,167 



Johnson. That distinguished writer pubhshed an account of his 

 Journey to the Western Islands, and in that work gave the pubhc his 

 opinion on the poems of Ossian, and of the conduct of Mr, Macpher- 

 son towards the pubhc, respecting those poems. He argues, Dubhn 

 Edition, 12mo, 1775, page 188-192, that the Earse was an unwrit- 

 ten speech, in which nothing that is not very short can be trans- 

 mitted from one generation to another, that there is not in the lan- 

 guage five hundred lines that can be proved to be one hundred years 

 old ; that the Scotch had not even the Bible in their own dialect, but 

 used the Irish translation ; that if there were any manuscripts to be 

 found, they were Irish ; for Martin,* who wrote an account of the 

 Western Islands, published in London, 1716, mentions Irish, but ne- 

 ver any Earse manuscripts to be found in the islands in his time ; that 

 the editor never did nor never could show the originals; that a learned 

 minister in Sky, whose testimony had been produced as one that held 

 Fingal to be the work of Ossian, would not say that he believed it ; 

 that all persons of integrity, who professed to have heard parts of the 

 poems, heard them when they were boys, and could not recite six 

 lines of them ; that the Scots are seduced by their fondness for their 

 supposed ancestors ; and that a Scotchman must be a very sturdy 

 moralist, who does not love Scotland better than truth." 



Those objections were certainly not all well founded, but the 

 most powerful of them might be overthrown by producing the origi- 

 nals. But this Mr. Macpherson did not do. On the contrary, he 



* Martin, in his account of the island of Erisca says, " The natives speak the Irish tongue 

 more perfectly here than in most of the other islands, partly because of the remoteness, and 

 the small number of those that speak English, and partly because some o4j them are scholars, 

 and versed in the Irish language." 



" Fergus Beaton hath the following ancient Irish manuscripts, in the Irish character, to 

 wit : — A Vicenna, A Verroes, Joannes de Vigo, Bernardus, Gordmus, and several volumes of the 

 Hippocrates," — Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, 8vo, pp. 88, 89. 



