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Hibernian origin of both the poet and the poems. Tliey had been 

 long accustomed, not only to the hearing, but to the reading of au:- 

 cient Irish poems ascribed to Ossian, the son of Fionn Mac Cubhait, 

 not Fingal, for neither they nor the Highlanders had ever, until then, 

 heard of a person of that name ; and remembeing the names, com- 

 mon in those poems, and several of the incidents contained in them, 

 and finding something of a similarity of names, and the same trans- 

 actions and events in Macphereon's Ossian, they, without taking the 

 trouble of comparing the two poets, at once proclaimed the transla- 

 tor a literary plunderer, and insisted on transferring the credit of the 

 work from Scotland to Ireland, the native country of the venerable 

 bard. 



.i It appears that much more than a year had not elapsed after the 

 publication of the first fragments of the poems of Ossian, when the 

 charge of plagiarism and forgery against Mr. Macpherson had ob- 

 tained an extensive currency. For in the year 1762, when he pub- 

 lished an enlarged edition of the fragments, with some additional 

 poems, he found it necessary to make some defence against so serious 

 a charge. This he did, not by a formal notice and denial of the 

 charge, but by publishing the following " advertisement," prefixed to 

 the new edition. 



" The translator thinks it necessary to make the public acquainted 

 with the motives which induced him to depart from his proposals 

 concerning the originals. Some men of genius, whom he has the 

 honour to number among his friends, advised him to publish propo- 

 sals for printing, by subscription, the whole originals, as a better way 

 of satisfying the public concerning the authenticity of the poems, 

 than depositing munuscript copies in any public library. This he 

 did; but no subscribers appearing, he takes it for the judgment of the 

 public, that neither the one nor the other is necessary. However, 



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