We need not dwell upon the subsidiary additions to this original and double nucleus in the Advocates’ Library. But it may be noted, there are besides in the University Library of Edinburgh, a Gaelic medical MS.; one collection of poetry made in the middle of the eighteenth century, by Jerome Stone; another in the beginning of the nineteenth, by Irvine, and a fragment of a Gaelic grammar. The Library of Scottish Antiquaries also exhibits a Gaelic curio in the form of a translation of the “Lilium Medicinæ” of Bernardus Gordonus, a foreign physician. And counting the few extra productions in private hands, these comprehend all the MS. literature of the Gael now extant in Scotland, so far as known. Not a satisfying sum-total by any means. The harvest truly was plentiful but the gleaners were few, and this forlorn remnant hardly does credit to our national prestige and veneration for the past. It cannot compare either in number, variety, antiquity, or content, with the rich assortments elsewhere, such as those in Ireland, England, and the Continent. Yet this collection, such as it is, has a value of its own, and in some important respects supplements the material of other more ancient and valued documents. The wonder is that so many of these manuscripts have survived to tell their tale of dool, considering the haphazard way in which they have been preserved. There is something to be said for the apparent apathy and neglect, when we remember the stormy past, the national vicissitudes and convulsions that continued down almost to last century. And how should our Scottish ancestors know that there was any purpose to be served in preserving books which nobody could read? The peculiar idiom and orthography had long since become obsolete. Until fifty years ago no scholar could interpret the scrolls, and the wiseacres of the past, no less than the multitude of illiterate clansmen, might well be pardoned if it never occurred to them that the brain of a modern critic would some day forge a key for these old-world hieroglyphics, and through the study of the derelict parchments, make a dead language speak. Instances are on record of the fate of some luckless MSS., which serve to illustrate the doom of many more. Before the Forty-five, for example, a valuable collection of old Gaelic poetry was made in Strathglass, which afterwards found its way to the Catholic College of Douay. The last heard of this vagrant volume was that the Principal, while yet a student there, saw the leaves of the mutilated document torn out to kindle the fire in their stove.