only two inches long and one and a half in breadth and thickness, bound together with thongs in quite primitive fashion? On a page in the middle is written: “Is e so leabhar Neil Oig” (“This is Neil the Younger’s book”). And here and there on some other musty records we find such entries as these: “Is mise Eoin o Albain” (“I am John from Scotland”), or “Is mise Domhnall a foghlumach Maigbeathadh” (“I am Donald Bethune the Scholar”). All are not equally tattered and faded. The handwriting in several is fresh and clear as on the day of production. It varies from the coarse and careless to the highly finished and artistic, from the merest daubs to the richly coloured and ornamental. Yet to the superficial observer with no antiquarian tastes, there is little here to attract, the more because most of these torn and dirty fragments exhibit a language and orthography hard to decipher, and much harder to read and understand. It took the late Dr. Maclauchlan of Edinburgh five years to decipher and copy a single MS.—No. XXXVII., and he tells us pathetically that it was the hardest piece of work he was ever engaged in. The interested spectator, on the other hand, if his eye happens to be directed to the obscure and tattered miscellany, naturally inquires, and learns to his surprise that this is the Scottish collection of Gaelic MSS., all that could be gathered into one place in this country of the vernacular MS. literature of the past. A swift inspection shows upwards of threescore documents, of which thirty-six at least are parchments, the rest paper or paper and parchment combined. Alongside lie later volumes—transcripts of tales, ballads, and other lore. A few of the parchments hail from the fourteenth century, but the majority were written in the fifteenth and sixteenth. The paper MSS. were all produced within the last 350 years, mainly in the end of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, while the adjacent accretions of transcripts and books belonged to men who lived within the last 100 years. It is easy to tell the tale of this assortment. Ireland, England, and the Continent had their rich collections long ago. With Scotland such a thing seems to have been an afterthought. Only in 1861 were these literary monuments of the past brought together and deposited as a kind of national treasury in the Advocates’ Library, and this laudable result is due mainly to the energy and interest of Dr. Skene, author of _Celtic Scotland_, and formerly Historiographer-Royal in Edinburgh.