Along the coasts of Britain lie several islets where were nursed and whence have emanated national elements of moral power which have to some extent influenced our all-prevailing Anglo-Celtic empire. Lindisfarne, Inchcolm, and Iona we generally know. Iona in Loch Erizort, Lewis, the interesting islets that stud the west coast of the latter island, the far north tiny little Rona, were in early days centres of light and religion, if not of culture. To-day the tourist finds few or none to welcome him in many of those once heaven-favoured island-homes that repose in their attractive poetic solitude and antiquarian suggestiveness on the majestic bosom of the Atlantic Ocean. But in the far-west St Kilda there still resides as monarch, priest, and judge, that zealous Free Church ordained missionary, Mr Mackay, who, according to artist Sands’s admission, bravely wrestles with all the elements, moral and physical, that conflict with the interests of man. But leaving St. Kilda in its loneliness and sailing in among the inner Hebridean Isles, we find in the fertile Island of Lismore—the _great garden_—a man in the fifteenth century, often now referred to in Gaelic literature, the Rev. Sir James Macgregor. A native of Perthshire, belonging to a royal clan that was afterwards “nameless by day,” with a heart filled with the enthusiasm and perfervid spirit of his countrymen, he and his brother got up a collection of the songs and ballads of their native land, which was among the first of the literary efforts of the kind. In Lismore also resided in later days another literary ecclesiastic, the sturdy MacNicol, who produced an able volume of obstinate Scottish prejudice, a pretty hearty, intelligent growl over the great lexicographer’s “Journey to the Hebrides.” To Macgregor’s book we are indebted for some specimens of the poetry of his own and previous periods. Some of the votaries of the muse to whom he assigned niches of honour in his collection have been already referred to; the names of a few more, with a few specimen verses of their compositions, are here given. SIR DUNCAN CAMPBELL is described as “Duncan MacCailein, the good knight.” He was Sir Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy, son of Sir Colin, who died in 1478. He must have been a knight of some courtly and literary importance in his day, for he not only wrote poetry in Gaelic, but he obtained from the powers that were charters to extensive lands in Perthshire, and became one of the Earls of Breadalbane. He is the author of several pieces of poetry which have been characterised as remarkable for caustic humour, indulged in sometimes at the expense of the female sex. A published poem of his is a satirical elegy on a miser, a species of beggar humanity that the world has not yet succeeded in extinguishing. I give a literal metrical translation of some of the verses:—