The Athletes and Athletic Sports of Scotland

ATHLETIC SPORTS OF SCOTLAND. women wherever heard all over the world. Not from among the educated and well-to-do classes, with plenty of leisure on their hands, but from the industrial classes has arisen the national music andsongs ofScotland. Many of the finest airs and pibrochs for the bagpipes were composed without premedi­ tation under the influence ofexultant joy, or the wildest sorrow and despair. Many a manly English heart mourned the loss of brave brothers and comrades after the battle of Waterloo, as they entered Paris in triumph a few days afterwards, but only the pipers of the 92nd Highlanders could give musical expre to their sorrow inthe mournful but beautiful march they played on that occasion. An officer who served thirty years with the 42nd regiment, the famous Black Watch, wrote to Colonel David Stewart, author of Sketches of the Highlanders of Scotland " Before my time there were many poets andbards among the soldiers. Their love songs werebeautiful, and their Jaments for the fallen brave, and recollections of absent friends, and their distant glens and rocks have often filled my eyes withtears." -As to the question whether people ofgood musical taste can appre­ ciate the music of the great Highland bagpipe, it is a fact that people whohave the keenest appreciation and intense enjoyment of the musicof such composers as Mozart andHandel; of such singers as Titiens, Patti, SimsReeves, and Foli; and of such musicians as Joachim and Sarasate, can, at the same time thoroughly appreciate and enjoy a pibroch or strathspey on the great Highlandbagpipe by a Cameron, a M'Coll, or a M'Lennan. Perhaps the greatest musical defect of such people isthat they cannot findmuch to appreciate in the songs andmusic that de­ light the hearts of millions of the people of England in the places of entertainment called with pregnant irony, music halls. The music hallsong has, however, an interest of its own, in that it represents the lowest depth towhich, ina civilised community, the human race has fallen from an intellectual and musical point of view. CAUSES OF THE POPULARITY OF THE BAGPIPE.— Ofthe main