THE LATE SIR DONALD McLEAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XIV, Issue 4748, 3 February 1877, Page 3

THE LATE SIR DONALD McLEAN.

The- Saiokc'e Bay Herald gives a full notice of the late Sir Donald McLean, in which reference is made to hia skill and policy when, in 1866, was committed to him by Mr. Weld the charge o5 reducing to order and loyal submission to Her Majesty the aboriginal natives of New Zealand, occupying the East Coast, then in a state of hostility. Our contemporary says also that the late knight will be remembered as the " Minister of Peace ;" and it adds :—And when those hundreds of native children, now under a process of education in which the acquirement of the English language forms an essential feature, shall have completed their studies, the two races—Maori and European —will recognise and attest the wisdom and foresight of the statesman to whose influence was due the extensive establishment of those schools. Sir Donald McLean was a statesman, not a soldier. He was nevertheless a born general, and endowed with all those qualities which are essential in the man to whom his country looks in any great emergency or crisis. The McLeans throughout their history have been remarkable for their extraordinary acts of devotion, for their strict integrity and honourable principles—for their bravery and loyalty—for their succour to the oppressed— and for those acts , of gallantry and chivalry which have been characteristic of the Knights of the British Isles. Sir Donald was the eighth member of his family upon whom the order of Knighthood had been conferred. Gaelic antiquities assert that the surname of M'Lean was originally M'Gillian, and that it was derived from the celebrated warrior (the progenitor of the family) Gillian, who was denominated Gillian-ni-Tuoidh, from his ordinary weapon, a battle-axe (in Gaelic, tuoidh), which his descendants wear to this day in their crests, betwixt a laurel and branch. By inter-marriage, the late Sir Donald was connected with some of the first families in Great Britain and Ireland. His great grandfather was Donald, of Kilmoluaig, in Tjrie, who married Isobelle, sister of Donald Campbell, of Dunstaffnage, whose third son, Archibald, succeeded his father at Tyrie, and married Catherine, daughter of Donald Campbell, of Scamadale. Archibald, of Kilmoluaig, had three sons, Donald, Charles, and John; Donald and Charles died in the West Indies, and John was the father of the late Sir Donald. John's wife, the mother of Sir Donald, was Margaret McColl, whose family, by intermarriages, is connected with several noble and distinguished Scottish families.