forms us, from the most authentic tradition, that the Druids were extirpated by Trenmor, the grandfather of Fingal. Not satisfied with such authentic tradition, the other Macpherson assures us, with the same plausibility, that ́as religion was appropriated to the Druids, and epic and heroic poetry to the bards, Ossian durst not encroach upon the province of those whom his ancestor had expelled 24. In rude focieties religion is interwoven, and so intimately blended with the fine arts which it fupports, that unless supported in return by poetry, painting, sculpture, music or eloquence, it must cease to exist. From the danger, however, or the difficulty of inventing a religious mythology, the author has created a savage society of refined atheists; who believe in ghosts but not in deities, and are ignorant, or indifferent to the existence, of superior powers. In adopting Rousseau's visions concerning the perfection of the savage state, so popular then, Macpherson, solicitous only for proper machinery, has rendered the highlanders a race of unheard-of infidels, who believed in no gods but the ghosts of their fathers. 4. The same difficulty occurred in the adaptation of cir- Customs. cumstances, peculiar customs, or rites, to the age. A nation was never yet destitute of some name for its favourite liquor; but mead is still unknown in the highlands: without agriculture there was neither whiskey nor ale; and the beverage of the Celts was left to obscure conjectures on the strength of shells; Roman wine, as Macpherson insinuates: a conjecture, says the credulous Whitaker, utterly incredible. In the first fragments of Fingal, the tree of the rustling leaf 25 was the trembling poplar, cran na crith or crithian; 24 Ossian, ii. 218. Dr. Macpherson's Critical Dissertation, 207. From Thomson's Spring, l. 155. "When not a breath Or rustling turn the many twinkling leaves. a literal translation of the Saxon aspin; but the translator discovered that the poplar (populus) was introduced by the Romans, and suppressed the name. The yew tree, (iubhar,) from the Saxon and German derivation of the name, and from the care to plant and preserve it in church-yards, was certainly not indigenous; yet it occurs repeatedly as a forest tree. In the history of Ireland, the silence with respect to the existence or destruction of the moose deer, whose large horns are found in its bogs, is a sufficient refutation of its Milesian antiquity, and pretensions to letters before the christian era; and in the poetical annals of a tribe of hunters, the omission of the wild cattle, the wolves and boars of the Caledonian forest, reflects the same discredit on the authenticity of Ossian 25. The method of dressing venison in pits lined with hot stones and covered with heath, the only appropriate custom of the age, is transcribed from Keating's account of the Fions, the militia of Ireland, who lived at free quarters in winter, and as they subsisted by hunting and fishing in summer, a minute description is given of the mode of preparing their game 27. In Homer, we attend the heroes at their altars, and repasts which they prepare themselves. We attend Penelope to the loom, and enter so completely into the whole oeconomy of their military and domestic life, that it requires some criticism to discover that Homer lived at a more improved period than the age he describes. As Virgil flourished at 16 The destruction of the moose deer in Ireland is ascribed by some to a murrain; such as is incident to the elks in Lapland. Wright's Louthiana, part iii p. 20. Ledwich's Antiq. 127. Wolves were common in the highlands till the last century. The boar occurs in the Lives of Columba. The British and Caledonian bears are mentioned by Plutarch, Martial, and Claudian; and the wild cattle are still preserved in parks. But Macpherson appropriates the wild boar to Scandinavia, and tame cattle to Ireland, i. 258. Keating's Hist. of Ireland, 269. a later period, the remote characters and scenes are less distinctly pourtrayed. From the genuine Ossian, a contemporary distinguished among the heroes whom he cele̱brates, we should obtain, if not an accurate delineation of their characters, some insight at least into the domestic manners, arts, and occupations of the early Caledonians ; some account of their dress, diversions, houses, beverage, and religious rites. But from Ossian's reputed father, nothing more was to be expected, in the eighteenth century, than from his model Fenelon's description of the Greeks. The customs of every subsequent age were unavoidably appropriated to the earliest, of which he was ignorant. In the Orkneys, and in the Western Isles, he' discovered the Norwegian temples or circles of Thor and Woden, but forgot the worship and human sacrifices to which they were appropriated. From an Irish ballad of the sixteenth century, he transcribes the offer of an hundred hawks, an hundred handmaids, an hundred sanctified girdles, an apple, or an arrow of gold, as tribute from hunters equally ignorant of hawking, female servitude, popish saints, and of the precious metals 28. But the ideal manners of romance, the insipid outlines of perfect, sentimental heroes, prevail throughout. The very shields, resound, when struck, like an Indian gong; an absurd imitation of the brazen basin or targe, suspended, to be struck by the challenger, at the bridge or portals of the castles of Romance. 1 the poems. V. 1. The origin of the poems may be distinctly traced. Origin of On awaking from a long lethargy that succeeded the union, the Scots, with their national ardour, sprung forward towards industry and commerce, and began to vie with the English in every literary pursuit. In philosophy and his 28 Ossian, i. 398. Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, i, 88. Martin's Western Isles, p. 9. tory Hume and Robertson had acquired an unrivalled excellence. The laurels of Thomson were recent. Home, whose Douglas was rather overvalued by his countrymen, had produced a promising specimen of tragedy, from which much was expected; and under a Scottish minister, the patron of genius, nothing was wanting but an epic poet to emulate Milton. We know that Homer and Milton were blind, but a third blind bard, like them the author of two epic poems, must be ascribed to imitation, not to accident. Macpherson, in one of his prefaces, informs us himself, "that he has served his apprenticeship in secret to the ""muses;" when encouraged by Wilkie's Epigoniad, he undertook to give an epic poet to Scotland. The fact is, that Macpherson was the author of three epic, or heroic, Macpher poems. The first was the Highlander, in six Cantos, published at Edinburgh in 1758, four years before the appearance of Fingal 29. The discovery of an additional epic poem by the father of Ossian, is itself the strongest proof that the author, not succeeding in poetry professedly modern, ascribed his subsequent productions to a remote antiquity, in order to ensure a more favourable reception, and to attract the public attention to their merit. But the argument "becomes invincible, if it shall appear, that the same plot and inflated phraseology, the same imagery and incidents are repeated and preserved in the poems of Ossian. son's first epic. 2. When the Highlander is examined, its plot exhibits the very outlines of Fingal. Swein, king of Norway, in 29 I have since discovered two earlier poems of Macpherson's, in his own hand writing; the one a descriptive poem in blank verse, entitled Death; the other an epic, or heroic poem, in ten cantos; both written at the age of seventeen. Between four and five thousand of Macpherson's verses, composed during his secret apprenticeship to the muses, are now in my possession; some of them exquisitely descriptive; and all of them distinguished by the same turgid imagery with Ossian. Macpherson was an heroic poet from the very beginning, vading Scotland with a large fleet and a numerous army, is opposed by Indulph, its seventy-fifth king. Alpin, a young chieftain from Lochaber, joins the Scottish army; explores the Norwegian camp by night; engages in single combat, and exchanges shields with Haco; and the battle is decided next day by his prowess and address; the Norwegian fleet is burnt, and the invading army destroyed. Haco, overpowered with his band, on retreating to a wood, is generously permitted to depart by Alpin, whom Indulph discovers to be his nephew, the son of Malcolm I. preserved in his infancy from the murderers of his father; and on his marriage with Culena, the king's daughter, Duffus, by the accidental death of his uncle, succeeds to the throne. It is obvious that Swein is converted into Swaran in Fingal; with this difference only in the plot, that the scene of invasion is transferred from Scotland to Ireland, and the time from the tenth to the third century. 3. That the Highlander is inferior to Fingal affords no transcribed in Fingal. presumption whatsoever that the latter is authentic. The author was then twenty-one; his native language was Earse; his taste was not yet formed; he had not attended Dr. Blair's lectures, nor acquired the graces of style, or a sufficient command of the English language. But the poem discovers much of the same imagery and incidents with Fingal; green meteors, clouds and mountains, maids in armour, ghosts and storms. The same ambitious phraseology, straining after the sublime, which is so apt to dege nerate into bombast in Ossian, becomes quite ludicrous in the Highlander, from the untutored taste of the author. Such expressions as these, which repeatedly recur: "He “fixed his rainy eyes on ground; Fierce Denmark belches "numbers on our land; The gleaming journey of the "sword, Talks on its way; Steel speaks on steel; And cuts "its brazen journey through the aim; Across the silver |