TAIT'S Edinburgh MAGAZINE FOR 1845. VOLUME XII. EDINBURGH: WILLIAM TAIT, 107, PRINCE'S STREET; SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO. LONDON; AND JOHN CUMMING, DUBLIN. MDCCCXLV. 477 729 79 65, 124, 136, 203, 544 65 University Tests in Ireland and Scotland, Priests, Women, and Children; by Michelet, Railways, Prospects of Benefit from, Ripa's (Father) Residence at Pekin, 489 517 Wolfensberger (Mad.) on Naples, 44, 85, 246, 429, 710 617 542 171 342 389 117 699 613 463 749 Wigan, Dr, on the Duality of the Mind, 127 Wilkinson, Jemimah, the American Prophetess, 450, 454 679 Wilson's History of British India, 130 332 Zschokke, The Novels of, EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. JANUARY, 1845. NIGHEAN CEARD; OR, THE GOLDSMITH'S DAUGHTER. BY MRS JOHNSTONE. THERE is a region of the Highlands of Scotland, lying far beyond the range of summer tourists, and comparatively little known even to Southern grouse-shooters or deer-stalkers, which, among the neighbouring clans and the Lowlanders on the border, once bore the name of Lochnaveen's country. Among its own people, when it had a people, this wild and romantic region was called, by the more resonant Celtic appellation of the Land of the race, [sliochd,] or, of the sons of the son of Raonull. Lochnaveen's country, extending from the centre of the island to the western seas, displays a rare combination of the soft and pastoral beauty and the untamed grandeur for which the scenery of the Highlands is celebrated. There is but one thing wanting the distant mountain peaks still rear themselves above the morning mists, or float in the golden ether of noon; the upland loch spreads its translucent waters to the sun; the sinuous frith winds up through the mountain ravines and sylvan glades, and the smaller streams rejoice, each as it hastens down its own glen, to join that abounding river which rolls its placid waters through the broadening strath:-Those native pine and birch forests which have twice bowed their leafy honours beneath the golden axe of the Saxon, are springing afresh, but there is no human eye to note their luxuriance. Those grassy banks and hillocks, and desolated touns and hamlets, Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all except their sun is set : and Lochnaveen, with all its pastoral softness and romance, and wild grandeur, is to the stranger but a melancholy country. There is no hunter on its hills, no fisher on its waters, no matron grinding with the quern, no maiden singing in the milking-fold-no aged woman plying her distaff in the sunshine-no husbandmen are returning from their daily labours, no little children paddling in the burns. A few Saxon shepherds, with their dogs, have taken the place of a numerous and tolerably happy, if not very enlightened feudal, or rather patriarchal population; and judgment must chide with imagination ere one can all at once be reconciled to a change which the progress of society seems to have rendered inevitable, and which, we are bound to believe, must be for the best. But our tale belongs to a period previous to VOL. XII.-NO. CXXXIII. that complete revolution which sent the broken remnant of Lochnaveen's clan to the rivers and upper lakes of Canada, or reduced them to solitary units in the aggregate population of lowland cities. In the deserted tract to which our story refers, there remains little to show that a swarm of human beings once found a home in its bosom ; yet it is remembered that the Chief of Lochnaveen, in a cause which he liked, could have led two hundred fighting men into the field. The rude sunken tombstones of a grave-yard placed within a Druidical circle, some remnant of the walls of a massive tower, or keep, overhanging the lake, and near which there seems to have been a rude landing-place or pier, with here and there a few patches of the brighter verdure of the aquatic plants which still point out the trickling fountains of the ruined Bhalies or solitary cabins, are all that now remain to tell the traveller of what has been. There is, in particular, one mass of ruins which never fails to arrest the attention of the southern fowler or angler who chances to penetrate the mountain recesses of Lochnaveen's country in a correi, or hollow, of the mighty Mam Tamar, as the guardian mountain of the region once was named, he comes suddenly upon what at first sight appears to have been a rude chapel, or more probably a watch-tower, the crumbling remains of which are in summer richly mantled with ground-ivy, ferns, the wild bramble, and the smaller arbutus. One or two scattered yews and cypresses of stunted size, may strike him with more surprise, as these cannot be of native growth. If he inquire into the history of the ruin, and his guide in the hill be a man of intelligence, skilled in the legends of the country, he will be told that this was neither chapel nor tower, but that here stood the sheiling of Donhuil nam Biodag, i. e. Donald of the Dirk, a once famous hunter and bard, the Tanist of Lochnaveen. He will be shown that from one opening of the correi the hunter chief could command the most magnificent sight which Scottish scenery affords,-the Hebridean Archipelago stretching northward and southward, and lost in the haze of the Atlantic ; while, by another vista, Donald's eyrie commanded the mountain passes of the country, the castle of the chief, the fair strath and the peopled glens, with all their blue smokes. If it B |