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in his hearers, who must have been as well acquainted with the facts as 

 himself, and who must have known that Cuchullin and Fingal lived in 

 different ages. If a poet of the present day, in celebrating the exploits 

 ascribed to the Duke of Wellington on the continent of Europe, were 

 to make him contemporary with Henry the Fourth of France, how- 

 ever smooth the verses might run, and however artificially the story 

 might be constructed, the work would be thrown by in disgust ; 

 people would not suffer such an outrage upon credibility and common 

 sense. So would it have been in the days of Ossian. This anachronism 

 is therefore a strong internal proof that the poems are not the com- 

 position of the ancient bard to whom they are ascribed. 



II. Historical Fads. 



Most, if not all, of those poems ascribed to Ossian, which treat 

 of Ireland, afford abundant proofs of their modern fabrication. It 

 would be tiresome to the reader, and unnecessary for the sake of 

 truth, to pursue the tracks of Ossian and his translator and commen- 

 tator through the devious course they run in tracing the ancient his- 

 tory of Ireland, and manufacturing one to their own taste, unheard of 

 before the publication of these poems by any writer or reader, either 

 Scotch or Irish. We shall, therefore, confine ourselves to a few of the 

 principal facts as they occur in the poems of Fingal and Temora. In 

 both these poems, and in the notes to them, we are told that Cormac, 

 the monarch of Ireland, was a minor in the days of Fingal, and that 

 Cuchullin was his guardian. That Cuchullin could not be the guar- 

 dian of Cormac, who, instead of a being minor, in the days of Fionn 

 Mac-Cubhaill, or, as Macpherson calls him, Fingal, was the father- 

 in-law of that celebrated general, we have seen above. That Cormac 

 was monarch of Ireland in his nonage, or, that he was killed by Cair- 



