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say of the doors, windows, and even towers, which we so often meet 

 with in the poems of Ossian, and which the Doctor seems to have 

 overlooked ? If the use of windows, doors, and towers, be marks of 

 a later period of society than the days of Ossian, that writer could 

 not be the author of those poems that are published under his name ; 

 for all those are mentioned in the poems. So much for this one of 

 the internal evidences relied on as a proof of the antiquity of those 

 poems. We shall immediately consider another kind of internal 

 proofs which the poems afford, as to their antiquity and authenticity. 

 The Doctor, speaking of the translator of the poems, says, the mea- 

 sured prose which he has employed, possesses considerable advantages 

 above any sort of versification he could have chosen." We confess 

 we do not perfectly understand what the learned Doctor means by 

 " measured prose." If he mean that it is composed of a regular suc- 

 cession of long and short syllables, following each other at equal dis- 

 tances, or that a certain number of syllables occur in a sentence, or in 

 each member of a sentence, we are unable to discover either. We 

 shall not attempt to criticise the style of the translation, but merely 

 observe that there are some good judges, who are of opinion, that in 

 the language of Macpherson's Ossian, " it is not poetry but prose run 

 mad." But let the beauties or defects of his manner of translation 

 be what they may, neither are to be entirely ascribed to him. He is 

 a close imitator of the mode of expression used in Gaelic poetry. 

 This is so evident to every person who has ever read ancient Gaelic 

 verse, that it is unnecessary to insist further on it. 



Let us now return to the consideration of the internal evidence 

 which the poems supply concerning their own antiquity. In doing 

 this we shall consider the silence of the author respecting things 

 which undoubtedly were in existence in Scotland in the days of 

 Ossian, and which are usually alluded to by way of simile, or other- 



