who was the first to direct public attention to Ossianic ballads. He was born at Scoonie, Fifeshire, in 1727. His father was a seafaring man. As a mere lad, Jerome became a packman; but dealing in buckles, garters, and such small articles not suiting his “superior genius,” he sold his stock, bought books, and finally struggled into St. Andrews University, where he graduated in 1750. He soon received the appointment of assistant in Dunkeld Grammar School, of which he became Rector two or three years afterwards. In this position, acquiring knowledge of the Gaelic language and of the people, along with his other duties, he remained until struck down of fever, as already stated, in 1756. At that time Dunkeld, an ancient home of Celtic activity, learning, and enterprise, was more of a Gaelic district than it is now and Stone found himself in social and intellectual surroundings which were new to him. He had probably more racial kinship, with the people than he himself knew or acknowledged, or than even Professor Mackinnon, who has edited his collection, has thought of. For centuries Gaidel and Brython lived and fought in his native Fifeshire, and their fervid life-blood has never ceased to run in the veins of Fife men. Probably the eloquent Thomas Chalmers received much of the inspiration of his genius from this Celtic source. Stone left a collection of Gaelic ballads which was for some time regarded as lost. The MS., after passing through various hands, passed two years ago into the possession of Edinburgh University on the death of Dr Clerk, to whom it was given when preparing his edition of Ossian, by David Laing. Professor Mackinnon has published the collection of ballads in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 1887-88, occupying fifty pages of the volume, and accompanied with an interesting biographical note, to which the writer is indebted for some of the particulars given above. These ballads are of exactly the same character as those of the Feinne already considered. They are merely other versions of the same poems dealing with the same themes of the Finnic environment of the old Gaelic national life. The first translator of Gaelic poetry deserves a memorial cairn in any book devoted to the interests of our Anglo-Gaelic literature. Jerome Stone gave the first translation of the old Gaelic Lays to the world in 1756 four years before the appearance of Macpherson’s _Fragments_. It appears that a St. Andrews Professor was the first to interest young Stone in Gaelic poetry, and the best of his efforts at translation was his free rendering of “Fraoch’s Death,” or as he entitles it, “Albin and the Daughter of Mey”:—