106 



employed by Macpherson, to signify the Danes is found in no poem 

 earlier than the tenth century. The most ancient MS. poem extant, 

 ascribed to Ossian, is in the Bodleian library. It is entitled in the 

 catalogue, Gigantomachia, and was written in the fourteenth century. 

 Price, the librarian, told Doctor O'Conor, that he shewed it to Mac- 

 pherson, who, for once, had the honesty to confess, that by reason of 

 its contractions, it was to him totally unintelhgible and illegible !* 

 So true it is, that not only no genuine poems of Ossian exist, but even 

 those of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ascribed to him, still 

 remain without a faithful editor or transcriber. Well, therefore, may 

 we join with Hume, in his letter to Gibbon, expressing wonder, "that 

 any man of common sense could have imagined it possible, that 

 above twenty thousand verses, along with numberless historic facts, 

 could have been preserved by oral tradition, during fifty genera- 

 tions, by the rudest, perhaps, of all the European nations, the 

 most necessitous, the most turbulent and unsettled. [^Loquitur de 

 ScoiicE Albanica. monticolis et Insulanis.^ Where a supposition is so 

 contrary to common sense, any positive evidence of it ought never to 

 be regarded. "-f- But the wonder is still farther increased, when we 

 consider, that of all compositions in existence, none are so difficult 

 to remember as Macpherson's Ossian, because it has no regularly 

 consecutive series of ideas, like the Iliad, or ^Eneid, or Tasso's 

 Jerusalem. It is a heterogeneous and chaotic mass of bombastic 

 epithets, and poetic scraps; the reflection, not of "nature's calm 

 image," but of an artificial landscape; not from a smooth, but an 

 agitated surface, where 



*' Gltmmering fragments of a broken sun. 

 Banks, trees, and skies in wild disorder run." 



• Rerum. Hib. Scriptores, vol. i. Ep. Nun. pp. ci. cxxiii. 



t Gibbon's Miscellaneous Works, vol. i. p. 149, London, 1796. 



