The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

126 The Highland Monthly.
had to herd or work. When sHghtly past the middle of
his 'teens, his brightness as a scholar procured for him
employment as teacher in side schools among the glens.
The little secondary school training which he received
was done mostly in the private time of the respective
teachers of Kingussie School. At the age of twenty, he
entered Edinburgh University, and at the age of twentynine,
in 1856, after a brilliant career, he was licensed a
minister of the Free Church. His first charge was Renton,
which he left in 1874 for Brodick, Arran, where his pastoral
work lay till he died. He was considered an able preacher,
but his relations with his Church were latterly of a strained
character. His last ^qw years were spent in a wearing
quarrel with his Church Courts, and leisure time that would
otherwise have been devoted to Gaelic studies was spent
on fruitless and evanescent ecclesiastical squabbling. In
this way, Dr Cameron was unable to take advantage of the
revolution caused in Gaelic and general philology by the
views of the " New School," led by Brugmann, Thurneysen,
and Zimmer. Indeed, he added little to his philologic
work after the publication of the last number of his Scottish
Celtic Revieiu in 1885, though he did some work in connection
with his texts and tianscripts.
His literary remains arc to appear in two volumes.
The first one consists of some six hundred pages, and the
second, which is to appear in the coming publishing season,
will in all possibility be of like bulk. The sub-title of the
first volume indicates fully its general character, which is
*' Ossianic." It is claimed to be almost a complete corpus,
or oody, of
na Feinne
Ossianic poetry, like J. F. Campbell's LeabJiar
The volume contains the Ossianic poetry in
the Dean of Lismore's Book, and several other pieces of
the Dean's text. The accuracy and care bestowed by Dr
Cameron on his transcription of the Dean is fully evidenced
in the hundred odd pages devoted to him in this volume
pages which are a marvel of printing as they are of
accuracy on the part of author and editor. The Edinburgh
MSS., 48 and 02, then follow. These are only partially
Ossianic. The former gives excellent specimens of the
common literary dialect of Ireland and the Highlands in .
the seventeenth century, and is written by one of the
M'Vurichs, the hereditary bards of Clanranald. Thereafter
the
Ossianic
volume contains several important collections of
poetry never before published—most of which,
—