127 



SECTION VII. 



Fin MaC'Cumhal and Oisin were Natives of Ireland, not of Scotland. 



Sir John Sinclair having shewn, to his own satisfaction, that 

 " various GaeUc poems existed in the Highlands and islands of 

 Scotland, in remote periods of their history," proceeds in the third 

 division of his dissertation, to shew that " those poems were said in a 

 great measure to have been composed by Ossian, a Scottish bard, 

 who celebrated the exploits of Fingal, a Scottish warrior." 



To prove this proposition, if possible, was indispensable to the 

 proof of the authenticity of Ossian's poems. The task was attended 

 with much difficulty ; but what will not the advocates of a favourite 

 hypothesis attempt ? The greater the paradox, the greater the renown 

 of establishing its truth. In vain had Ireland possessed an undis- 

 puted claim to the warrior and the bard for 1500 years. In vain 

 had her poets celebrated the actions of the one, and imitated the 

 strains of the other. In vain had her historians handed down in 

 written records, never to be effaced, the genealogy of both. In vain 

 had they chronicled the age in which the son of Cumhal lived, the 

 battles he fought, the monarch he served, the mode in which he 

 died. All this was now to be set aside, and the popular traditions 

 and the written annals of Ireland falsified, to make room for the fic- 

 tions of Macpherson, who had metamorphosed the Irish general into 

 a Caledonian king, and placed him on the throne of a kingdom 

 which no muse of history has ever condescended to notice ! 



Sir John Sinclair endeavours to support his hypothesis, 1st, By 

 the evidence of authors who never imagined that it would be a sub- 



