In the "Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins", there is a well-known
allusion to the bag-pipes:
"Than cryd Mahoun[27] for a Healand padyane;
Syne ran a feynd to feche Makfadyane[28]
Far northwart in a nuke.[29]
Be he the correnoch had done schout
Erschemen so gadderit him about
In Hell grit rowme they tuke.
Thae tarmegantis with tag and tatter
Full lowde in Ersche begowth to clatter,
And rowp lyk revin and ruke.
The Devill sa devit was with thair yell
That in the depest pot of Hell
He smorit thame with smoke."
Similar allusions will be found in the writings of Montgomerie; but such
caricatures of Gaelic and the bagpipes afford but a slender basis for a
theory of racial antagonism.
After the Union of the Crowns, the Lowlands of Scotland came to be more
and more closely bound to England, while the Highlands remained
unaffected by these changes. The Scottish nobility began to find its
true place at the English Court; the Scottish adventurer was
irresistibly drawn to London; the Scottish Presbyterian found the
English Puritan his brother in the Lord; and the Scottish Episcopalian
joined forces with the English Cavalier. The history of the seventeenth
century prepared the way for the acceptance of the Celtic theory in the
beginning of the eighteenth, and when philologists asserted that the
Scottish Highlanders were a different race from the Scottish Lowlanders,
the suggestion was eagerly adopted.
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