NOTES TO CANTO FOURTH.

Note I.

The Taghairm call'd, by which, afar,

Our sires foresaw the events of war,-St. IV. p. 121.

The Highlanders, like all rude people, had various superstitious modes of inquiring into futurity. One of the most noted was the Taghairm, mentioned in the text. A person was wrapped up in the skin of a newly slain bullock, and deposited beside a water-fall, or at the bottom of a precipice, or in some other strange, wild, and unusual situation, where the scenery around him suggested nothing but objects of horror. In this situation he revolved in his mind the question proposed, and whatever was impressed upon him by his exalted imagination, passed for the inspiration of the disembodied spirits, who haunt these desolate recesses. In some of the Hebrides, they attributed the same oracular power to a large black stone by the sea-shore, which they approached with certain solemnities, and considered the first fancy which came into their own minds after they did so, to be the undoubted dictate of the tutelar deity of the stone, and as such, to be, if possible, punctually complied with. Martin has recorded the following curious modes of Highland angury, in which the Taghairm, and its effects upou the person who was subjected to it, may serve to illustrate the text.

"It was an ordinary thing among the over-curious to consult an invisible oracle, concerning the fate of families and battles, &c. This was performed three different ways: the first was by a company of men, one of whom being detached by lot, was afterwards carried to a river, which was the boundary between two villages; four of the company laid hold on him, and having shut his eyes, they took him by the legs and arms, and then tossing him to and again, struck his hips with force against the bank. One of them cried out, What is it you have got here? another answers, A log of birch-wood. The other cries again, Let his invisible friends appear from all quarters, and let them relieve him by giving an answer to our present demands; and in a few minutes after, a number of little creatures came from the sea, who answered the question, and disappeared suddenly. The man was then set at liberty, and they all returned home, to take their measures ac

cording to the prediction of their false prophets; but the poor deluded fools were abused, for the answer was still ambiguous. This was always practised in the night, and may literally be called the works of

darkness.

"I had an account from the most intelligent and judicious men in the Isle of Skie, that, about sixty-two years ago, the oracle was thus consulted only once, and that was in the parish of Kilmartin, on the east side, by a wicked and mischievous race of people, who are now extin. guished, both root and branch.

"The second way of consulting the oracle was by a party of men, who first retired to solitary places, remote from any house, and there they singled out one of their number, and wrapt him in a big cow's hide, which they folded about him; his whole body was covered with it except his head, and so left in this posture all night, until his invisible friends relieved him, by giving a proper answer to the question in hand; which he received, as he fancied, from several persons that he found about him all that time His consorts returned to him at the break of day, and then he communicated his news to them; which often proved fatal to those concerned in such unwarrantable inquiries.

"There was a third way of consulting, which was a confirmation of the second, above mentioned. The same company who put the man into the hide, took a live cat and put him on a spit; one of the number was employed to turn the spit, and one of his consorts inquired of him, What are you doing? he answered, I roast this cat, until his friends. answer the question; which must be the same that was proposed by the man shut up in the hide. And afterwards, a very big cat* comes, attended by a number of lesser cats, desiring to relieve the cat turned upon the spit, and then answers the question. If this answer proved the same that was given to the man in the hide, then it was taken as a confirmation of the other, which in this case was believed infallible.

"Mr. Alexander Cooper, present minister of North-Vist, told me that one John Erach, in the Isle of Lewis, assured him, it was his fate to have been led by his curiosity with some who consulted this oracle, and that he was a night within the hide, as above mentioned; during which time he felt and heard such terrible things, that he could not express them; the impression it made on him was such as could never go off, and he

*The reader may have met with the story of the "King of the Cats," in Lord Lyttleton's Letters. It is well known in the Highlands as a nursery tale.

said, for a thousand worlds he would never again be concerned in the like performance, for this had disordered him to a high degree. He confessed it ingenuously, and with an air of great remorse, and seemed to be very penitent under a just sense of so great a crime; he declared this about five years since, and is still living in the Lewis for any thing I know."-Description of the Western Isles, p. 110. See also PENNANT's Scottish Tour, vol. ii. p. 361.

Note II.

The choicest of the prey we had,

When swept our merry men Gallangad.-St. IV. p. 121.

I know not if it be worth observing, that this passage is taken almost literally from the mouth of an old Highland Kerne, or Ketteran, as they were called. He used to narrate the merry doings of the good old time when he was follower of Ghlune Dhu, or Black Knee, a relation of Rob Roy Macgregor, and hardly his inferior in fame. This leader, on one occasion, thought proper to make a descent upon the lower part of the Loch-Lomond district, and summoned all the heritors and farmers to meet at the Kirk of Drymen, to pay him black-mail, i. e. tribute for forbearance and protection. As this invitation was supported by a band of thirty or forty stout fellows, only one gentleman, an ancestor, if I mistake not, of the present Mr. Grahame, of Gartmore, ventured to decline compliance. Ghlune Dhu instantly swept his land of all he could drive away, and among the spoil was a bull of the old Scottish wild breed, whose ferocity occasioned great plague to the Ketterans. "But ere we had reached the Row of Denan," said the old man, "a child might have scratched his ears." The circumstance is a minute one, but it paints the times when the poor beeve was compelled

To hoof it o'er as many weary miles,

With goading pikemen hollowing at his heels,

As e'er the bravest antler of the woods.

Ethwald,

Note III.

that huge cliff, whose ample verge Tradition calls the Hero's Targe.-St. V. p. 122.

forest of Glenfinlas, by which a This wild place is said in former outlaw, who was supplied with

There is a rock so named in the tumultuary cataract takes its course. times to have afforded refuge to an provisions by a woman, who lowered them down from the brink

of the precipice above. His water he procured for himself, by letting down a flagon tied to a string into the black pool beneath the fall.

Note IV.

Or raven on the blasted oak,

That, watching while the deer is broke,

His morsel claims with sullen crouk.-St. V. p. 122.

Every thing belonging to the chase was matter of solemnity among our ancestors, but nothing was more so than the mode of cutting up, or, as it was technically called, breaking the slaughtered stag. The forester had his allotted portion; the hounds had a certain allowance; and, to make the division as general as possible, the very birds had their share. also. "There is a little gristle," says Turberville, "which is upon the spoone of the brisket, which we call the raven's bone. And I have seen. in some places a raven so wont and accustomed to it, that she would never fail to croak and cry for it all the time you were in breaking up of the deer, and would not depart till she had it." In the very ancient. metrical romance of Sir Tristrem, that peerless knight, who is said to have been the very deviser of all rules of chase, did not omit this

ceremony.

The raven he yaf his yiftes

Sat on the fourched tree."

SIR TRISTREM, 2nd edition, p. 34.

The raven might also challenge his rights by the Book of St. Albans, for thus says Dame Juliana Berners :

-Slitteth anon

The bely to the side from the corbyn bone,

That is corbin's fee, at the death he will be.

Jonson, in "The Sad Shepherd," gives a more poetical account of the

same ceremony.

Marian.

He that undoes him,

Doth cleave the brisket bone upon the spoon,
Of which a little gristle grows-you call it-
Robin Hood. The raven's bone.

Marian.

Now o'er head sat a raver

On a sere bough, a grown, great bird and hoarse,

Who, all the time the deer was breaking up,

So croaked and cried for it, as all the huntsmen,

Especially old Seathlocke, thought it ominous.

Note V.

Which spills the foremost foeman's life,

That party conquers in the strife.-St. VI. p. 123.

Though this be in the text described as the response of the Taghairm, or Oracle of the Hide, it was of itself an augury frequently attended to. The fate of the battle was often anticipated in the imagination of the combatants, by observing which party first shed blood. It is said that the Highlanders under Montrose were so deeply embued with this notion, that on the morning of the battle of Tippermoor, they murdered a defenceless herdsman, whom they found in the fields, merely to secure au advantage of so much consequence to their party.

Note VI.

Alice Brand-St. XII. p. 128.

This little fairy tale is founded upon a very curious Danish ballad, which occurs in the KIEMPE VISER, a collection of heroic songs, first published in 1591, and reprinted in 1695, inscribed by Anders Sofrensen, the collector and editor, to Sophia Queen of Denmark.

Note VII.

Up spoke the moody Elfin King,

Who won'd within the hill.-St. XIII. p. 129.

In a long dissertation upon the Fairy superstition, published in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, the most valuable part of which was supplied by my learned and indefatigable friend Dr. John Leyden, most of the circumstances are collected which can throw light upon the popular belief which even yet prevails respecting them in Scotland. Dr. Grahame, author of an entertaining work upon the Scenery of the Perthshire Highlands, already frequently quoted, has recorded, with great accuracy, the peculiar tenets held by the Highlanders on this topic, in the vicinity of Loch-Katrine. The learned author is inclined. to deduce the whole mythology from the Druidical system,--an opinion to which there are many objections.

"The Daoine Shi', or men of peace of the Highlanders, though not absolutely malevolent, are believed to be a peevish, repining race of beings, who, possessing themselves but a scanty portion of happiness, are supposed to envy mankind their more complete and substantial enjoyment. They are supposed to enjoy, in their subterraneous recesses, a sort of shadowy happiness, a tinsel grandeur; which, however, they would willingly exchange for the more solid joys of mortality.