silence of Shakspeare, and the unwillingness of topographical critics to break the spell of the accepted localities. Though legends spring up like rumours, with a breath, the _names_ of places which they have received from historical incidents are generally of long standing, and, indeed, a large proportion of the lowlands of Scotland is full of places which to this day bear Celtic names, given them by tribes who cannot have inhabited the districts for a thousand years at least. The old chroniclers, without exception, lay Macbeth's death in Lunfanan; the people of the spot, who never read these chronicles, and never, perhaps, heard of Macbeth, or if they did, heard the popular account of his death in Dunsinane, call a certain monumental tumulus Cairn Beth--this, we think, is very nearly conclusive.[O] And yet, sitting on that Cairn, with the fresh breeze blowing round one, and the blue heavens above, and the blooming heather-bells around, or reclining on the smooth green turf of the Peel Bog, on a summer day, with the sun shining hot upon the hills, and the babbling brook singing its "quiet tune," it is not easy to associate the spot with that history of blood and horror, or to feel that its features are ancient, or that they ever were connected with warfare. In the gloomy, galleries of Glammis or Cawdor, with their grim old portraits, their armour, their secret staircases, their mysterious hidden chambers, and iron hooks in the wall--the idea of the haggard murderer, and all the associations of his deeds and his remorse creep more vividly on that imaginative conscience, which more or less makes cowards of us all in such places. Yet the history of the arts tells us that not one stone of these edifices, ancient though they be, can have stood upon another till the history of Macbeth was as old as that of Queen Mary is now. Why, then, should they retain their hold on us? They are contemporary with Shakspeare's Macbeth, though not with the historians', and are the style of edifice in which he cast his tragedy. It must be a feudal stronghold, heavily arched, buttressed, fortified, and gloomy,--where the lady in a vaulted half-lighted chamber may say: "The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements." [M] New Statistical Account, Aberdeenshire, 1089. [N] Of the many spots traditionally connected with Ossian, we have no doubt that the association is no older than the days of James Macpherson. Yet, to show how fearlessly we adopt our theory, we shall here state a circumstance appearing to establish a genuine Ossianic tradition of no common interest, which we wonder never to have seen introduced in the controversy. The wild glen running from the neighbourhood of Crieff towards Loch Tay, called Glen Almond or Glen Almain, is the traditional resting-place of the bones of Ossian. The reader will remember it from Wordsworth's lines:--