311 



probable that those gentlemen could not get, among the modern 

 Scotch, persons capable of translating Macpherson's Ossian into an- 

 cient Gaelic, with ancient orthography, and according to the rules of 

 ancient Gaelic verse; and therefore Sir John Sinclair, apprehensive that 

 some Irish scholar would detect the blunders of those fabricated 

 originals, made the best excuse he could, namely, that " the ortho- 

 graphy was made according to that of the Gaelic Bible ; because 

 that was the orthography with which the generality of Gaelic readers 

 were best acquainted." Sir John's excuse is too ridiculous to obtain 

 credence. 



We do not dispute that the language of the Gaelic originals con- 

 tains internal evidence of its own originality ; what we contend for is, 

 that it is not that kind of originality which the society and its friends 

 would wish us to believe. The Society would persuade us that the 

 language of the originals is evidence of the antiquity and authenti- 

 city of Ossian's poems. We> on the contrary, insist that we have 

 given indisputable proofs of the fact, that the language, alone, con- 

 tains the strongest internal evidence of the modern originality of the 

 Gaelic of those poems. The language is the base dialect of the mo- 

 dern Scottish Gaelic, interlarded indeed with some obsolete words to 

 give it an air of antiquity, but the true meaning of which the writers, 

 as it appears to us, did not understand. We come to this conclusion 

 from a comparison of those Gaehc words with the English words they 

 are intended to represent, and we find that the meaning attached to 

 them is widely different from what they bear in ancient manuscripts. 

 The originals, however, call for some further attention from us. We 

 shall compare some extracts from them with others from the Cento of 

 Doctor Donald Smith, published in the Fifteenth Number of the 

 Appendix to the Report of the Highland Society, and with others 

 from those Irish poems that bear the name of Ossian, some few of 



