years the telegram was ignored and the credit claimed for the cavalry division of the British army. For his services he received at the time a medal and clasp and Khedive's star, the thanks of parliament, and the order of K.C.S.I. In August 1880, while still on the Bengal staff, he was appointed commander-in-chief at Madras, and, after the failure of the first expedition to Burmah to accomplish the pacification and settlement of the country, was ordered temporarily to transfer his headquarters to Burmah, and to remain there until the conclusion of operations in the cold season. The appointment was notified to the home government on 13 Aug. 1886. Macpherson arrived at Rangoon, full of energy and life, on 9 Sept., and assumed command of the expeditionary force, by that time amounting to thirty thousand men. He at once proceeded up the river Irrawaddy, taking with him a formidable flotilla of river-boats, carrying the reinforcements he had brought with him from India. He reached Yenangang on 14 Sept., and, after brief delays there and at Prome, arrived at Mandalay on 17 Sept. The inundations which occurred there soon afterwards were productive of much sickness among Europeans and natives. Macpherson himself fell ill, having, it was believed, contracted the seeds of fever at Mandalay. He abandoned his intention of proceeding to Bhamo, and returned on 12 Oct. to Thayet-mayo, and thence to Prome, where his illness, aggravated, no doubt, by the restless seal which marked his military career on all occasions of trying responsibility, became so severe as to require his removal to Rangoon. He died on board the steamer Irrawaddy, immediately after leaving Prome for Rangoon, 20 Oct. 1886. Macpherson married in 1859 Maria, daughter of Lieutenant-general James Eckford, C.B., Indian army.
[Hart's Army Lists; Lond. Gaz. (despatches under dates); Maurice's Campaign in Egypt, London, 1887; Broad Arrow, 23 Oct. 1886, pp. 574, 581, 587.]
MACPHERSON, JAMES (d. 1700), known as the Banff freebooter, is said to have been an illegitimate son of a member of the family of Invereshie in Inverness-shire by a gipsy woman. After his father's death he joined his mother and her roving companions. For some years he defied the magistrates and lairds of the neighbourhood, but in the autumn of 1700 he, with some of his gipsy band, was captured at Keith market by Lord Braco of Kilbride. He was imprisoned in the tolbooth of Banff under an exceptionally strong guard, and was tried before the sheriff of that place on 7 Nov., on the charge of ‘going up and doune the country armed and keeping mercats in a hostile manner.’ He and an accomplice, Gordon, were sentenced to death, and were executed at the Cross of Banff during the afternoon market of Friday, 16 Nov. 1700. According to tradition, Macpherson was handsome in appearance and of kindly temper. No charge of bloodshed was preferred against him, and evidence was adduced at his trial that one of his ‘unlawful’ visits had been for the purpose of curing a sick man.
It is said that before his execution he played a ‘rant’ or dirge on his favourite violin, offered the instrument as a keepsake to any one in the crowd who would think well of him, and, receiving no response, broke it and threw it into the open grave by his side. The rant is said to have appeared in a broadside in 1701. An early version, reputed to have been committed to memory by a young woman to whom Macpherson had formed a strong attachment, was given by Buchan to Motherwell, and is printed in Hogg and Motherwell's edition of Burns (1834, ii. 178). Another copy, obviously later, appears in Herd's collection, published in 1776 (see also Hogg and Motherwell, ii. 179, and Ritson, ii. 454). Internal evidence shows that none of these versions could have been written by Macpherson, though we can readily believe that the melody, played with such dramatic circumstance, was not long without words. It suggested Burns's ‘Macpherson's Farewell,’ in which the poet has characteristically preserved the old air and the burden, almost verbatim, of the version associated with the outlaw's lover.
A curious parallel is found in the story of John Macpherson, the Leinster highwayman, the reputed composer of an Irish air called ‘Macpherson's tune’ (see notes to ‘Titus's Ballad’ in Ainsworth's Rookwood, p. 63).
[Process against the Egyptians at Banff, 1700 (Spalding Club Miscell. iii. 175); Imlach's Hist. of Banff, 1868, pp. 26–8; Cramond's Annals of Banff (New Spalding Club), i. 99; New Monthly Mag. 1821, i. 142–3, quoted in Gipsy Lore Journal, iii. 190; Chambers's Domestic Annals, iii. 233. See also Carlyle's account of his reading the ‘rant’ to Tennyson, in a letter to E. Fitzgerald, 26 Oct. 1844 (E. F.'s ‘Letters,’ 1889 i. 144 n.)]
MACPHERSON, JAMES (1736–1796), the alleged translator of the Ossianic poems, was born at Ruthven in the parish of Kingussie, Inverness-shire, on 27 Oct. 1786 (tombstone in Westminster Abbey). His father, Andrew Macpherson, a penurious
