with historical and critical notes, and a comprehensive glossary

PREFACE,
to acknowledge my mistakes, as I shall be imperturbable at the innocuous shafts of ill-
natured pedantic invective and declamation.
And now, Reader, having conducted you to the threshold of the palladium of the High-
land Minstrels, let me crave your leisure hours to the study and contemplation of their
works. We speak of by-gone ages in terms which seem to imply that we are morally,
intellectually, and religiously superior to our ancestors. Would that it were so! We
exult in the progress of civilization, improvement and scientific knowledge ; but we are
retrograding in another point of view. Time was, when the hours which arc now so
assiduously devoted to the propagation of gossip, to circumvention, scandal and chicanery,
were spent in singing songs, and reciting legends in the innocent comfort and simplicity
of unsophisticated manners. But the Bards have ceased to lash the backbiter, the drunkard,
and the moral delinquent ; and as snails shoot out their horns in a calm, so the human owlets
of our country have multiplied in a fearful degree !
Reader, farewell !—but ere I pronounce that doleful word, allow me, in the sincerity of a
warm Highland heart, to wish you the innocence, beauty, and simplicity of the mountain
maid—the prowess and patriotism of the plaided warrior— the lofty talent of the Keltic
bard—the age of our Apollo, silvery-locked Ossian—and the death-bed of one who is
conscious of nothing worse than having read and studied and sung the " Beauties or
Gaelic Poethy."
University Printing Office,! Iniui mf1rrM7if
Glasgow, 4»« 1, 1M1. JOHN MACKENZIE.
J