Literary Messenger.” She is at present engaged upon a prose volume, to be entitled “The Heroines of History.”
The following extract is from an Irish legend, the events of which are supposed to have occurred during the times of the Druidical superstition.
A LEGEND OF IRELAND.
The business of state was over for the day. Judgments had been awarded, the different records of the kingdom examined, and whatever material they afforded for national history had been carefully entered in the great national record called the Psalter of Tara; when a herald advanced and proclaimed to the assembly that a combat would take place on the morrow, between Conrigh, a celebrated chieftain, and Maon, a knight of the Red Branch. These warriors had each demanded the hand of the lady Brehilda, the king’s ward, as the meed of their prowess in battle, and the lady was to be the reward of the successful competitor. But Brehilda had known Maon and loved him from her childhood, far away in her own home; for he was the son of a neighbouring chieftain, and years ago he had gathered flowers for her upon the hills, and walked at her bridle rein, while her rough pony scrambled with her over the rocky passes.
But her sire was dead—no son inherited his name and glory—his estate had passed away to a distant male relative; for, by the law existing among the Irish, females of every degree were precluded from the inheritance, and Brehilda was the ward of the nation’s monarch.
There was feasting that night in the palace of Tara, and a noble assemblage of the brave and beautiful of the land. In the banquet hall the bards sang the praises of heroes to the harp, while the chiefs feasted at the board and quaffed meadh from the corna—the trumpet in battle, and in peace the drinking cup—and in the lighted saloon the guests of the monarch danced the rincead-fadha, the national dance, to the music of the harp, the tabor, and the corobasnas—an instrument formed of two circular pieces of brass, strung together by a wire of the same metal and used for marking time—but the lady Brehilda sat alone in her bower, looking out
