PORTRAIT OF SARAH, LADY MACLEOD, BY RAEBURN.
HORN.
DUNVEGAN’S THREE TREASURES.
In the present drawing-room a small portrait of Johnson, ascribed to Reynolds, but, as I was told, by Zoffany, hangs in a place of honour. Here, too, is kept his letter of thanks to Macleod, endorsed “Dr. Johnston’s.” He wrote it “on the margin of the sea, waiting for a boat and a wind. Boswell,” he continues “grows impatient; but the kind treatment which I find wherever I go makes me leave with some heaviness of heart an island which I am not very likely to see again.” Among other treasures in the same room is Rorie More’s horn, “a large cow’s horn, with the mouth of it ornamented with silver curiously carved. It holds rather more than a bottle and a half. Every laird of Macleod, it is said, must, as a proof of his manhood, drink it off full of claret without laying it down.” It is curious that Boswell makes no mention of the ancient cup described by Scott in a note to the second canto of The Lord of the Isles, or of the fairy flag. “Here,” writes Pennant, “is preserved the Braolauch shi, or fairy-flag of the family, bestowed on it by the queen of the fairies. She blessed it with powers of the first importance, which were to be exerted on only three occasions; on the last, after the end was obtained, an invisible being is to carry off standard and standard-bearer, never more to be seen. The flag has been produced thrice. The first time in an engagement against the Clan-Ronald, to whose sight the Macleods were multiplied ten-fold; the second preserved the heir, being then produced to save the longings of the lady; and the third time to save my own; but it was so tattered, that Titania did not seem to think it worth sending for. This was a superstition derived from the Norwegian ancestry of the house.”[652] Sir Walter describes it as “a pennon of silk, with something like round red rowan-berries wrought upon it.”[653] RORIE MORE’S CLAYMORE. In the gallery I saw Rorie More’s claymore, “of a prodigious size,” as Boswell called it. He wrote this some years before he heard from old Mr. Edwards that Johnson, when an undergraduate of Oxford, “would not let them say prodigious at college, for even then he was delicate in language.” If it is not prodigious, nevertheless it is a real claymore or great sword, for that is what the Gaelic word means. Unfortunately the point is broken off. The sight of it did not console me for my disappointment at finding that Rorie More’s bed is no longer in existence, with the inscription above it, “Sir Roderick M’Leod of Dunvegan, Knight. God send good rest.” I would rather have seen it than a dozen swords, whether great or small.
ARMOUR.
THE FAIRY BEDROOM.
Johnson slept in the Fairy Bedroom in the Fairy Tower. The legend runs that this part of the castle was built 450 years ago by that very uncommon being, a fairy grandmother. Godmothers among the fairies have often been heard of, but grandmothers, we believe, never before or since. Had Puck peeped in and seen Johnson wearing his wig turned inside out and the wrong end in front as a substitute for a night-cap,[654] he might well have exclaimed that his mistress kept a monster, not only near but in “her close and consecrated bower.” From this room a winding stone staircase led up to the battlements, but without mounting so high Johnson commanded a fine view. From his window he could see, far away across the lochs, Macleod’s Tables, two lofty hills with round flat tops, which on all sides form a striking landmark. Much nearer was the Gallows Hill, where in the bad old times many a poor wretch, dragged from his dark and dismal dungeon, caught his last sight of loch and mountain and heath, doomed to death by the laird. Only thirty-three years before our travellers’ visit a man was hanged there by the grandfather of their host. He was a Macdonald who had murdered his father, and escaped into Macleod’s country. But the old tribal feuds were long since over, and he found no safety there. At Macdonald’s request he was at once seized and hanged.[655]