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LADY NAIRNE AND HER SONGS. 121 |
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and the romantic adventures of the Prince in hiding from his hunters among the mountains and islands, all contrived to create themes for song and poetry which have never been surpassed in modern history. The enterprise was as foolish as it was daring, an episode of knight-errantry after the age when success was possible, but it had all the elements of chivalry in its impulse and conduct, and no modern war has been less selfish and sordid, not even the insurrections of Poland or the uprising of the Spanish and German people against Napoleon. The young Chevalier himself, only twenty-four years of age, tall, handsome, and martial, with his flowing yellow hair and Tartan dress, and with the fascination of his race in his manner, his courage, clemency, and misfortune, gave it the personal element so necessary to the highest poetry, and altogether the circumstances and the conditions combined to create an effervescence of popular poetry which has never been surpassed. Its quantity was as remarkable as its quality. The two large volumes of Hogg's Jacobite Relics by no means exhausted the collection of songs in the Lowland dialeot, and to this day those in Gaelic are still being discovered by the labors of Professor Blackie and others, as they are yet preserved in the bothies of the Highlands and the islands. The inspiration of the later poets, Burns, Hogg, Cunningham, and |
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