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letters, certificates, testimonies, or affidavits ; and to these subjects 

 we now call the attention of the reader. 



The Report of the Committee, after mentioning the business for 

 which it was appointed, and inserting the list of queries, which we 

 have already given in full, page 170, favours us with the copy of a 

 letter from David Hume, Esq., to Doctor Blair. In this Mr. Hume 

 pays some merited compliments to Doctor Blair, on the ingenuity of 

 his Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, but he says not one word in 

 favour of the opinion that the poems are genuine. On the contrary, 

 he openly confesses that he has scruples on that head. He tells 

 Doctor Blair, " You think that the internal proofs in favour of the 

 poems are very convincing. So they are ; but there are also internal 

 reasons against them, particularly from the manners, notwithstand- 

 ing all the art with which you have endeavoured to throw a varnish 

 on that circumstance ; and the preservation of such long and such 

 connected poems, by oral tradition alone, during a course of fourteen 

 centuries, is so much out of the ordinary course of human affairs> 

 that it requires the strongest reasons to make us believe it." He 

 then tells the Doctor that he must bring proofs of the antiquity of 

 the poems, before the literary world can be persuaded to believe that 

 they were not " a palpable and most impudent forgery * * * * 

 forged within these five years by James Macpherson." He then tells 

 him that the kind of proofs that should be brought forward, " must 

 not be arguments, but testimonies," and he directs him how to pro- 

 ceed to procure such testimonies as may be satisfactory. 



There is a second letter from Mr. Hume to Doctor Blair, in the 

 Report, (p. 9,) but this proves, no more than the former, that the 

 writer believed the poems genuine. 



It appears from the Report of the Committee, that Doctor Blair 

 followed, in part, the advice of Mr. Hume, in procuring testimonies; 



