200 



/ 



The history of Ireland is the only sure authority from which we 

 can learn who Cormac really was ; and that history tells us that he was 

 the son of Art, (not Artho,) the son of Conn of the hundred battles, 

 and not of another imaginary Cormac, who never had an existence 

 before he was conceived in the prolific brain of James Macpherson. 

 The real Cormac had a son Cairbre, by whom, and not by a " Cairbre 

 of Atha," Oscar, the son of Ossian, was killed, in the twenty-fifth 

 year of his age, in the battle of Gaura, fought in the year 296; in 

 which battle Cairbre also was killed, not by Oscar, but by the hand 

 of Simeon, son of Kirb, of the sept of the Fotharts. 



In forming the pedigree of Cormac, Mr. Macpherson has taken 

 no small pains to disguise the truth. He has suppressed the names 

 of some persons, invented others, and brought others again on the 

 world who had been dead near 200 years before. He has trans- 

 formed the Irish monarch Conaire into Conar, the son of Trenmor, 

 one of his imaginary kings of Scotland, who, he says, founded the 

 the monarchy of the Scots in Ireland. He has transferred Cairbre, 

 the son of Cormac, from his own time back to the grandfather of his 

 own father, and he has made him the son of a Cormac that never 

 lived. He has made Cairbre, surnamed Cinn-cait, or Cat-head, 

 come out of his grave and personate Cairbre, the son of Cormac, at the 

 battle of Gaura, where Oscar was killed. For no usurper of the name 

 of Cairbre ever ruled in Ireland but one, and that Cairbre was the 

 Cairbre surnamed Cinn-cait, of the race of the Firbolg of Connaught, 

 who rebelled against the monarch Fee-ha Finn-olay, (Fiacha Fionno- 

 luidh), put him to death, and usurped his throne, about the year of 

 our Lord 54. He has converted the name of Fearadhach, (pro- 

 nounced Fer-ay-agh,) monarch of Ireland, in the early part of the 

 first century, into Ferod-artho, whom he makes the successor of Cair- 

 bre on the throne, after the battle of Gaura, at the end of the third 



