Organizational Communication

Balancing Creativity and Constraint 7th

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Organizational Communication Balancing Creativity and Constraint 7th Edition Eisenberg Test

1. According to Mead, the self is constructed of which of the following two parts?
A) The “me” and the “you”
B) The “inner self” and the “outer self”
C) The “I” and the “me”
D) The “us” and the “them”

2. Communication that respects the validity of each person's experience and perceptions is
called
A) symbolic interaction.
B) discussion.
C) validation theory.
D) dialogue as empathic conversation.

3. Which of the following is NOT one of the three main factors that contributes to
information overload?
A) Tonality of the sender's voice
B) Complexity of information
C) Amount of information to be processed
D) Rate at which the information is presented

4. Which of the following approaches to understanding organizational communication

emphasizes the use of communication to accomplish multiple goals and objectives?
A) Transactional process
B) Strategic control
C) Balancing creativity and constraint
D) Information transfer

5. The approach to organizational communication that highlights the importance of

feedback is
A) strategic control.
B) information transfer.
C) balancing creativity and constraint.
D) transactional process.

6. The definition of dialogue that allows all participants the ability to voice their opinions
and perspectives is called
A) real meeting.
B) empathic conversation.
C) situated individualism.
D) equitable transaction.

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 7. Which of the following concepts best illustrates communication that has both purpose
and strategy?
A) Equitable transaction
B) Emphatic communication
C) Mindful communication
D) Empathic conversation

8. Giddens's theory of structuration influenced which of the following communication

theories?
A) Transactional process
B) Balancing creativity and constraint
C) Strategic control
D) Dialogic

9. Although dated, which of the following models of communication is still useful to

certain organizational situations, such as the giving and receiving of technical
instructions?
A) Information transfer
B) Strategic control
C) Transactional process
D) Balancing creativity and constraint

10. According to William Wentworth, the balance of creativity and constraint in social life
is achieved through
A) tension.
B) logic.
C) bureaucracy.
D) communication.

11. The concept of distortion refers to the effects of noise on the receiver's ability to process
a message. According to the information-transfer approach, noise can be all of the
following types EXCEPT
A) semantic.
B) physical.
C) psychological.
D) contextual.

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12. Which of the following approaches to communication can be most useful in
understanding the role that leaders play in organizations?
A) Transactional process
B) Strategic control
C) Balancing creativity and constraint
D) None of the above

13. Which of the following approaches to communication recognizes that clarity is not
always the main goal in interaction?
A) Balancing creativity and constraint
B) Transactional process
C) Strategic control
D) Information transfer

14. Which of the following approaches to communication often comes at the cost of
building strong communities?
A) Transactional process
B) Information transfer
C) Strategic control
D) Balancing creativity and constraint

15. Since the 1960s, which of the following has been the primary focus of social theorists?
A) The relationship between individuals and society
B) The relationship between organizations and employees
C) The ways that individuals apply scientific facts
D) The instigation of social change

16. Which of the following concepts is characterized by the irony that individuals rarely get
to see the reality they set out to create?
A) Strategic ambiguity
B) Duality of structure
C) Structure
D) Distortion

17. When individuals communicate without purpose or conscious thought, they are said to
be engaging in which of the following kinds of communication?
A) Strategically ambiguous communication
B) Communication without consequence
C) Distorted communication
D) Mindless communication

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perpendicular wall in resisting the waves; and he set himself to discover
that particular angle which, without being inconveniently low, resists
them best. Every new bulwark was a new experiment made on principles
which he had discovered in the long nights of winter, when, hanging
over the fire, he converted the hearth-stone into a tablet, and, with a
pencil of charcoal, scribbled it over with diagrams. But he could never
get the sea to join issue with him by changing in the line of his angles;
for, however deep he sunk his foundations, his insidious enemy
contrived to get under them by washing away the beach; and then the
whole wall tumbled into the cavity. Now, however, he had discovered a
remedy. First he laid a row of large flat stones on their edges in the line
of the foundation and paved the whole of the beach below until it
presented the appearance of a sloping street—taking care that his
pavement, by running in a steeper angle than the shore, should, at its
lower edge, lose itself in the sand. Then, from the flat stones which
formed the upper boundary of the pavement, he built a ponderous wall,
which, ascending in the proper angle, rose to the level of the garden; and
a neat firm parapet surmounted the whole.—Winter came, and the storms
came; but though the waves broke against the bulwark with as little
remorse as against the Sutors, not a stone moved out of its place. Donald
had at length fairly triumphed over the sea.
The progress of character is fully as interesting a study as the
progress of art; and both are curiously exemplified in the history of
Donald Miller. Now that he had conquered his enemy, and might realize
his long-cherished dream of unbroken leisure, he found that constant
employment had, through the force of habit, become essential to his
comfort. His garden was the very paragon of gardens; and a single
glance was sufficient to distinguish his furrow of potatoes from every
other furrow in the field; but, now that his main occupation was gone,
much time hung on his hands, notwithstanding his attentions to both.
First, he set himself to build a wall quite round his property; and a very
neat one he did build; but unfortunately, when once erected, there was
nothing to knock it down again. Then he whitewashed his house, and
built a new sty for his pig, the walls of which he also whitewashed. Then
he enclosed two little patches on the side of the stream, to serve as
bleaching-greens. Then he covered the upper part of his bulwark with a
layer of soil, and sowed it with grass. Then he repaired a well, the
common property of the town. Then he constructed a path for foot-
passengers on the side of a road, which, passing his garden on the south,
leads to Cromarty House. His labours for the good of the public were
wretchedly recompensed, by, at least, his more immediate neighbours.
They would dip their dirty pails into the well which he had repaired, and
tell him, when he hinted at the propriety of washing them, that they were
no dirtier than they used to be. Their pigs would break into his
bleaching-greens, and furrow up the sward with their snouts: and when
he threatened to pound them, he would be told “how unthriving a thing it
was to keep the puir brutes aye in the fauld,” and how impossible a thing
“to watch them ilka time they gae’d out.” Herd-boys would gallop their
horses and drive their cattle along the path which he had formed for foot-
passengers exclusively: and when he stormed at the little fellows, they
would canter past, and shout out, from what they deemed a safe distance,
that their “horses and kye had as good a right to the road as himsel’.”
Worse than all the rest, when he had finished whitening the walls of his
pigsty, and gone in for a few minutes to the house, a mischievous urchin,
who had watched his opportunity, sallied across the bridge, and, seizing
on the brush, whitewashed the roof also. Independent of the insult,
nothing could be in worse taste; and yet, when the poor man preferred
his complaint to the father of the urchin, the boor only deigned to mutter
in reply, that “folk would hae nae peace till three Lammas tides, joined
intil ane, would come and roll up the Clach Malacha” (it weighs about
twenty tons) “frae its place i’the sea till flood watermark.” The fellow,
rude as he was, had sagacity enough to infer that a tide potent enough to
roll up the Clach Malacha, would demolish the bulwark, and concentrate
the energies of Donald for at least another season.
But Donald found employment, and the neighbours were left
undisturbed to live the life of their fathers without the intervention of the
three Lammas tides. Some of the gentlemen farmers of the parish who
reared fields of potatoes, which they sold out to the inhabitants in square
portions of a hundred yards, besought Donald to superintend the
measurement and the sale. The office was one of no emolument
whatever, but he accepted it with thankfulness; and though, when he had
potatoes of his own to dispose of, he never failed to lower the market for
the benefit of the poor, every one now, except the farmers, pronounced
him rigid and narrow to a fault. On a dissolution of Parliament, Cromarty
became the scene of an election, and the honourable member-apparent
deeming it proper, as the thing had become customary, to whitewash the
dingier houses of the town, and cover its dirtier lanes with gravel,
Donald was requested to direct and superintend the improvements.
Proudly did he comply; and never before did the same sum of election-
money whiten so many houses, and gravel so many lanes. Employment
flowed in upon him from every quarter. If any of his acquaintance had a
house to build, Donald was appointed inspector. If they had to be
enfeoffed in their properties Donald acted as bailie, and tendered the
earth and stone with the gravity of a judge. He surveyed fields, suggested
improvements, and grew old without either feeling or regretting it.
Towards the close of his last, and almost only illness, he called for one of
his friends, a carpenter, and gave orders for his coffin; he named the
seamstress who was to be employed in making his shroud; he prescribed
the manner in which his lykewake should be kept, and both the order of
his funeral and the streets through which it was to pass. He was
particular in his injunctions to the sexton, that the bones of his father and
mother should be placed directly above his coffin; and professing
himself to be alike happy that he had lived, and that he was going to die,
he turned him to the wall, and ceased to breathe a few hours after. With
all his rage for improvement, he was a good old man of the good old
school. Often has he stroked my head, and spoken to me of my father, a
friend and namesake, though not a relative; and when, at an after period,
he had learned that I set a value on whatever was antique and curious, he
presented me with the fragment of a large black-letter Bible which had
once belonged to the Urquharts of Cromarty.
 CHAPTER IV.
“All hail, Macbeth! thou shalt be king hereafter.”
—S .
It is, perhaps, not quite unworthy of remark, that
OUR EARLIER not only is Cromarty the sole district of the kingdom
DATA.
whose annals ascend into the obscure ages of fable,
but that the first passage of even its real history derives its chief interest,
not from its importance as a fact, but from what may be termed its
chance union with a sublime fiction of poetry. Few, I daresay, have so
much as dreamed of connecting either its name or scenery with the
genius of Shakspere, and yet they are linked to one of the most powerful
of his achievements as a poet, by the bonds of a natural association. The
very first incident of its true history would have constituted, had the
details been minutely preserved, the early biography of the celebrated
Macbeth; who, according to our black-letter historians, makes his first
appearance in public life as Thane of Cromarty, and Maormor, or great
man of Ross. But I am aware I do not derive from the circumstance any
right to become his biographer. For though his character was probably
formed at a time when he may be regarded as the legitimate property of
the provincial annalist, no sooner is it exhibited in action than he is
consigned over to the chroniclers of the kingdom.
For the earlier facts of our history the evidence is rather
circumstantial than direct. We see it stamped on the face of the country,
or inscribed on our older obelisks, or sometimes disinterred from out of
hillocks of sand, or accumulations of moss; but very rarely do we find it
deposited in our archives. Let us examine it, however, wherever it
presents itself, and strive, should it seem at all intelligible, to determine
regarding its purport and amount. Not more than sixty years ago a bank
of blown sand, directly under the northern Sutor, which had been heaped
over the soil ages before, was laid open by the winds of a stormy winter,
when it was discovered that the nucleus on which the hillock had
originally formed, was composed of the bones of various animals of the
chase, and the horns of deer. It is not much more than twelve years since
there were dug up in the same sandy tract two earthen urns, the one filled
with ashes and fragments of half-burned bones, the other with bits of a
black bituminous-looking stone, somewhat resembling jet, which had
been fashioned into beads, and little flat parallelograms, perforated
edgewise, with four holes apiece. Nothing could be ruder than the
workmanship: the urns were clumsily modelled by the hand, unassisted
by a lathe; the ornaments, rough and unpolished, and still bearing the
marks of the tool, resembled nothing of modern production, except,
perhaps, the toys which herd-boys sometimes amuse their leisure in
forming with the knife. We find remains such as these fraught with a
more faithful evidence regarding the early state of our country than the
black-letter pages of our chroniclers. They testify of a period when the
chase formed, perhaps, the sole employment of the few scattered
inhabitants; and of the practice, so prevalent among savages, of burying
with their dead friends whatever they most loved when alive. It may be
further remarked as a curious fact, and one from which we may infer that
trinkets wrought in so uncouth a style could have belonged to only the
first stage of society, that man’s inventive powers receive their earliest
impulses rather from his admiration of the beautiful, than his sense of the
useful. He displays a taste in ornament, and has learned to dye his skin,
and to tatoo it with rude figures of the sun and moon, before he has
become ingenious enough to discover that he stands in need of a
covering.
There is a tradition of this part of the country
THE FIONS OF which seems not a great deal more modern than the
KNOCK-FERRIL.
urns or their ornaments, and which bears the character
of the savage nearly as distinctly impressed on it. On the summit of
Knock-Ferril, a steep hill which rises a few miles to the west of
Dingwall, there are the remains of one of those vitrified forts which so
puzzle and interest the antiquary; and which was originally constructed,
says tradition, by a gigantic tribe of Fions, for the protection of their
wives and children, when they themselves were engaged in hunting. It
chanced in one of their excursions that a mean-spirited little fellow of the
party, not much more than fifteen feet in height, was so distanced by his
more active brethren, that, leaving them to follow out the chase, he
returned home, and throwing himself down, much fatigued, on the side
of the eminence, fell fast asleep. Garry, for so the unlucky hunter was
called, was no favourite with the women of the tribe;—he was spiritless
and diminutive, and ill-tempered; and as they could make little else of
him that they cared for, they converted him into the butt of many a
teasing little joke, and the sport of many a capricious humour. On seeing
that he had fallen asleep, they stole out to where he lay, and after
fastening his long hair with pegs to the grass, awakened him with their
shouts and laughter. He strove to extricate himself, but in vain; until at
length, infuriated by their gibes and the pain of his own exertions, he
wrenched up his head, leaving half his locks behind him, and, hurrying
after them, set fire to the stronghold into which they had rushed for
shelter. The flames rose till they mounted over the roof, and broke out at
every slit and opening; but Garry, unmoved by the shrieks and groans of
the sufferers within, held fast the door until all was silent; when he fled
into the remote Highlands, towards the west. The males of the tribe, who
had, meanwhile, been engaged in hunting on that part of the northern
Sutor which bears the name of the hill of Nigg, alarmed by the vast
column of smoke which they saw ascending from their dwelling, came
pressing on to the Firth of Cromarty, and leaping across on their hunting-
spears, they hurried home. But they arrived to find only a huge pile of
embers, fanned by the breeze, and amid which the very stones of the
building were sputtering and bubbling with the intense heat, like the
contents of a boiling caldron. Wild with rage and astonishment, and yet
collected enough to conclude that none but Garry could be the author of
a deed so barbarous, they tracked him into a nameless Highland glen,
which has ever since been known as Glen-Garry, and there tore him to
pieces. And as all the women of the tribe perished in the flames, there
was an end, when this forlorn and widowed generation had passed away,
to the whole race of the Fions. The next incident of our history bears no
other connexion to this story, than that it belongs to a very early age, that
of the Viking and Sea-King, and that we owe our data regarding it, not to
written records, but to an interesting class of ancient remains, and to a
doubtful and imperfect tradition.
In this age, says the tradition, the Maormor of
THE KING’S Ross was married to a daughter of the king of
SONS.
Denmark, and proved so barbarous a husband, that her
father, to whom she at length found the means of escape, fitted out a fleet
and army to avenge on him the cruelties inflicted on her. Three of her
brothers accompanied the expedition; but, on nearing the Scottish coast,
a terrible storm arose, in which almost all the vessels of the fleet either
foundered or were driven ashore, and the three princes were drowned.
The ledge of rock at which this latter disaster is said to have taken place,
still bears the name of the King’s Sons; a magnificent cave which opens
among the cliffs of the neighbouring shore is still known as the King’s
Cave; and a path that winds to the summits of the precipices beside it, as
the King’s Path. The bodies of the princes, says the tradition, were
interred, one at Shandwick, one at Hilton, and one at Nigg; and the
sculptured obelisks of these places, three very curious pieces of antiquity,
are said to be monuments erected to their memory by their father. In no
part of Scotland do stones of this class so abound as on the shores of the
Moray Firth. And they have often attracted the notice and employed the
ingenuity of the antiquary; but it still appears somewhat doubtful
whether we are to regard them as of Celtic or of Scandinavian origin. It
may be remarked, however, that though their style of sculpture
resembles, in its general features, that exhibited in the ancient crosses of
Wales, which are unquestionably British, and though they are described
in a tradition current on the southern shore of the Moray Firth, as
monuments raised by the inhabitants on the expulsion of the Danes, the
amount of evidence seems to preponderate in the opposite direction;
when we consider that they are invariably found bordering on the sea;
that their design and workmanship display a degree of taste and
mechanical ability which the Celtæ of North Britain seem never to have
possessed; that the eastern shores of the German Ocean abound in
similar monuments, which, to a complexity of ornament not more
decidedly Runic, add the Runic inscription; and that the tradition just
related—which, wild as it may appear, can hardly be deemed less
authentic than the one opposed to it, seeing that it belongs to a district
still peopled by the old inhabitants of the country, whereas the other
seems restricted to the lowlands of Moray—assigns their erection not to
the natives, but to their rapacious and unwelcome visitors, the Danes
themselves. The reader may perhaps indulge me in a few descriptive
notices of the three stones connected with the tradition; they all lie within
six miles of Cromarty, and their weathered and mossy planes, roughened
with complicated tracery and doubtful hieroglyphics, may be regarded as
pages of provincial history—as pages, however, which we must copy
rather than translate. May I not urge, besides, that men who have visited
Egypt to examine monuments not much more curious, have written
folios on their return?
The obelisk at Hilton, though perhaps the most
THE OBELISKS elegant of its class in Scotland, is less known than any
OF EASTER
ROSS. of the other two, and it has fared more hardly. For,
about two centuries ago, it was taken down by some
barbarous mason of Ross, who converted it into a tombstone, and,
erasing the neat mysterious hieroglyphics of one of the sides, engraved
on the place which they had occupied a rude shield and label, and the
following laughable inscription; no bad specimen, by the bye, of the taste
and judgment which could destroy so interesting a monument, and of
that fortuitous species of wit which lies within the reach of accident, and
of accident alone.
HE · THAT · LIVES · WEIL · DYES · WEIL · SAYS · SOLOMON ·
THE · WISE.
HEIR · LYES · ALEXANDER · DVFF · AND · HIS · THRIE · WIVES.
The side of the obelisk which the chisel has spared is surrounded by
a broad border, embossed in a style of ornament that would hardly
disgrace the frieze of an Athenian portico;—the centre is thickly
occupied by the figures of men, some on horseback, some afoot—of wild
and tame animals, musical instruments, and weapons of war and of the
chase. The stone of Shandwick is still standing,[4] and bears on the side
which corresponds to the obliterated surface of the other, the figure of a
large cross, composed of circular knobs wrought into an involved and
intricate species of fretwork, which seems formed by the twisting of
myriads of snakes. In the spaces on the sides of the shaft there are two
huge, clumsy-looking animals, the one resembling an elephant, and the
other a lion; over each of these a St. Andrew seems leaning forward from
his cross; and on the reverse of the obelisk the sculpture represents
processions, hunting-scenes, and combats. These, however, are but
meagre notices; the obelisk at Nigg I shall describe more minutely as an
average specimen of the class to which it belongs.
It stands in the parish burying-ground, beside the eastern gable of the
church; and bears on one of its sides, like the stone at Shandwick, a large
cross, which, it may be remarked, rather resembles that of the Greek than
of the Romish Church, and on the other a richly embossed frame,
enclosing, like the border of the obelisk at Hilton, the figures of a
crowded assemblage of men and animals. Beneath the arms of the cross
the surface is divided into four oblong compartments, and there are three
above—one on each side, which form complete squares, and one a-top,
which, like the pediment of a portico, is of a triangular shape. In the
lower angle of this upper compartment, two priest-like figures, attired in
long garments, and furnished each with a book, incline forwards in the
attitude of prayer; and in the centre between them there is a circular cake
or wafer, which a dove, descending from above, holds in its bill. Two
dogs seem starting towards the wafer from either side; and directly under
it there is a figure so much weathered, that it may be deemed to
represent, as fancy may determine, either a little circular table, or the
sacramental cup. A pictorial record cannot be other than a doubtful one;
and it is difficult to decide whether the hieroglyphic of this department
denotes the ghostly influence of the priest in delivering the soul from the
evils of an intermediate state; for, at a slight expense of conjectural
analogy, we may premise that the mysterious dove descends in answer to
the prayer of the two kneeling figures, to deliver the little emblematical
cake from the “power of the dog;”—or, whether it may not represent a
treaty of peace between rival chiefs whose previous hostility may be
symbolized by the two fierce animals below, and their pacific intentions
by the bird above, and who ratify the contract by an oath, solemnized
over the book, the cup, and the wafer. A very few such explanations
might tempt one to quote the well-known story of the Professor of signs
and the Aberdeen butcher; the weight of the evidence, however, rests
apparently with those who adopt the last. We see the locks of the
kneeling figures curling upon their shoulders in unclerical profusion,
unbroken by the tonsure; while the presence of the two books, with the
absence of any written inscription, seems characteristic of the mutual
memorial of tribes, who, though not wholly illiterate, possess no
common language save the very doubtful language of symbol. If we hold
further that the stone is of Scandinavian origin—and it seems a rather
difficult matter to arrive at a different conclusion—we can hardly
suppose that the natives should have left unmutilated the monument of a
people so little beloved had they had no part in what it records, or no
interest in its preservation.
We pass to the other compartments;—some of these and the plane of
the cross are occupied by a species of fretwork exceedingly involved and
complicated, but formed, notwithstanding, on regular mathematical
figures. There are others which contain squares of elegantly arrayed
tracery, designed in a style which we can almost identify with that of the
border illuminations of our older manuscripts, or of the ornaments,
imitative of these, which occur in works printed during the reigns of
Elizabeth and James. But what seem the more curious compartments of
the stone are embossed into rows of circular knobs, covered over, as if by
basket-work, with the intricate foldings of myriads of snakes; and which
may be either deemed to allude to the serpent and apple of the Fall—thus
placed in no inapt neighbourhood to the cross; or to symbolize (for even
the knobs may be supposed to consist wholly of serpents) that of which
the serpent has ever been held emblematic, and which we cannot regard
as less appositely introduced—a complex wisdom, or an
incomprehensible eternity.
The hieroglyphics of the opposite side are in lower relief, and though
the various fretwork of the border is executed in a style of much
elegance, the whole seems to owe less to the care of the sculptor. The
centre is occupied by what, from its size, we must deem the chief figure
of the group—that of a man attired in long garments, caressing a fawn;
and directly fronting him, there are the figures of a lamb and a harp. The
whole is, perhaps, emblematical of peace, and may be supposed to tell
the same story with the upper hieroglyphic of the reverse. In the space
beneath there is the figure of a man furnished with cymbals, which he
seems clashing with much glee, and that of a horse and its rider,
surrounded by animals of the chase; while in the upper part of the stone
there are dogs, deer, an armed huntsman, and, surmounting the whole, an
eagle or raven. It may not be deemed unworthy of remark, that the style
of the more complex ornaments of this stone very much resembles that
which obtains in the sculptures and tatooings of the New-Zealander. We
see exhibited in both the same intricate regularity of pattern, and almost
similar combinations of the same waving lines. And we are led to infer,
that though the rude Scandinavian of perhaps nine centuries ago had
travelled a long stage in advance of the New-Zealander of our own
times, he had yet his ideas of the beautiful cast in nearly the same mould.
Is it not a curious fact, that man, in his advances towards the just and
graceful in design, proceeds not from the simple to the complex, but
from the complex to the simple?
The slope of the northern Sutor which fronts the
DUNSKAITH. town of Cromarty, terminates about a hundred and
fifty feet above the level of the shore in a precipitous
declivity surmounted by a little green knoll, which for the last six
centuries has borne the name of Dunskaith (i.e. the fort of mischief). And
in its immediate vicinity there is a high-lying farm, known all over the
country as the farm of Castle-Craig. The prospect from the edge of the
eminence is one of the finest in the kingdom. We may survey the entire
Firth of Cromarty spread out before us as in a map; the town, though on
the opposite shore, seems so completely under our view that we think of
looking down into its streets; and yet the distance is sufficient to conceal
all but what is pleasing in it. The eye, in travelling over the country
beyond, ascends delighted through the various regions of corn, and
wood, and moor, and then expatiates unfatigued amid a wilderness of
blue-peaked hills. And where the land terminates towards the east, we
may see the dark abrupt cliffs of the southern Sutor flinging their
shadows half-way across the opening, and distinguish among the lofty
crags, which rise to oppose them, the jagged and serrated shelves of the
Diamond-rock, a tall beetling precipice which once bore, if we may trust
to tradition, a wondrous gem in its forehead. Often, says the legend, has
the benighted boatman gazed from amid the darkness, as he came rowing
along the shore, on its clear beacon-like flame, which, streaming from
the rock, threw a long fiery strip athwart the water; and the mariners of
other countries have inquired whether the light which they saw shining
so high among the cliffs, right over their mast, did not proceed from the
shrine of some saint, or the cell of some hermit. But like the carbuncle of
the Ward-hill of Hoy, of which the author of Waverley makes so poetical
a use, “though it gleamed ruddy as a furnace to them who viewed it from
beneath, it ever became invisible to him whose daring foot had scaled the
precipices from whence it darted its splendour.” I have been oftener than
once interrogated on the western coast of Scotland regarding the
“Diamond-rock of Cromarty;” and an old campaigner who fought under
Abercromby has told me that he has listened to the familiar story of its
diamond amid the sand wastes of Egypt. But the jewel has long since
disappeared, and we see only the rock. It used never to be seen, it is said,
by day, nor could the exact point which it occupied be ascertained; and
on a certain luckless occasion an ingenious ship-captain, determined on
marking its place, brought with him from England a few balls of chalk,
and, charging with this novel species of shot, took aim at it in the night-
time with one of his great guns. Ere he had fired, however, it vanished,
as if suddenly withdrawn by some guardian hand; and its place on the
rock has ever since remained as undistinguishable as the scaurs and cliffs
around it. And now the eye, after completing its circuit, rests on the
eminence of Dunskaith;—the site of a royal fortress erected by William
the Lion, to repress, says Lord Hailes in his Annals of Scotland, the oft-
recurring rebellions and disorders of Ross-shire. We can still trace the
moat of the citadel, and part of an outwork which rises towards the hill;
but the walls have sunk into low grassy mounds, and the line of the outer
moat has long since been effaced by the plough. The disorders of Ross-
shire seem to have outlived, by many ages, the fortress raised to suppress
them. I need hardly advert to a story so well known as that of the robber
of this province who nailed horse-shoes to the feet of the poor widow
who had threatened him with the vengeance of James I., and who, with
twelve of his followers, was brought to Edinburgh by that monarch, to be
horse-shoed in turn. Even so late as the reign of James VI. the clans of
Ross are classed among the peculiarly obnoxious, in an Act for the
punishment of theft, rief, and oppression.
Between the times of Macbeth and an age
THE comparatively recent, there occurs a wide chasm in
URQUHARTS OF
CROMARTY. the history of Cromarty. The Thane, magnified by the
atmosphere of poetry which surrounds him, towers
like a giant over the remoter brink of the gap, while, in apparent
opposition to every law of perspective, the people on its nearer edge
seem diminished into pigmies. And yet the Urquharts of Cromarty—
though Sir Thomas, in his zeal for their honour, has dealt by them as the
poets of ancient Greece did by the early history of their country—were a
race of ancient standing and of no little consideration. The editor of the
second edition of Sir Thomas’s Jewel, which was not published until the
first had been more than a hundred years out of print, states in his
advertisement that he had compared the genealogy of his author with
another genealogy of the family in possession of the Lord Lyon of
Scotland, and that from the reign of Alexander II. to that of Charles I. he
had found them perfectly to agree. The lands of the family extended
from the furthest point of the southern Sutor to the hill of Kinbeakie (i.e.
end of the living), a tract which includes the parishes of Cromarty,
Kirkmichael, and Cullicuden; and, prior to the imprisonment and exile of
Sir Thomas, he was vested with the patronage of the churches of these
parishes, and the admiralty of the eastern coast of Scotland, from
Caithness to Inverness.
The first of his ancestors, whose story receives
WALLACE. some shadow of confirmation from tradition, was a
contemporary of Wallace and the Bruce. When ejected
from his castle, he is said to have regained it from the English by a
stratagem, and to have held it out with only forty men for about seven
years. “During that time,” says Sir Thomas, “his lands were wasted and
his woods burnt; and having nothing he could properly call his own but
the moat-hill of Cromarty, which he maintained in defiance of all the
efforts of the enemy, he was agnamed Gulielmus de monte alto. At
length,” continues the genealogist, “he was relieved by Sir William
Wallace, who raised the siege after defeating the English in a little den or
hollow about two miles from the town.” Tradition, though silent
respecting the siege, is more explicit than Sir Thomas in her details of
the battle.
Somewhat more than four miles to the south of Cromarty, and about
the middle of the mountainous ridge which, stretching from the Sutors to
the village of Rosemarkie, overhangs at the one edge the shores of the
Moray Firth, and sinks on the other into a broken moor, there is a little
wooded eminence. Like the ridge which it overtops, it sweeps gradually
towards the east until it terminates in an abrupt precipice that overhangs
the sea, and slopes upon the west into a marshy hollow, known to the
elderly people of the last age and a very few of the present as Wallace-
slack—i.e., ravine. The direct line of communication with the southern
districts, to travellers who cross the Firth at the narrow strait of
Ardersier, passes within a few yards of the hollow. And when, some time
during the wars of Edward, a strong body of English troops were
marching by this route to join another strong body encamped in the
peninsula of Easter Ross, this circumstance is said to have pointed it out
to Wallace as a fit place for forming an ambuscade. From the eminence
which overtops it, the spectator can look down on a wide tract of
country, while the ravine itself is concealed by a flat tubercle of the
moor, which to the traveller approaching from the south or west, seems
the base of the eminence. The stratagem succeeded; the English,
surprised and panic-struck, were defeated with much slaughter, six
hundred being left dead in the scene of the attack; and the survivors,
closely pursued and wholly unacquainted with the country, fled towards
the north along the ridge of hill which terminates at the bay of Cromarty.
From the top of the ridge the two Sutors seem piled the one over the
other, and so shut up the opening, that the bay within assumes the
appearance of a lake; and the English deeming it such, pressed onward,
in the hope that a continued tract of land stretched between them and
their countrymen on the opposite shore. They were only undeceived
when, on climbing the southern Sutor, where it rises behind the town,
they saw an arm of the sea more than a mile in width, and skirted by
abrupt and dizzy precipices, opening before them. The spot is still
pointed out where they made their final stand; and a few shapeless
hillocks, that may still be seen among the trees, are said to have been
raised above the bodies of those who fell; while the fugitives, for they
were soon beaten from this position, were either driven over the
neighbouring precipices, or perished amid the waves of the Firth.
Wallace, on another occasion, is said to have fled for refuge to a cave of
the Sutors; and his metrical historian, Blind Harry, after narrating his
exploits at St. Johnstone’s, Dunotter, and Aberdeen, describes him as

“Raiding throw the North-land into playne,

Till at Crummade fell Inglismen he’d slayne.”

Hamilton, in his modernized edition of the “Achievements,” renders

the Crummade here Cromarty; and as shown by an ancient custom-house
seal or cocket (supposed to belong to the reign of Robert II.), now in the
Inverness Museum, the place was certainly designated of old by a word
of resembling sound—Chrombhte.
Of all the humbler poets of Scotland—and where is there a country
with more?—there is hardly one who has not sung in praise of Wallace.
His exploit, as recorded in the Jewel, connected with the tradition of the
cave, has been narrated by the muse of a provincial poet, who published
a volume of poems at Inverness about five years ago; and, in the lack of
less questionable materials for this part of my history, I avail myself of
his poem.

Thus ran the tale:—proud England’s host

Lay ’trench’d on Croma’s winding coast.
And rose the Urquhart’s towers beneath
Fierce shouts of wars, deep groans of death.
The Wallace heard;—from Moray’s shore
One little bark his warriors bore.
But died the breeze, and rose the day,
Ere gained that bark the destined bay;
When, lo! these rocks a quay supplied,
These yawning caves meet shades to hide.
Secure, where rank the nightshade grew,
And patter’d thick th’ unwholesome dew,
Patient of cold and gloom they lay,
Till eve’s last light had died away.
It died away;—in Croma’s hall
No flame glanced on the trophied wall,
Nor sound of mirth nor revel free
Was heard where joy had wont to be.
With day had ceased the siege’s din,
But still gaunt famine raged within.
 In chamber lone, on weary bed,
That castle’s wounded lord was laid;
His woe-worn lady watch’d beside.
To pain devote, and grief, and gloom,
No taper cheer’d the darksome room;
Yet to the wounded chieftain’s sight
Strange shapes were there, and sheets of light
And oft he spoke, in jargon vain,
Of ruthless deed and tyrant reign,
For maddening fever fired his brain.
O hark! the warder’s rousing call—
“Rise, warriors, rise, and man the wall!”
Starts up the chief, but rack’d with pain,
And weak, he backward sinks again:
“O Heaven, they come!” the lady cries,
“The Southrons come, and Urquhart dies!”
Nay, ’tis not fever mocks his sight;
His broider’d couch is red with light;
In light his lady stands confest,
Her hand clasp’d on her heaving breast.
And hark; wild shouts assail the ear,
Loud and more loud, near and more near
They rise!—hark, frequent rings the blade,
On crested helm relentless laid;
Yells, groans, sharp sounds of smitten mail,
And war-cries load the midnight gale;
O hark! like Heaven’s own thunder high,
Swells o’er the rest one ceaseless cry,
Racking the dull cold ear of night,
“The Wallace wight!—the Wallace wight!”
Yes, gleams the sword of Wallace there,
Unused his country’s foes to spare;
Roars the red camp like funeral pyre,
One wild, wide, wasteful sea of fire;
Glow red the low-brow’d clouds of night,
The wooded hill is bathed in light,
Gleams wave, and field, and turret height.
Death’s vassals dog the spoiler’s horde,
Burns in their front th’ unsparing sword;
The fired camp casts its volumes o’er;
 Behind spreads wide a skiffless shore;
Fire, flood, and sword, conspire to slay.
How sad shall rest morn’s early ray
On blacken’d strand, and crimson’d main,
On floods of gore, and hills of slain;
But bright its cheering beams shall fall
Where mirth whoops in the Urquharts’ Hall.
* * *

There occurs in our narrative another wide chasm, which extends

from the times of Wallace to the reign of James IV. Like the earlier gap,
however, it might be filled up by a recital of events, which, though they
belong properly to the history of the neighbouring districts, must have
affected in no slight degree the interests and passions of the people of
Cromarty. Among these we may reckon the descents on Ross by the
Lords of the Isles, which terminated in the battles of Harlaw and
Driemderfat, and that contest between the Macintoshes and Munros,
which took place in the same century at the village of Clachnaherry. I
might avail myself, too, on a similar principle, of the pilgrimage of
James IV. to the neighbouring chapel of St. Dothus, near Tain. But as all
these events have, like the story of Macbeth, been appropriated by the
historians of the kingdom, they are already familiar to the general reader.
In an after age, Cromarty, like Tain, was honoured by a visit from
royalty. I find it stated by Calderwood, that in the year 1589, on the
discovery of Huntly’s conspiracy, and the discomfiture of his followers
at the Bridge of Dee, James VI. rode to Aberdeen, ostensibly with the
intention of holding justice-courts on the delinquents; but that, deputing
the business of trial to certain judges whom he instructed to act with a
lenity which the historian condemns, he set out on a hunting expedition
to Cromarty, from which he returned after an absence of about twenty
days.
We find not a great deal less of the savage in the
THE FORAY OF records of these later times than in those of the darker
THE CLANS.
periods which went before. Life and property seem to
have been hardly more secure, especially in those hapless districts which,
bordering on the Highlands, may be regarded as constituting the battle-
fields on which needy barbarism, and the imperfectly-formed vanguard
of a slowly advancing civilisation, contended for the mastery. Early in
the reign of James IV. the lands of Cromarty were wasted by a
combination of the neighbouring clans, headed by Hucheon Rose of
Kilravock, Macintosh of Macintosh, and Fraser of Lovat; and so
complete was the spoliation, that the entire property of the inhabitants, to
their very household furniture, was carried away. Restitution was
afterwards enforced by the Lords of Council. We find it decreed in the
Acta Dominorum Concilii for 1492, that Hucheon Rose of Kilravock do
restore, content, and pay to Mr. Alexander Urquhart, sheriff of Cromarty,
and his tenants, the various items carried off by him and his accomplices;
viz., six hundred cows, one hundred horses, one thousand sheep, four
hundred goats, two hundred swine, and four hundred bolls of victual.
Kilravock is said to have conciliated the justice-general on this occasion
by resigning into his hands his grand-daughter, the heiress of Calder,
then a child; and her lands the wily magistrate secured to his family by
marrying her to one of his sons.
There lived in the succeeding reign a proprietor of
PATERHEMON. Cromarty, who, from the number of his children,
received, says the genealogist, the title, or agname, of
Paterhemon. He had twenty-five sons who arrived at manhood, and
eleven daughters who ripened into women, and were married. Seven of
the sons lost their lives at the battle of Pinkie; and there were some of the
survivors who, settling in England, became the founders of families
which, in the days of the Commonwealth, were possessed of
considerable property and influence in Devonshire and Cumberland.
Tradition tells the story of Paterhemon somewhat differently. His
children, whom it diminishes to twenty, are described as robust and very
handsome men; and he is said to have lived in the reign of Mary. On the
visit of that princess to Inverness, and when, according to Buchanan, the
Frasers and Munros, two of the most warlike clans of the country, were
raised by their respective chieftains to defend her against the designs of
Huntly, the Urquhart is said also to have marched to her assistance with a
strong body of his vassals, and accompanied by all his sons, mounted on
white horses. At the moment of his arrival Mary was engaged in
reviewing the clans, and surrounded by the chiefs and her officers. The
venerable chieftain rode up to her, and, dismounting with all the ease of a
galliard of five-and-twenty, presented to her, as his best gift, his little
troup of children. There is yet a third edition of the story:—About the
year 1652, one Richard Franck, a native of the sister kingdom, and as
devoted an angler as Isaac Walton himself, made the tour of Scotland,
and then published a book descriptive of what he had seen. His notice of
Cromarty is mostly summed up in a curious little anecdote of the
patriarch, which he probably derived from some tradition current at the
time of his visit. Sir Thomas he describes as his eldest son; and the
number of his children who arrived at maturity he has increased to forty.
“He had thirty sons and ten daughters,” says the tourist, “standing at
once before him, and not one natural child amongst them.” Having
attained the extreme verge of human life, he began to consider himself as
already dead; and in the exercise of an imagination, which the
genealogist seems to have inherited with his lands, he derived comfort
from the daily repetition of a kind of ceremony, ingenious enough to
challenge comparison with any rite of the Romish Church. For every
evening about sunset, being brought out in his couch to the base of a
tower of the castle, he was raised by pulleys, slowly and gently, to the
battlements; and the ascent he deemed emblematical of the resurrection.
Or to employ the graphic language of the tourist—“The declining age of
this venerable laird of Urquhart, for he had now reached the utmost limit
of life, invited him to contemplate mortality, and to cruciate himself by
fancying his cradle his sepulchre; therein, therefore, was he lodged night
after night, and hauled up by pulleys to the roof of his house,
approaching, as near as the summits of its higher pinnacles would let
him, to the beautiful battlements and suburbs of heaven.”
I find I must devote one other chapter to the consideration of the
interesting remains which form almost the sole materials of this earlier
portion of my history. But the class of these to which I am now about to
turn, are to be found, not on the face of the country, but locked up in the
minds of the inhabitants. And they are falling much more rapidly into
decay—mouldering away in their hidden recesses, like bodies of the
dead; while others, which more resemble the green mound and the
monumental tablet, bid fair to abide the inquiry of coming generations.
Those vestiges of ancient superstition, which are to be traced in the
customs and manners of the common people, share in a polite age a very
different fate from those impressions of it, if I may so express myself,
which we find stamped upon matter. For when the just and liberal
opinions which originate with philosophers and men of genius are
diffused over a whole people, a modification of the same good sense
which leads the scholar to treasure up old beliefs and usages, serves to
emancipate the peasant from their influence or observance.
 CHAPTER V.

“She darklins grapit for the bauks,

And in the blue clue throws then.”

—B .

REMAINS OF
Violence may anticipate by many centuries the
THE OLD natural progress of decay. There are some of our
MYTHOLOGY. Scottish cathedrals less entire than some of our old
Picts’ houses, though the latter have been deserted for
more than a thousand years, and the former for not more than three
hundred. And the remark is not less applicable to the beliefs and usages
of other ages, than to their more material remains. It is a curious fact,
that we meet among the Protestants of Scotland with more marked traces
of the Paganism of their earlier, than of the Popery of their later
ancestors. For while Christianity seems to have been introduced into the
country by slow degrees, and to have travelled over it by almost
imperceptible stages—leaving the less obnoxious practices of the
mythology which it supplanted to the natural course of decay—it is
matter of history that the doctrines of the Reformation overspread it in a
single age, and that the observances of the old system were effaced, not
by a gradual current of popular opinion, but by the hasty surges of
popular resentment. The saint-days of the priest have in consequence
been long since forgotten—the festivals of the Druid still survive.
There is little risk of our mistaking these latter; the rites of
Hallowe’en, and the festivities of Beltane, possess well-authenticated
genealogies. There are other usages, however, which, though they bear
no less strongly the impress of Paganism, show a more uncertain lineage.
And regarding these, we find it difficult to determine whether they have
come down to us from the days of the old mythology, or have been
produced in a later period by those sentiments of the human mind to
which every false religion owes its origin. The subject, though a curious,
is no very tangible one. But should I attempt throwing together a few
simple thoughts respecting it, in that wandering desultory style which
seems best to consort with its irregularity of outline, I trust I may
calculate on the forbearance of the reader. I shall strive to be not very
tedious, and to choose a not very beaten path.
Man was made for the world, and the world for man. Hence we find
that every faculty of the human mind has in the things which lie without
some definite object, or particular class of circumstances, on which to
operate. There is a thorough adaptation of that which acts to that which is
acted upon—of the moving power to the machine; and woe be to him
who deranges this admirable order, in the hope of rendering it more
complete. It is prettily fabled by the Brahmins, that souls are moulded by
pairs, and then sent to the earth to be linked together in wedlock, and that
matches are unhappy merely in consequence of the parties disuniting by
the way, and choosing for themselves other consorts. One might find
more in this fable than any Brahmin ever found in it yet. There is a
prospective connexion of a similar kind formed between the powers of
the mind and the objects on which these are to be employed, and should
they be subsequently united to objects other than the legitimate, a
wretchedness quite as real as that which arises out of an ill-mated
marriage is the infallible result.
Were I asked to illustrate my meaning by an example or two, I do not
know where I could find instances better suited to my purpose than in the
imaginative extravagancies of some of our wilder sectaries. There is no
principle which so deals in unhappy marriages, and as unhappy divorces,
as the fanatical; or that so ceaselessly employs itself in separating what
Heaven has joined, and in joining what Heaven has separated. Man, I
have said, was made for the world he lives in;—I should have added, that
he was intended also for another world. Fanaticism makes a somewhat
similar omission, only it is the other way. It forgets that he is as certainly
a denizen of the present as an heir of the future; that the same Being who
has imparted to him the noble sentiment which leads him to anticipate an
hereafter, has also bestowed upon him a thousand lesser faculties which
must be employed now; and that, if he prove untrue to even the minor
end of his existence, and slight his proper though subordinate
employments, the powers which he thus separates from their legitimate
objects must, from the very activity of their nature, run riot in the
cloisters in which they are shut up, and cast reproach by their excesses
on the cause to which they are so unwisely dedicated. For it is one thing
to condemn these to a life of celibacy, and quite another to keep them
chaste. We may shut them up, like a sisterhood of nuns, from the objects
to which they ought to have been united, but they will infallibly discover