256 



Lordship that he had written out many poems for his namesake, 

 "but unfortunately could not remember which." A Mr. Campbell told 

 him that he had often compared several of the poems translated by 

 Macpherson with the originals, and found them to vary but little ; and 

 on being asked for the particular poem which he had compared, the 

 mountain brought forth a mouse, " he named Oscar and Malvina !!" 

 A Mr. Augustine Mac Donald, a Catholic priest, remembered a 

 " whole poem which he learned when a boy, and which has not been 

 given in Macpherson's translation," and " Scalpa told them of a 

 dialogue in verse, betwixt Ossian and Peter of the Psalms, who had 

 married Ossian's daughter." 



Such is the amount of the extract from Lord Webb Seymour's 

 note-book, which leaves us just as well qualified to judge of the 

 authenticity of Ossian's poems as we were before we had read that 

 important document. The first poem mentioned by his Lordship is evi- 

 dently the poem of " Moighre Borb," which we have noticed at pp. 

 221, 251, and the last poem was doubtless the poem called by Scot- 

 tish writers '"Ossian's Prayers," and by the Irish ^^ Agallamh Oisin 

 agus Phadruig" or " Dialogue between Ossian and Patrick," of which 

 we have already spoken, p. 247, and which Mr. Macpherson in his 

 Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, n. ed. p. 39, declares to be 

 Irish. The poems repeated by " Mr. Malcolm Macpherson, and by 

 Mr. Augustine Mc. Donald, a Catholic priest," might have been, for 

 any thing we could know to the contrary, the original of the Battle of 

 Lora, or of the Death of CuchulHn, or of Berrathon, which the Society 

 regrets it could not find ; but that Mr. Mac Donald's poem, we are 

 told, " was not given in Macpherson's translation." Or, what is more 

 likely, those poems may have been the production of one of our Irish 

 Ossians ; for we are inclined to think that many of our bards 

 assumed the character of that venerable hero. 



