Excerpt from The Modern Scottish Minstrel; Or the Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century, Vol. 1 of 6: With Memoirs of the Poets, and Sketches and Specimens in English Verse of the Most Celebrated Modern Gaelic Bards Scotland has probably produced a more patriotic and more extended minstrelsy than any other country in the world. Those Caledonian harp - strains, styled by Sir Walter Scott gems of our own mountains, have fre quently been gathered into caskets of national song, but have never been stored in any complete cabinet; while no attempt has been made, at least on an ample scale, to adapt, by means of suitable metrical transla tions, the minstrelsy of the Gael for Lowland melody. The present work has been undertaken with the View of supplying these deficiencies, and with the further de Sign of extending the fame of those cultivators of Scot tish song - hitherto partially obscured by untoward circumstances, or on account of their own diffidence and of affording a stimulus towards the future cultiva tion of national poetry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.