considerable as it may appear in other respects, even according to my system, so that it is altogether needless to fix its origin a fictitious millennium before.

Since the first publication of these poems, many insinuations have been made, and doubts arisen, concerning their authenticity. Whether these suspicions are suggested by prejudice, or are only the effects of malice, I neither know nor care. Those who have doubted my veracity, have paid a compliment to my genius; and were even the allegation true, my self-denial might have atoned for my fault. Without vanity I say it, I think I could write tolerable poetry; and I assure my antagonists, that I should not translate what I could not imitate.

As prejudice is the effect of ignorance, I am not surprised at its being general. An age that produces few marks of genius ought to be sparing of admiration. The truth is, the bulk of mankind have ever been led by reputation more than taste, in articles of literature. If all the Romans who admired Virgil understood his beauties, he would have scarce deserved to have come down to us, through so many centuries. Unless genius were in fashion, Homer himself might have written in vain. He that wishes to come with weight, on the superficial, must skim the surface, in their own shallow way. Were my aim to gain the many, I would write a madrigal sooner than an heroic poem. Laberius himself would be always sure of more followers than Sophocles.

Some who doubt the authenticity of this work, with peculiar acuteness appropriate them to the Irish nation. Though it is not easy to conceive how these poems can belong to Ireland and to me, at once, I shall examine the subject, without further animadversion on the blunder.

Of all the nations descended from the ancient Celta, the Scots and Irish are the most similar in language, custom, and manners. This argues a more intimate connec

tion between them, than a remote descent from the great Celtic stock. It is evident, in short, that at some one pe riod or other, they formed one society, were subject to the same government, and were, in all respects, one and the same people. How they became divided, which the colony, or which the mother nation, I have in another work amply discussed. The first circumstance that induced me to disregard the vulgarly-received opinion of the Hibernian extraction of the Scottish nation, was my observations on their ancient language. That dialect of the Celtic tongue, spoken in the north of Scotland, is much more pure, more agreeable to its mother language, and more abounding with primitives, than that now spoken, or even that which has been written for some centuries back, amongst the most unmixed part of the Irish nation. A Scotchman, tolerably conversant in his own language, understands an Irish composition, from that derivative analogy which it has to the Galic of North Britain.' An Irishman, on the other hand, without the aid of study, can never understand a composition in the Galic tongue. This affords a proof, that the Scotch Galic is the most original, and, consequently, the language of a more ancient and unmixed people. The Irish, however backward they may be to allow any thing to the prejudice of their antiquity, seem inadvertently to acknowledge it, by the very appellation they give to the dialect they speak. They call their own language Caëlic, Eirinarch, i. e. Caledonian Irish, when, on the contrary, they call the dialect of North Britain a Chaëlic, or the Caledonian tongue, emphatically. A circumstance of this nature tends more to decide which is the most ancient nation, than the united testimonies of a whole legion of ignorant bards and senachies, who perhaps never dreamed of bringing the Scots from Spain to Ireland, till some one of them, more learned than the rest, discovered that the Romans called

the first Iberia, and the latter Hibernia. On such a slight foundation were probably built the romantic fictions concerning the Milesians of Ireland.

From internal proofs it sufficiently appears, that the poems published under the name of Ossian, are not of Irish composition. The favourite chimæra, that Ireland is the mother country of the Scots, is totally subverted and ruined. The fictions concerning the antiquities of that country, which were forming for ages, and growing as they came down, on the hands of successive senachies and fileas, are found, at last, to be the spurious brood of modern and ignorant ages. To those who know how tenacious the Irish are of their pretended Iberian descent, this alone is proof sufficient, that poems, so subversive of their system, could never be produced by an Hibernian bard. But when we look to the language, it is so different from the Irish dialect, that it would be as ridiculous to think, that Milton's Paradise Lost could be wrote by a Scottish peasant, as to suppose, that the poems ascribed to Ossiah were writ in Ireland.

The pretensions of Ireland to Ossian proceed from another quarter. There are handed down, in that country, traditional poems, concerning the Fiona, or the heroes of Fion Mac Comnal. This Fion, say the Irish annalists, was general of the militia of Ireland, in the reign of Cormac, in the third century. Where Keating and O'Flaherty learned, that Ireland had an embodied militia so early, is not easy for me to determine. Their information certainly did not come from the Irish poems concerning Fion. I have just now, in my hands, all that remain of those composi tions; but, unluckily for the antiquities of Ireland, they appear to be the work of a very modern period. Every stanza, nay almost every line, afford striking proofs, that they cannot be three centuries old. Their allusions to the manners and customs of the fifteenth century, are so

that it is matter of wonder to me, how any one could dream of their antiquity. They are entirely writ in that romantic taste, which prevailed two ages ago. Giants, enchanted castles, dwarfs, palfreys, witches and magicians, form the whole circle of the poet's invention. The celebrated Fion could scarcely move from one hillock to another, without encountering a giant, or being entangled in the circles of a magician. Witches, on broomsticks, were continually hovering round him, like crows; and he had freed enchanted virgins in every valley in Ireland. In short, Fion, great as he was, passed a disagreeable life. Not only had he to engage all the mischiefs in his own country, foreign armies invaded him, assisted by magicians and witches, and headed by kings, as tall as the mainmast of a first-rate. It must be owned, however, that Fion was not inferior to them in height.

A chos air Cromleach, druim-ard,
Chos eile air Crom-meal dubh,
Thoga Fion le lamh mhoir

An d'uisge o Lubhair na fruth.

With one foot on Cromleach his brow,

The other on Crommal the dark,

Fion took up with his large hand

The water from Lubar of the streams.

Cromleach and Crommal were two mountains in the neighbourhood of one another, in Ulster, and the river Lubar ran through the intermediate valley. The property of such a monster as this Fion, I should never have disputed with any nation. But the bard himself, in the poem from which the above quotation is taken, cedes him to Scotland. Fion o Albin, siol nan laoich!

Fion from Albion, race of heroes!

Were it allowable to contradict the authority of a bard, at this distance of time, I should have given as my opinion, that this enormous Fion was of the race of the Hibernian giants, of Ruanus, or some other celebrated name, rather than a native of Caledonia, whose inhabitants, now at least,

are not remarkable for their stature. As for the poetry, I leave it to the reader.

If Fion was so remarkable for his stature, his heroes had also other extraordinary properties. In weight, all the sons of strangers yeilded to the celebrated Ton-iosal; and for hardness of skull, and, perhaps, for thickness too, the valiant Oscar stood unrivalled and alone. Ossian himself had many singular and less delicate qualifications than playing on the harp; and the brave Cuthullin was of so diminutive a size, as to be taken for a child of two years of age, by the gigantic Swaran. To illustrate this subject, I shall here lay before the reader, the history of some of the Irish poems, concerning Fion Mac Comnal. A translation of these pieces, if well executed, might afford satisfaction, in an uncommon way, to the public. But this ought to be the work of a native of Ireland. To draw forth from obscurity the poems of my own country, has wasted all the time I had allotted for the muses; besides, I am too diffi dent of my own abilities, to undertake such a work. gentleman in Dublin accused me to the public, of committing blunders and absurdities, in translating the language of my own country, and that before any translation of mine appeared*. How the gentleman came to see my blunders before I committed them, is not easy to determine: if he

A

*In Faulkner's Dublin Journal, of the 1st December 1761, appeared the following Advertisement: two weeks before my first publication appeared in London:

"Speedily will be published, by a gentleman of this kingdom, who hath been for some time past employed in translating and writing historical notes to

FINGAL, A POEM.

Originally wrote in the Irish or Erse language. In the preface to which, the translator, who is a perfeet master of the Irish tongue, will give an account of the manners and customs of the ancient Irish or Scotch, and, therefore, most humbly intreats the public to wait for his edition, which will appear in a short time, as he will set forth all the blunders and absurdities in the edition now printing in London, and show the ig norance of the English translator in his knowledge of Irish grammar, not understanding any part of that accidence.