101 



well understand this ancient poem." It is entitled Cath Mucruimha. 

 Keating, O'Flaherty, and others, notice it, but in such a manner as 

 evinces them to have laboured under the same difficulty as the vene- 

 rable O'Conor.* Colgan, speaking of the poems of Dallanus, says, 

 they are written in the ancient style, and that, consequently, they 

 were in a great degree unintelligible in after times, even to many who 

 were skilled in the old idiom of their country. " A multis alioquin 

 in veteri patrio idiomate versatis, nequeunt penetrari"-\- The same 

 author notices an Irish manuscript on parchment, in the Irish library, 

 at Louvain, in which Saint Patrick and Coilte are introduced con- 

 versing, and pronounces it to be a forgery from the style indepen- 

 dently of the anachronism, for Coilte lived in the reign of Cormac, 

 A. D. 250. Est commentitmm, et posterioris cevi tit ex ipso stylo 

 satis liquet. He passes the same judgment on another work, in which 

 Saint Patrick and Oisin are interlocutors. ::|: 



But we need not have recourse to reasoning nor to learned 

 authorities, since Macpherson himself and his friends, by a just fata- 

 lity ever attendant on imposture, sufficiently confute their own 

 hypothesis by their own confessions. The former, in several of his 

 notes, pretends that he has been able to distinguish a spurious from a 

 genuine production of Ossian, by the language alone. Thus, in the 

 third note of Cath-Loda. he states, that the names of certain 

 warriors ) • "^^ ^"^"^V 



'• Are mentioned as attending Comhal in his last battle against the tribe of Morni, in a 

 poem which is still preserved. It is not the work of Ossian ; ihe phraseology betrays it to be 



* O'Flaherty says, " I do not suppose the poem to be genuine, because, in the benedic- 

 tions which he gives Eugenius living and dead, he uses a style and expression totally un- 

 known to pagan ages." — Ogy. vol. ii. p. 228. 



t O'Conor's Prolegomena, p. Ixxiv. 



t Vide Rerum Hibemicarum Scriptores. — Ep. Nun. p. Ixi. 



