102 



a modern composition. It is something like those trivial compositions which the Irish bards 

 forged, under the name of Ossian, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries." 



Again, in the first note to the third duan of the same poem, he 

 says, 



" The interpolations (of the bards) are so easUy distinguished from the genuine remains 

 of Ossian, that it took me very little time to mark them out, and totally to reject them. If the 

 modern Scotch and Irish bards have shewn any judgment, it is in ascribing their own compo- 

 sitions to names of antiquity, for by that means, they themselves have escaped that contempt, 

 which the authors of such futile performances must necessarily have met with, from people of 

 true taste." 



Macpherson was privileged to write this, for no one could appre- 

 ciate the judgment of the modern bards more highly than he ; none 

 has been so successful a rival of their dishonesty. He deserves to 

 reign sole monarch in the dominion of literary imposture. In the 

 second note to Carrick-Thura, he speaks of a poem of Ossian on the 

 strife of Crona, which " it was impossible for him to procure with 

 any degree of purity." Why then did he not give it to the world 

 in its impurity, to prove that he was not uttering a falsehood, and 

 leave it to the purgation of some Celtic Aristarchus "^ Speaking of 

 the poem " Fion gal na huai," in a note to the 7th book of Temora, 

 he says, that from the phraseology it appears to be ancient ; and in a 

 note to the 8th book, '■'•from the language (of some Hibernian poems in 

 his hands) and allusions to the times in which they were writ, I should 

 fix the date of their composition to the fifteenth or sixteenth century." 



It is evident then, from the confessions of the great fabricator 

 himself, that the Gaelic language has suffered such changes and cor- 

 ruptions as indicate a marked difference between its ancient and mo- 

 dern compositions ; consequently the hypothesis that Ossian's Poems 

 have been handed down in an intelligible form, by oral tradition, is 



