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Ireland by a worthless person, and is now thought lost, but the tran- 

 script he desired Mr. Macpherson to recover out of the hands of one 

 Donald Mac Donald, Edinburgh." What does all this prove, that the 

 Committee should think it of importance ? It proves that the writer 

 had failed in his expectations about the poems ; that he never saw 

 any written copies of them ; that Clanranald had, indeed, copied 

 some old manuscript about the wars of Finn and Comhal, and that 

 he gave Macpherson an order to recover the transcript ; but he does 

 not attempt to say that Clanranald's old manuscript contained any 

 part of Macpherson's Ossian, or that it was not of Irish composition. 

 Mr. Mac Neill, however, does not stop with what he had heard Clan- 

 ranald declare: he gives the declarations of others, in all which, 

 except in two articles, there is nothing but a repetition of the extracts 

 of the poems mentioned in Doctor Macpherson's second letter, and 

 which we have shewn to be garbled extracts from Irish poems and 

 tales. The two articles mentioned by Mr. Mac JNeill, that were not 

 spoken of by Doctor Macpherson, are, " the terms of peace proposed 

 by Morla in Swaran's name to CuchuUin," {Fingal, B. II.) and the 

 poem of " Berrathon," of which Neill M'Murrich, "declared that he 

 is of opinion, that last poem in the collection, Berrathon, is contained 

 in a manuscript which he himself saw him deliver, with three or four 

 more, to Mr. Macpherson." The first of these articles is stolen from 

 an Irish poem called " Laoidh Mhaghnuis mhoir." i. e. " The Lay of 

 Magnus, or Manus the Great," which has been elegantly translated 

 by Miss Brooke, and published in her Reliques of Irish Poetry, 4to., 

 Dublin, 1789, p. 37. In that poem we find Maghnus, the son of 

 Meidhigh, (he whom Macpherson, with his druidical wand, has 

 transformed into Swaran, the son of Sterno,) coming to invade Ire- 

 land. Fionn Mac Cubhail, (the Fingal of Macpherson,) chief of the 

 Feinne, or military of Leinster, despatched his son, Fergus, the poet, 



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