201 



century. In short, he has made different facts in the history of Ire- 

 land, and in the popular tales of the Irish, subservient to his own pur- 

 poses, transferring the persons of one period to another, sometimes 

 giving the real name, sometimes with a slight change, and sometimes 

 inventing new names and persons, which were never before heard of 

 in Irish history. The name of Mr. Macpherson only is here men- 

 tioned as the fabricator of all these impostures ; but let it not be sup-, 

 posed that Ossian has not a right to his full proportion of them. 

 Ossian supplies the text, and Macpherson the comment, and both 

 being contrary to history, mark the poems of Ossian as barefaced 

 impositions. 



III. Geography. 



Upon this subject little need be said to prove the forgery of the 

 poems. The Scotch Ossian, if he ever were in Ireland, must have 

 known the topography of the country. The Irish Ossian, whoever he 

 was, certainly did ; for in his poems we never find places removed 

 from where God had created them, and transferred to others at an 

 immense distance. Not so the Scotch Ossian : in him we find Moy- 

 lena^ or the plain of Lena, on the coast of Ullin, which the bard's 

 commentator tells, but untruly tells us, is the name of Ulster ; and 

 near it, in the same province, we find Temora (Teatnhra) or Tara, 

 the seat of the Irish monarchs. The first mentioned of these places, 

 however, stands at present where it always stood, in the present 

 King's county ; and the latter is well known to have always stood in 

 that part of the ancient kingdom of Meath, now called East Meath. 

 These errors the true Ossian could not have fallen into, therefore the 

 mention of them in the poems of Ossian, is another internal evidence 

 of their forgery. 



