2U 



arrived in Ireland in the year 806, and that the order then came from 

 the South, which certainly could not be Scotland. 



The first note to " the Battle of Lora," tells us that this poem " is 

 called in the original Duaii a Chuldich, or the Culdees poem, because 

 it was addressed to one of the first Christian missionaries, who were 

 called, from their retired life, Culdees, or sequestered persons." The 

 folly of this nonsensical derivation, and the true Gaelic name of these 

 persons, and the real meaning of it, we havegiven before, p. 175 and 

 176. We shall now only observe that the name " Duan-a Chuldich" 

 which Mr. Macpherson says is the name of the poem in the original, 

 is not correct Gaelic. Duan is certainly a poem, but Chuldich, which 

 he gives as the genitive case of the original name, which is properly 

 Ceile De, is a strong proof that the writer of it, notwithstanding all 

 his pretensions, was unacquainted with pure Gaelic language, and 

 consequently, as we have always remarked, totally incompetent to 

 translate the genuine poems of Ossian if he had them before him. 

 In asserting that the poem is called in the original " Duan a Chul- 

 dich," he is as far from the truth as he is from the real derivation of 

 the name. The Highland society has not favoured the world with 

 the "original" of "the Battle of Lora," in its three beautifully 

 printed volumes of " Gaelic originals ;" but there is a copy of a 

 poem in Gillie's Collection of Gaelic Poems, printed at Perth, in 

 1786, called " Earragon," upon which "the Battle of Lora" is said to 

 be founded, and there is not in it, from one end to the other, a word 

 about Culdees. 



There is a copy of this poem in the collection of Gaelic poems, 

 found in the Highlands of Scotland in the year 1784, by the late 

 Doctor Young, Bishop of Clonfert, and published with a literal 

 translation into English, in the first volume of " Transactions of the 

 Royal Irish Academy," under the class " Antiquities," p. 8?. From 



VOL. XVI. F F 



