Page:The Lady of the Lake - Scott (1810).djvu/372

 nally only implied its being the haunt of a ferocious banditti. But tradition has ascribed to the Urisk, who gives name to the cavern, a figure between a goat and a man; in short, however much the classical reader may be startled, precisely that of the Grecian Satyr. The Urisk seems not to have inherited, with the form, the petulance of the sylvan deity of the classics: his occupations, on the contrary, resembled those of Milton's lubbar fiend, or of the Scottish Brownie, though he differed from both in name and appearance. "The Urisks," says Dr Graham, "were a sort of lubberly supernaturals, who, like the Brownies, could be gained over by kind attention, to perform the drudgery of the farm, and it was believed that many of the families in the Highlands had one of the order attached to it. They were supposed to be dispersed over the Highlands, each in his own wild recess, but the solemn stated meetings of the order were regularly held in this cave of Benvenew. This current superstition, no doubt, alludes to some circumstance in the ancient history of this country."—Scenery on the Southern Confines of Perthshire. 1806. p. 19.

It must be owned that the Coir, or den, does not, in itspresent state, meet our ideas of a subterranean grotto or cave, being only a small and narrow cavity, among huge fragments of rocks, rudely piled together. But such a scene is liable to convulsions of nature, which a lowlander cannot estimate, and which may have choaked up what was originally a cavern. At least the name and tradition authorize the author of a fictitious talc, to assert its having been such at the remote period in which his scene is laid.