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habitants of the Highlands had fallen, from several concurring cir- 

 sumstances, into the last degree of ignorance and barbarism." This 

 is a disgraceful imputation upon the literary character of the ancient 

 Caledonians ; but as it comes from one of their countrymen, we have 

 no right to dispute its correctness. Yet, these are they whom Mr. 

 Macpherson, Doctor Blair, the two Highland Societies, and all their 

 correspondents and affidavit makers, would wish us to believe, pre- 

 served the genuine poems of Ossian in all their original purity, from 

 the days of Fingal, in the third century, down to the year 1762, 

 when James Macpherson, in kindness to the world, thought proper 

 to rescue those invaluable treasures of ancient history and poetry 

 from the obscurity of the pure dialect of the Scottish Gaelic, and 

 send them into the world in the garb of modern English. 



Mr. Macpherson tells us, in the same page, that the Irish, who, 

 by-the-by, he acknowledges to have " a competent share of that 

 kind of learning which then prevailed in Europe, found it no difficult 

 matter to impose their own fictions on the ignorant Highland Sena- 

 chies." He afterwards adds, that " though a few ignorant Senachies 

 might be persuaded out of their own opinion by the smoothness of an 

 Irish tale, it was impossible to eradicate from the bulk of the people 

 their own national traditions. These traditions afterwards so much 

 prevailed, that the Highlanders continue totally unacquainted with 

 the pretended Hibernian extract of the Scottish nation." So then 

 we are to believe that the " last degree of ignorance and barbarism," 

 to which the Highlanders had fallen, had, upon their Senachies, 

 who must have been possessed of some information, the full effect of 

 making them forget their origin ; yet, that this "ignorance and bar- 

 barism" had no effect upon " the bulk of the people," who are the 

 vulgar, but they, wonderful to relate, preserved their national tradi- 

 tions down to our own times, and they still continue " unacquainted 



