A Highland Chapbook A Highland Chapbook, by Isabel Cameron (Aeneas
Mackay, 3s. 6d.), is a collection of entertaining odds and ends. So long as the author gossips about curiosities of speech in both Highland and Lowland speech, and scraps of folklore that• show the persistence of ancient magic in Scottish rural customs, she is mildly amusing though not very novel. Most people in Scotland, at least, know what a " ceilidh " is. Her notes on witches and warlocks, shape-shifting, and the Brotherhood of the Horseman's Word, are of more value, or would be if- she had the scholar's mind. But when, after- recording the cruelties of the " harden goun " and the " many, stool," and the other tyrannies with which the Reformers fought against the inveterate paganism of the countryside, and describing their vicious torture of witchcraft, she observes com- placently that " Right up to the time of the Reformation. the Highlands were held in the grasp of ignorance and super- stition," we can but gasp at an attitude we considered extinct. The Gael can endure nothing except in its extreme. In some districts he actually wrings a dark poetry from the Calvinism that extirpated his elaborate traditional culture of song, dance, and story. In the islands and inland regions where Catholicism continued to mingle the legends of Celtic saints with the stories of Celtic heroes, you may still hear an old woman tell an ancient story wherein, as by accident, you get a sudden glimpse of the wizard Michael Scott, or sudden voices lift into an old lament in a strange scale or see the young men and maidens dancing through the eightsome intricacies of the reel, and know that the far- gazing eyes are dreamier because they are aware both of
Deirdre and Saint Bride.. -- - - - -
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